Our ability to hold ambivalence is one of the key characteristics of emotional intelligence.
Our sentiments are rarely 100% one way or the other. An experience can evoke both joy and sadness within us. An upcoming change could be both exciting and frightening. We can feel simultaneously compelled and repelled by someone or something.
Research shows that leaders and support groups that express their ambivalence are more resonant.
In my experience, the degree to which we can accommodate our ambivalence is the degree of safety and resilience we feel.
For me, this is a two-step process. First, there’s the intellectual recognition of life’s inherent polarity. Acknowledging that love appears on the same slider on which hate does, fear on the same as fearlessness, compassion on the same as brutality. That they are two polar manifestations of the same phenomenon—and neither can exist without the other.
The second step is the experiential integration of that knowledge—which is what really makes the difference and underpins our sense of safety and expansiveness. Allowing both polarities as they occur, making space for the clash between them, for the cognitive dissonance that rattles us and for the instinctual sense of disorientation and helpless we feel. The extent to which I can be with that clash is the extent of safety and resilience I feel in life.
One way in which this has been manifesting for me recently is through a need for order.
I want to organise my life, work, ideas, relationships. I want to have a perfect structure and consistency. Neatness. Manageability. Meticulousness.
The need for order is a common human impulse—yet a rather comical one when we look at what the underlying need is—to reduce the infinite complexity of life into manageable simplicity. To have a bird’s eye view and control of life’s inherent expansiveness. To keep still and categorised life that’s alive, ever-changing, boundless. To suspend and contain something that I’m but a tiny fractal of.
The reason I crave order is because it gives me a sense of calm and peace. Safety essentially. Conversely, the lack of order makes me feel anxious, restless and unsafe.
And my ability to feel safe and unsafe simultaneously, without having my head explode or launching into panicked overdrive, is ultimately the level of safety I feel in life.
The more I am able to hold both the need for order and the need for spontaneity within me, the more expansive and resilient I feel.