Mixed feelings: what they are and how can we deal with them?

This is what happens in our mind when we have mixed feelings.

We have all experienced situations where our feelings were confusing, going in one direction but also in another.

These are the mixed feelings. We will try to better understand what this phenomenon consists of by reviewing some examples and everyday situations. We will also learn some of the psychological mechanisms behind them and how to deal with them.

What are mixed feelings?

We speak of mixed feelings when a person experiences ambivalent emotions before a stimulus, be it a situation, a person, an animal or object.. This element would be generating to that individual a multiple emotionality, causing him to have feelings that seem to go in different directions and sometimes even seem to be totally opposite, such as love and hate.

Faced with such a situation, the person feels confused, because the mixed feelings generate instability, as the individual loses the guidance that emotions normally provide. In these cases, they no longer know how to act according to the emotion they are feeling, because it is not only one, but two and sometimes even more, or they are so diffuse that they are not able to identify them.

Experiencing mixed feelings is, therefore, to go through an emotional labyrinth that is tiring. an emotional labyrinth that fatigues the mind of the one who is living it, because he has to coexist with very diverse sensations around some element of his life.. Some of them urge him to come closer while others order him to do the opposite. Faced with such a situation, it is logical that the person feels this disorientation.

Why does this psychological phenomenon occur?

But how can such a paradoxical situation, that of mixed feelings, occur in a rational being such as human beings? The answer is simple. However rational we may be, we are still emotional beings. Reason is governed by logical laws, but emotions are not. Although we can modulate them (precisely through reason), it is sometimes very complicated to control the appearance of a specific emotion..

Life is extremely complex. There are so many variables that affect each stimulus that in many occasions it happens that some parts related to that particular element are pleasant for us and therefore it drives us to approach it, while at the same time there are dimensions of that same stimulus that are unpleasant and even aversive for us, causing us to reject it.

What happens then: does the person get carried away by one emotion or the other? Generally, the more intense one will win out, unless reason has something to say about it.. That's where our rational side comes into play. It is easier for this to happen the lesser the strength of the emotion we are trying to "overcome", because if it becomes so intense that it overwhelms us, even reason could be compromised.

Mixed feelings occur many more times than we think, but in most cases one of the emotions is substantially more intense than the other, so the weaker one will be overshadowed and sometimes we will not even detect it.

What to do in the face of mixed feelings

We have already seen what it means to have mixed feelings and the discomfort they can sometimes generate for the person experiencing them. What could an individual in this situation do to feel better? First of all, it would be good for the person to dedicate some time to an exercise of introspection that would allow him/her to identify all the emotions he/she is experiencing.

This is not the time to make judgments about whether each of these emotions is good or bad in and of itself. Once we have completed the list, we can repeat the exercise, this time thinking about a specific situation in which that stimulus has been present. Now it is time to further explore the feelings encountered and evaluate whether each of these emotions was triggered by the stimulus or by the situation itself.

We will continue to probe to find out exactly what it was that caused us to feel the way we have identified.. To do this we can write down in another column what we believe was the origin of each of these sensations, to see exactly where it came from and to verify that we have not automatically assigned any of them to the original stimulus.

At this point we may come to realize that a certain emotion that caused us discomfort did not actually come directly from the element we believed, but had been generated by a contextual situation and we had automatically associated it with the stimulus.

In the case of people and the mixed feelings towards them, we can fall into the so-called transference process, which consists of assigning to them emotions that in reality were provoked by another person, simply because they remind us of that person. In these cases it is also useful to carry out the introspection we were talking about and check if the feelings are genuine for this individual or if they are actually generated by a third party.

After exploring the origins of the conflicting feelings, it is time to try to find a solution.. If we have identified an emotion that is unpleasant to us, we can go to the source to try to convert it into one that is more positive. For example, if a negative feeling comes from a particular comment that a person made to us at a particular time, we can try to talk to that person about it.

Another good exercise is to hypothesize scenarios in which we explore the pros and cons of each solution we come up with. For example, we can evaluate the consequences of telling the person who offended us how he or she made us feel, the consequences of talking about it with a third party, the consequences of doing nothing, and so on.

In this way we will have all the information on the table to be able to make an informed decision. This way we will be able to choose the path that best suits us, and we will even have the rest of the options ready in case the first choice does not prosper and we continue to have unresolved mixed feelings.

The work of introspection is very powerful and productive, but sometimes we may need the help of a person outside this whole situation to find new points of view that may be escaping us. That is why we should not discard the seeking the objectivity of an external individual if we believe that the work we are doing is not generating the good results we would expect..

In cases where the situation is generating great discomfort and we are not able to find that improvement, the counselor we are looking for could be none other than a psychological therapist. Undoubtedly, with the tools that this professional will provide, the person will find the relief he or she needs.

The case of cognitive dissonance

We have made a tour of the different facets of mixed feelings as well as the methodology to be able to resolve them in the most satisfactory way possible. We are now going to get to know the case of cognitive dissonance, a phenomenon that, although it has different nuances, has quite a lot to do with mixed feelings, so it deserves a separate mention.

Cognitive dissonance also implies a discomfort in the individual, but in this case it is generated by tension between two or more thoughts or beliefs that conflict with respect to a given situation or stimulus. situation or stimulus. We see, therefore, the resemblance it bears to the subject of this article.

It is a concept coined by Leon Festinger and refers to the need for coherence that human beings have between what they feel, what they think and what they do, that is, between beliefs, thoughts and behaviors. When this coherence is compromised, for example because we are forced to perform a task that goes against what we think, this is when cognitive dissonance appears.

This dissonance can lead the person to attempt self-deception, making him/her believe that in reality the behavior he/she is performing does seem correct to him/her, since his/her beliefs were wrong.because his or her beliefs were wrong. He tries to fit the pieces together in order to reduce the discomfort he is suffering, hence one of the ways he uses to do so is lying, through self-deception.

Therefore, cognitive dissonance would be an independent psychological phenomenon that would be related to conflicting feelings, although these would differ fundamentally in that, as its name dictates, they refer only to feelings or emotions.

Bibliographical references:

• Aronson, E. (1969). The theory of cognitive dissonance: A current perspective. Advances in experimental social psychology.
• Carrera, P., Caballero, A., Sánchez, F., Blanco, A. (2005). Mixed emotions and risk behavior. Latin American Journal of Psychology. Konrad Lorenz University Foundation.
• Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford University Press.
• Garrido-Rojas, L. (2006). Attachment, emotion and emotional regulation. Implications for health. Revista latinoamericana de psicología. Konrad Lorenz University Foundation.
• Schneider, I.K., Schwarz, N. (2017). Mixed feelings: The case of ambivalence. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences. Elsevier.