ambivalent

Ambivalent is a concept associated with ambivalence (the particularity of what can be interpreted in contradictory ways). For the psychology, Ambivalence is a state of mind in which opposite emotions coexist.

The ambivalent exists from the notion of Valencia, which can be understood as interest or rejection of a certain thing. What produces joy or pleasure has a positive valence, while what generates sadness or pain has a negative valence.

Ambivalence implies that they co-exist feelings with positive valence and negative valence with respect to the same element. The typical example of ambivalence is the Love Hate: "I feel somewhat ambivalent about María: I am fascinated with her and I think I love her but, at the same time, I hate how she treats me when she is with her friends", "The situation generates an ambivalence in me, since it causes me satisfaction and, at the same time, it causes me pain".

There are those who recognize different levels of ambivalence: it can be temporary or specific (when someone is torn between eating a plate of noodles or maintaining a diet, for example), affective (feelings about a person) or intellectual (who speaks simultaneously to favor of a proposition and its opposite).

A ambivalent behavior may be linked to a mental disorder such as schizophrenia, the psychosis wave obsessive neurosis, although it is also associated with certain states accepted as normal, such as jealousy.

In some contexts, a person is considered to be ambivalent when communicating through ambiguous signals, which hinders the social bond: “I don't understand Ariel: on the one hand she tells me that she misses me and on the other she doesn't call me for a week. He is an ambivalent boy ".

Anxious-ambivalent insecure attachment

The relationship that children establish with their parents or those closest adult referents are of vital importance for the development of their affective universe.

If this relationship is based on secure attachment, where the child feels content and understood, it is likely that in the future he will develop an enviable emotional stability; if instead the relationship is one of insecure attachment, the child will feel completely adrift and in the future it will be extremely difficult to establish a coherent life line, because of this frustrated relationship.

Insecure attachment occurs when the responses that parents present to the physical or emotional needs of their children have a certain ambivalence or contradiction; that is, sometimes they respond positively, others negatively, and sometimes they do not respond directly. This creates great confusion in the child because he does not know when and how his parents will respond to his needs.

The consequence of all this is a deep feeling of abandonment and loneliness, which in turn places him powerless in the face of his own existence, losing control; All of this leads to great anxiety and manifests itself in strong self-doubt.

These children grow up with a feeling of never being good enough to be loved by others and they are always aware of the affective displays of their environment; In addition, this experience causes them a low self-esteem, which makes them place themselves many steps below their environment.

The first difficulties of this disorder appear when the child enters a environment outside the family, generally the school one. In this environment, children manifest clear problems at the cognitive Y emotional; In this last aspect, they will feel the constant need to receive approval for everything they do, they will manifest possessive attitudes, jealousy and rivalry.

The clearest way to define the fundamental characteristic of this type of attachment is as a intense anxiety for feeling loved and the feeling, at the same time, of not being able to be that leads them to develop a disturbing concern for the attention or interest that others have in front of their person or actions.