On accepting ambivalence

?“I don’t want to die but sometimes wish I’d never been born at all”. I was listening to Bohemian Rapsody the other day, and this thought suddenly dawned on me: how can we hold two contradictory views at the same time and still function?

Then I realised that Freddie’s dilemma is an encapsulation of the constant battle between divergent feelings, thoughts, and perceptions that we all have concerning ourselves and others.

There seems to be an internal fight between our various, at times conflicting, micro-identities, be it Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Light and the Shadow, the Human and the Chimp, or whatever you may want to call them. And we somehow expect the battle to be ultimately won by the “good” party, as an ingrained expression of the either-or mindset.

As we all know, life is not a Hollywood tale, and the good guy doesn’t always win. Maybe there isn’t a “good guy” to begin with. How can we even assess what good means? Take light versus darkness, for instance. The sun does bring light, but at the same time blocks our vision from seeing the surroundings, including the stars. Complementary views, and yet not antagonistic.

Divergent facets of us might emerge, depending on personality, on one hand, and age, previous experiences, social network, setting, culture, and context, on the other. Surely there is a bit of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in all of us, in different proportions. Two poles on the same continuum, that we oscillate between. According to Carl Jung, it is when those identities start converging, and gradually become one, that we become whole (known as individuation).

On a deep psychological level, there’s the unconscious and the conscious, as part and parcel of the human psyche. The shadow versus the ego. The inner digging that takes us back to the core. As Robert Bly eloquently puts it, we spend our life until we’re twenty deciding what parts of ourselves to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again. Integrating those bits is a lifetime journey, and there are no shortcuts.

So maybe it’s not about fighting. It’s about noticing and accepting the intrinsic duality and coming to terms with the existing ambivalence of our thoughts and emotions. And then maybe start embracing the both-and mindset (or the paradox mindset).

The paradox mindset is a sense of ease while confronting a dilemma with multiple potential solutions. It pushes us to shift from an either-or mentality to a both-and one. It’s about challenging the ambivalence and embracing it. Letting nuances of grey into our lives and observing them without attachment.

To conclude, I would like you to reflect on the famous words of Scott Fitzgerald, who said that the test of first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.?

Accepting ambivalence might be a first step. We should also embrace it and make use of the paradox mindset in our daily lives. And see it as an asset rather than a hindrance. Let’s make it easier on ourselves and learn to shift guilt and shame to self-compassion.?

I’d be curious to know what your thoughts on the matter are. Feel free to share them, please.