Being Ambivalent

I have spoken to many groups of mental health, medical, addictions, and social work practitioners about how people change. Each time, I've asked those present to think of an area of their own lives in which they'd been considering whether or not to make a change and then to say how long they'd been considering it. With just a little prompting the majority of these therapists, counselors, doctors, nurses, caseworkers, and other professionals call out (sheepishly, forthrightly, or sometimes defiantly) "a few months," "a year," "2 years," "3 years," and then (to the increasing amusement and knowing nods of their colleagues) "5 years," "10," "20. ..."

When faced with important life decisions, it's normal for people to get stuck. This is as true for professional helpers as it is for you (and for everyone else, for that matter): they routinely, frustratingly, often exasperatedly get trapped in the all-too-human state known as ambivalence.

When one direction seems much preferable to another, most people have little trouble making a choice and pursuing the preferred option. But often the choice doesn't seem so clear. Ambivalence arises when people are confronted with a choice between two or more options, both (or all) of which are appealing or unappealing.

In some cases you are ambivalent when you're confronted with a choice between two things you really want—two good job offers or exciting relationship possibilities, say. In other cases, it's the opposite —you're unhappily forced to decide which is the lesser of two evils, like a person who's being blackmailed and has to choose whether to pay the blackmailer or have his secrets made public, or (to take an everyday example) a person who must decide between doing unpleasant chores or suffering the consequences of not doing them.

The most difficult kind of choice to make, though, is between two or more options, each of which has its good points and not-good points, or aspects that make you want to move toward it and aspects that make you want to move away.

Simple examples or abstract descriptions of this kind of conflict can't do it justice and won't help you work your way out of your own ambivalence. Instead, allow me to introduce five people who, like you, are caught in a dilemma. Their stories will bring home just how complex and sticky ambivalence can be and set the stage for a closer look at your own ambivalence—which will also be your first step toward understanding what it will take to resolve it.

MEET ALEC, BARBARA, COLIN, DANA, AND ELLIE

Alec: "People Want Me to Change, but I Don't Need To"

Alec is 39 years old and lives with his wife, Wendy, and 11-year-old daughter, Jen, in the near suburbs of a small city. A salesman with a technology-based company, Alec is successful at his job, but it's a high- pressure position and he often feels stressed by it. He loves his family but doesn't get to spend as much time with them as he'd like to. He has a few friends but wouldn't say he's especially close with any of them. Most of the time Alec is either working or socializing with clients. Although he does have a hobby of gradually restoring an old muscle car (he bought it because it was the car he wanted as a kid), he doesn't seem to have much time to spend on this anymore either.

Alec is stuck in deciding what to do about his drinking. He would never identify himself as an alcoholic and would have choice words for anyone who described him that way. Most of the time he doesn't see his alcohol use as a problem at all—especially when others are trying to tell him that it is a problem. At those times he insists that he's a social drinker: part of his job is making connections with people in the companies he's trying to sell to, and getting together over a few drinks is the best way to make that happen. In fact, quitting drinking (as some people have been telling him he should do) would probably hurt his ability to do his job. He never misses work because of drinking, although he'll admit that on some days he might get off to a slow start after a late night entertaining clients. He rarely gets drunk; most often he gets (as he puts it) "relaxed." And that seems like a good thing to him; he's always been kind of a high-strung guy who has a hard time sitting still, and drinking helps settle him down as well as acting as a great social lubricant.

As he sees it, Alec's biggest problem is that people in his life have been bugging him about his drinking recently, and he needs those people to believe that he takes what they're saying seriously so they'll back off. Wendy, his wife, is the main one. She's been giving him a hard time because he often comes home late after a few drinks, and when he finally does get home he's not in the mood to spend time with her or their daughter. She complains that she hardly sees him since either his evenings are taken up with client meetings or he's too tired after a few drinks for any quality time. She also thinks he's more likely to be irritable and start yelling after he's been drinking; he counters that he only gets mad because she just won't leave him alone to have some time to himself when he comes home, even though she knows he needs it and deserves it.

The other person who's been on his case lately, in Alec's view, is his primary care physician, who told Alec that he should cut down on his drinking because his cholesterol and blood pressure have been rising and he's put on some weight. While none of these issues are immediate threats, the doctor said, staying on this track would put Alec's health more at risk the older he gets. Alec got irritated with his doctor and dismissed the warnings, telling himself that he's still in great shape and doesn't need to start acting like an old man just yet. But a couple of weeks ago a friend at work, who is a few years older than Alec, and whom he respects as an excellent salesman and someone he can talk to about life and its hassles, told Alec about a scare he'd had recently —"not a heart attack, just some fibrillations"—and added that his doctor had told him he needed to stop drinking if he didn't want to have a much more serious event in the future. This got Alec thinking that he might want to cut down a...