AMBIVALENCE & INDECISION

Ambivalence is not confusion; it’s the experience of two equally charged truths pulling in opposite directions. The psyche hesitates when both choices feel like a kind of loss.

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In nature, when an animal faces two competing instincts of equal force — to fight or to flee — it often performs a displacement activity: grooming, pecking at the ground, or circling aimlessly. It’s a way of managing unbearable tension by doing something unrelated. Humans are no different. We scroll, clean, overanalyze, commit to nothing. The energy that could move us toward choice disperses sideways.

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In therapy, we stay with that tension rather than rushing to resolve it. You might tell us what’s been weighing on you — the decision you keep circling, the options you replay, the people you worry your choice might affect. We can play those scenarios out together, give language to what’s pulling in opposite directions, and listen for what each part of you is trying to preserve. Therapy offers space to talk freely, without judgment, about what’s keeping you stuck.

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And sometimes, talking itself isn’t enough. You can think through it a hundred times and still not know what to do— it lives in the body, in feeling, in fantasy. We might notice what happens inside you as you imagine each outcome: the quickening, the dread, the relief that follows.

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There isn’t always a clear right way forward — just a need to stop trying to outthink what’s unfolding. Over time, ambivalence doesn’t always resolve; it softens, or it rearranges you. The work can be as much about deciding as it is about understanding what’s at stake. At a certain point, reflection gives way to movement — to finding out through experience what can’t be known in thought. That can mean trying something — living into one side to see how it feels, knowing we’ll keep thinking it through together.