EMOTIONAL AMBIVALENCE

The first bond that protects us when we come to this world is the maternal, in this connection we find the essential sustenance to ensure our survival, this nexus of union so intense from the first breath of life, is full of deep affections that will forge our primitive archetypes of behavior with our first object relations. Since the baby is born he is immersed in a hectic emotional world, given the limited range of autonomous resources he has, his survival instinct urges him to demand the nourishmen he needs to survive, causing him a pleasant feeling of gratification when he succeeds, and frustration and pain in the absence of it.

All the instinctive aggression that the baby feels projected in his internal figures, formed by his parents and caregivers, we could speak here of the birth of a very incipient guilt coming from instinctive impulses that the baby feels against its first objects loved.

Here we could find the seat of our emotional ambivalence, an unconscious and instinctive pattern that is inserted in our way of relating emotionally, this affective attitude in which coexist contradictory impulses that derive from a common source, can provoke much anxiety in all our bonds due to the impulsive character of the same ones. Most of the time one of the two feelings is repressed and we can express our love without anger or hate being exposed, it is expressed only indirectly.

In the course of analytic therapy, this aggressive part that is repressed and disconnected from our attachments can be revealed, we must understand that all these processes are impulsive and unconscious, gestated when our cognitive system was forming.

In many psychic disorders this repression of ambivalence becomes more labile and can trigger much suffering by not being able to separate this contradictory feeling towards the same person. Emotional ambivalence is inherent to the human being and we must learn to assimilate and interpret that instinctive part of our affections in order to be free from the feeling of guilt and confusion that can block us in our relationships.