Why Making a Choice Sometimes Feels Like Betraying Yourself

Many people come to therapy saying some version of this:

“I know what I want… but I also don’t.” 

“I know who I am when I’m on my own, but it all evaporates when I’m in a relationship.” 

“I feel pulled in two directions all the time and it causes me stress and anxiety.” 

“I feel like a fraud saying I like the colour blue, when I know my room is painted yellow.”

(The last one isn’t true, but it illustrates the problem people feel when they can’t find a bridge between different aspects of themselves.)

Often, they worry this means something is wrong with them. That they are confused, blocked, resistant, or failing to make progress. They feel that by choosing one thing, they are abandoning another part of themselves — especially when what they want also happens to be what others want from them. And yet, they want that too.

From a therapeutic perspective, this is not a problem to be fixed. It is a description of being human.

What Ambivalence Really Is

Ambivalence means having conflicting feelings, wishes, or impulses at the same time.

You can:

• want closeness and fear it

• long for clarity and resist simplification

• desire change and grieve what would be lost

• feel proud of who you are and still feel shame

  
  

Psychodynamic and relational approaches understand ambivalence not as indecision, but as a sign of complexity. It often appears when different parts of the self have learned to survive in different contexts.

Especially for people who live in between: cultures, languages, genders, orientations. Ambivalence is not an exception. It is a logical outcome of a layered life.

Ambivalence is Not a Defect. It's Capacity.

We often talk about ambivalence as something to overcome, but in many areas of life, it is actually a skill.

Being able to speak two languages is not a disadvantage. It opens up completely different ways of understanding the world. Some feelings, sensations, or meanings can be named in one language and not in another. You don’t lose one language by knowing another. You gain perspective. You gain range.

The same is true psychologically. Being able to hold two emotional truths at once:

"I want this and I don’t want this','This feels right and this hurts', allows for depth, nuance, and choice. It lets you describe your inner world more precisely, even when it’s uncomfortable. The problem is not ambivalence itself. The problem is being forced to simplify it too early. It's a lack of capacity to stay with the choice long enough to make an informed decision.

Ambivalence as a Survival Skill and as a Sign of Growth

Many of the people I work with have already overcome a great deal.

They are reflective, capable, resilient. They’ve adapted to new countries, learned new languages, navigated visibility and invisibility, belonging, exclusion, microaggressions, and cancelling. They know how to read contexts, sense expectations, and move between worlds.

Ambivalence often develops because it has to.

One part of you learned: “This is how I belong here.”

Another part learned: “This is how I stay safe there.”

Yet another learned: “This is how I matter here.”

All these parts make sense. All have histories. All deserve respect.

The difficulty comes later. It's when these parts are no longer clearly separated by place, language, or group, but live together inside one body. When that one body wants to feel whole, coherent, one. When we feel that ambivalence is too much and we want a rest, thinking that going back to mythical oneness is our only option.

For now, I want to stay with something else: how ambivalence itself can become threatening - internally and externally.

When Ambivalence Feels Threatening

Ambivalence challenges the idea that identity should be simple, consistent, and neatly categorised

Internally, it can feel unsettling because it disrupts the fantasy of a clear, unified self. From a young age, we are taught (sometimes directly, sometimes subtly) that maturity means knowing exactly who we are, what we want, and where we’re going. Ambivalence exposes that this clarity is often a myth.

Externally, ambivalence can feel threatening to others. This is particularly true for people who live between categories — queer, fluid, multilingual, multicultural, non binary, bisexual. Bisexuality, for example, often unsettles people not because it’s confusing, but because it refuses either/or logic. Desire, attachment, and identity do not always obey neat boxes. Bisexuality often unsettles people not because it is confusing, but because it refuses an either/or logic. It shows that desire, attachment, and identity do not always obey neat categories. For some, this triggers discomfort, disbelief, or aggression - not because something is wrong with bisexuality, but because it confronts others with their own difficulty tolerating ambivalence. What cannot be easily classified can feel destabilising. When your very existence embodies “both/and,” you may become a mirror for what others cannot yet hold in themselves.

The Dandelion Roots of Identity

Some people experience their identity like a tree with a clear trunk. Others experience it more like a dandelion.

A dandelion has many roots. The more you pull, the more roots appear. Trying to extract just one part makes the system more complex, not simpler.

For people living across cultures, languages, and identities, the self often works like this:

• one root in family history

• another in cultural belonging(s)

• another in sexuality or gender

• another in relationships

• another in work

• another in the body

Ambivalence arises when the mind tries to organise what is actually an ecosystem.

Why does it so often feel dark and lonely?

A common experience is this:

“I’ve done so much work already. I’ve survived so much. Why does what’s left feel so heavy?”

Often, what remains is not weakness — it is what never had enough space or safety to be felt before.

Early survival requires clarity: “This is who I need to be here.” It has to be simple. Sweeping. As children, those conclusions often keep us safe.

Later integration requires tolerance for ambiguity, grief, longing, shadow.

What’s left can feel dark, not because it is bad, but because it has been alone for a long time.

Ambivalence Lives in the Body

Ambivalence is not only a thought process. It is somatic.

It often shows up as:

• tension in the chest or throat

• exhaustion without a clear reason

• a push–pull feeling in relationships

• freezing when making decisions

From a body-oriented perspective, these are not symptoms to override. They are communications. The body is often the first place where conflicting needs meet. Stay with them, and they will enrich you like a delta river. Ignore them, and they may overflow.

What Therapy Does With Ambivalence

In relational, psychodynamic, and integrative therapy, we don’t try to eliminate ambivalence.

We slow it down. Listen to it. Give language to different parts. Notice how it lives in the body. Explore how it formed in relationships.

Integration does not mean choosing one side. It doesn’t require rigidity. An integrated experience often allows different parts of yourself to exist without attacking each other. It finds ways to grow around complexity rather than collapsing into it, opening new internal spaces and expanding your capacity.

If you recognise yourself here - living in more than one world, longing for integration, tired of carrying complexity alone, it's not a failure.

It is evidence of depth, intelligence, survival and a self that refuses to be reduced.

Therapy can be a place where you don’t have to simplify yourself to be understood. A place where even the darkest, loneliest parts are allowed to arrive, and not be rushed away.

If this resonates with you, you’re welcome to reach out.

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