Contents
Mixed feelings: delaying a decision is not always bad
Psychology
Mixed feelings can cause discomfort and discomfort, but they also allow us to analyze the situation in detail, evaluate it and not get carried away by the first impulse
When we say that we have mixed feelings, we are at a kind of crossroads where by making the decision we make, we feel that a part is going to be damaged. Fortunately, this feeling is not an isolated case, but all human beings, at some point (in many, to tell the truth), we go through this invasion of tiredness and exhaustion until the final decision is made.
We speak of conflicting feelings not only when emotions of love and hate coexist, but also when other emotions such as fear and attraction, anger and compassion or sadness and joy assail us at the same time, among many others. Laura Rodríguez, a psychologist at the Cepsim Center in Madrid, clarifies that we usually recognize the mixed feelings when before a decision polar emotions appear “That make us doubt” because they present themselves with a similar force.
“For example, a person wants to start his own company and two feelings come to him, one is fear of uncertainty and the other is the illusion of” jumping into the pool “and investing in the business. This person is likely to be in a state of ambivalence and you don’t know what to do, which can cause you anguish and frustration, but it will also make you stop and weigh the pros and cons of your decision, ”he says.
How to deal with them
Each filtering bag mixed feelings They can cause discomfort and discomfort, but they also allow us to analyze the situation in detail, evaluate it and not get carried away by the first impulse.
It is important to remember what having mixed feelings involves and what it does not involve. It means, on the one hand, the presence of two interpretations or opposite values in front of the same object, the feeling that both emotions are perceived as valid and true when a situation is evaluated. However, mixed feelings do not imply indifference because if they were, the emotions would not give us the same, nor inconsistency, since in that case we would not give the same weight to both emotions.
But, above all, the situation must be normalized. When we are faced with a state of ambivalence we must, before facing it, normalize it: “We are used to believing that it is imperative to have everything clear and that emotions are black or white, forgetting that there is a wide range of gray”, says the psychologist. The truth is that this expectation is very far from the emotional reality of people and, therefore, many times we fall into the “I shouldn’t feel this way.” For this reason, it is essential to point out that there are no emotions better than others and that “we should not judge the emotion that comes to us.”
Accepting it normally we assume that our emotional fan generates opposing states; then we can go on to examine in detail what is happening. Laura Rodríguez encourages us to imagine two emotions at the two ends of a continuum and to analyze what each of them is telling us in order to understand what is happening within oneself.
«As an example, we have just had a fight with our partner and two mixed feelings appear: love and hate. The emotion of love leads to others such as curiosity about what the other had to say to us, nostalgia for other moments lived, tranquility for the shared space … while hatred leads to other emotions such as anger because the other does not understand our point of view, the fear of breaking the relationship, the loneliness that this idea produces, etc. », he says. This range of feelings is what will allow us to address the situation, stopping to listen to our emotional needs, without taking the first impulse.
These types of feelings occur because we are emotional beings who live with a delusion of rationality in everything we do; When emotion goes one way and reason goes the other, we find ourselves in a situation of ambivalence and internal conflict.
The psychologist Laura Rodríguez states that this conflict is a “source of motivation” and allows “delaying our decisions”, considering certain behaviors, as well as being a moderator in interpersonal relationships. “This indicates that it has a biological substrate and allows the survival of the spice, avoiding violent behavior,” he clarifies.
On the other hand, this phenomenon also has a social and cultural component, which implies that the experience of mixed feelings is different: while some see it as anguish and discomfort, in more collectivist cultures it is lived as something natural that facilitates finding a balance. Society requires us to be decisive and mixed feelings slow down the solution to problems.