Thinking and Communicating Past Ambiguity and Ambivalence

THINKING AND COMMUNICATING PAST AMBIGUITY & AMBIVALENCE

By Bill Cottringer

     I think it is a good idea to start out by defining key ideas first, to begin with a common understanding of what the problem is in order to proceed in describing why and how it is a problem, and what can or can't be done about it. Make sense? Hence the following definitions of these two main words in the article title:

Ambiguity—Doubt or uncertainty about the meaning or interpretation of something.

Ambivalence—The presence of conflicting thoughts, beliefs, attitudes or feelings; uncertainty as to which choice or course to follow.

     In life there are problems and predicaments. Predicaments are problems that need more tolerance, understanding and acceptance than solutions. An example is another person not behaving the way you would prefer in order to make you happier. The truth is you can't make someone else happy, only unhappy.

     And there are two main types of problems—convergent ones that have definite solutions (becoming warmer when you are too cold) and divergent ones that don't have clear solutions because of great ambivalence in response to their prevalent ambiguity (freedom vs. equality, justice vs. mercy, free will vs. determinism, and unconditional love and acceptance vs. encouragement to grow and improve). These are the real challenges in living where the most important lessons can be learned to produce the most growth and success..  

     It is being stuck in the ambiguity and ambivalence of divergent problems, and the resulting negative vicious circle that makes that stuckness more paralyzing, that blocks positive growth and requires the best level of creative thinking and communicating to get positive movement. But this is a catch-22 paradox that needs understanding.

    A good understanding of the above process—especially realizing the potential positive value of recognizing this unknown dwelling place for wisdom and growing or reducing impatience and intolerance for the comfort or discomfort of being stuck in the problem's ambiguity and ambivalence—is a big part of beginning to resolve such difficult problems.  

     Here is what I have come to observe—that a great majority of people in the world are living quiet lives of desperation, in trying to just survive, without knowing they were born to thrive, let alone knowing how to do that. Put another way, there appears to be a very humongous gap between the few truly optimistic people who know the reality of quantum physics with the real potential for increasing and improving the power of awareness and consciousness to affect reality, and those many realists and pessimists who are stuck in conventional relativity with its passive victimization perspective. By the way if you haven't seen "Down the Rabbit Hole," a follow-up to the intriguing video, "What the Bleep Do We Know," you may want to rent it from your friendly video store. This is a very enlightening visual documentary describing science's most recent attempts to capture the real reality behind what we think we see and know.

     I think there are three different mechanisms to know "truth" and they are a critical mind, a feeling/empathic heart, and a trusting/growing/loving soul. The trouble is that these three processes rarely seem to agree when interacting with life and people without conflicts, nagging suspicions, ambiguity or inconsistent exceptions (pervasive ambivalence). Thus begins the problem of being stuck and the subsequent focus on trying to survive and getting nowhere in a hurry. Of course another serious problem is that no two people are hardly ever at the same time and place with their thinking and acting in their journey's to capture the most valuable but elusive truths in resolving such divergent problems and predicaments. We all have slightly different CPUs and keyboards.

     Now the reason for the pervasiveness of quiet desperation and the subsequent focus on treading water instead of swimming a marathon in joy, is our desperation to avoid becoming addicted to ambivalence. And this particular addiction can turn out to be much more destructive and powerful than gambling, sex, physical/emotional abuse, danger, substance abuse, or even chocolate, because it is so subtle and so much a part of our basic brain functioning.

     Our brains are driven to fulfill their built-in required measurement of homeostasis and maintaining just the right amount of arousal—not too much excitement, conflict and chaos, just enough calming, peace and order; some doubt in the truth of something but not too much; and just enough security and insecurity to feel balanced and safe. As it turns out we want our cake and eat it too—we always want to be both sure and yet unsure of a hoped-for outcomes in all choices. This is a result of the fundamental human drive to avoid too much boredom and have a little surprise in exercising our free will as we attempt to get in more in sync with the way of life.

     I think the secret of this ambivalence addiction avoidance is in seeing how we actually affect everything we are apart of even when we think we aren't doing this—especially in really being ambivalent in expecting both positive and negative outcomes of our choices and never being sure enough of letting go of one choice and changing to another one.

     And, we now have physics proving that even a mechanical "observer" can influence the outcome patterns of shooting electrons through splits onto a background screen, simply by "watching" them. We are already part of life and cannot not do things that influence the outcomes we want or don't want, even by consciously trying not to do that. The same is true in communication. We cannot not communicate, even with silence. We are always communicating something. Even while sleeping we may not be thinking or communicating per se, but we may be dreaming which is still energy going somewhere and affecting something as the remote butterfly effect.

     So how do we think about and try to communicate to another person who is stuck in a state of an ambivalent vicious circle to help them get unstuck? Actually the first thing is to make sure you are not ambivalent about your own efforts to help or do what you need to do to be successful in your efforts! Now take an unhappy marriage for example—where some unhappiness and even emotional abuse is perceived to be better than the scary alternative of a financially disruptive divorce and children be raised by one parent?  Or even getting married or not—which will result in the most unhappiness and other benefits and least discomfort or other problems?

     Or, consider a depressed person who may be less distressed and more comfortable, safe, and secure in a passive blue world of reacting rather than having to act in becoming responsible in solving problems that maybe causing the pain and hardship and even the thought of this effort may open a can of worms?   And what about a person who claims to be spiritual but not religious, who ends up doing more harm than good with his or her knowledge and wisdom, because of not really being certain about choosing individual freedom of experience over not being bound by traditional moral laws, despite denying it?

     The bottom line to all this, is that thinking is probably the best access point for any possible productive change/growth in moving a person away from surviving in a victim perspective towards believing in the possibility of a powerful, reality changing thriving one. The catch-22 to tolerating or abandoning ambivalence (depending upon which way you need to go) is that you have to become more secure about not knowing for sure what will happen by giving up your security blanket before you can give it up. Make no mistake about it, this gap is a huge one and the challenge is in dealing with your own ambiguity/ambivalence and having enough patience to get a first step in the right direction, whichever side of the equation the person needs to be moving towards.

     And since most thinking is really unconscious, we must go to the person's pre-conscious mind and stop the build-up of chemically produced thinking-feeling neuro-net links keeping him or her addicted to avoiding or tolerating ambivalence through cognitive reprogramming.  Then comes the patient coaxing of the person's thinking more towards a consciousness of being aware of the real potential for making the particular choices necessary to influence a situation for the better. This is the attempt to help the person build the confidence to just consider the plus side of growing towards optimism.

     Let's get down to the nitty-gritty here. We are talking about see-saw communication. One person who is convinced his or her reality (optimism, and trust and love as the only way to move mountains) is healthy, correct and useful in achieving success, peace, happiness, wholeness and meaning, is trying to "sell" that perspective to one who doesn't have much hope for or believe in his or her power to control an uncontrollable world, and even if he or she could, would a "positive" outcome really be that positive? The person doing the selling better be damn sure of having the only right reality. And if you are selling, you better have it on good authority and from ample experience or there won't be any selling or if there is it may cause more harm than good.

   Does any of this make any sense? I remember with caution how my graduate school advisor thought I was going insane when I got excited about brain hemisphere differentiation and how that affected counseling outcomes by therapist and patient gender back in 1970. My "theory" was that better counseling outcomes would occur when female therapists were matched with female patients because females as a group showed more right brain hemisphere activity then their male counterparts, and this was essential for therapeutic change to take place. Now understand that nowadays genders may be evolving towards whole-brainess, maybe even as a partial result of the years of research that followed this measly thesis. Maybe when something sounds whacko but strangely possible, we are onto something important?

    The only real clue I have about thinking and communicating through this conundrum of ambiguity and ambivalence is learning what Emerson meant by his earlier admonition of "thinking in shades of grey and acting in black and white intil you get it right." We can learn to speak life's two main languages in the right order, frequency and amplitude—conveying unconditional love and acceptance first loudly and frequently, without any need or expectations for movement away from or towards the ambiguity and ambivalence, and then thoughtfully demonstrating small ways that you use your own optimism to grow and improve past your own ambiguity and ambivalence and encouraging the other person to do so too, patiently, and without any traces of superiority, judgment, over-certainty, control, or dishonesty. In the end, you may have to be okay not even being able to speed up that process to short circuit the perceived time wasted in just trying to survive. Predicaments and divergent problems have to be confronted by creative thinking and clever communication, both taking something away and adding something too.  That is the choice to continue God's act of creation with our tiny contribution.

William Cottringer, Ph.D. is President of Puget Sound Security in Bellevue, WA. He is author of You Can Have Your Cheese & Eat It Too and The Bow-Wow Secrets.  He can be reached at (425) 454-5011 or bcottringer@pssp.net