Last week I started to talk about the phenomenon of ambivalence and how it plays out in our different roles, at work and at home. It can cause varying degrees of mess or missed opportunities or fray relationships in its unclarity.

So, how do we unravel ourselves from the bind of this trap?

In working families, this is a trap for mothers and fathers alike, who struggle with navigating their domestic and work roles and corresponding time commitments. In US culture, we are expected to figure all this out alone. Not so in Europe or even Canada. There are social structures in place to support young families with long maternity and paternity leaves, medical care, child care – all subsidized by the state. And as Lauren Sandler says in Psychology Today (March 15, 2011), whatever you think about socialism, it works at the level of the individual. Because on this side of the pond, families are stretched     t    h     i      n.

To begin the trap’s unwinding, we accept what is, one of my favorite Tools of Sufficiency. Here we are in the United States of Independent Nuclear Families, where adults and their offspring are expected to fend for themselves with very little help unless you are lucky enough to live in a supportive and healthy extended family situation. So unless you have that or are willing to co-habitate with other families in a village atmosphere, we accept that we live where we live and that we only have 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week. (How many times my husband says, there are not enough hours in the day.)

We accept the limitations of being human: that we need some number of hours of sleep and down time, (this is my obsession – how on earth did evolution resolve to make us so sleep deprived in the early weeks of caring for someone so needy?!), some amount of exercise, some amount of socialization, some sense of purpose, oh yeah, and food, air and water, all preferably clean, so make time for that committee of keeping the lake healthy.

We then tell the truth about our pain points. We confide in the community of trusted people we have around us. We tell the truth to our mentor, our coach, our colleague, our best friend and our partner. We open to another in our vulnerability, our yearning and uncertainty. In the truth telling we see we want it all: we want to be home and at work, we want to flesh and spirit, we want to be loved and left alone. We are ambivalent, and we are uncomfortable. So we resolve to return to the starting point and accept what is. We return here often.

Then, we ask for help and we allow help to come to us. We let life get messy, the laundry to pile up, the dust to gather. We don’t pick up every scrap of paper floating in the corner cobweb from the morning’s craft project. We let go of the little stuff, and we invest where we can – through currency or exchange – and letting others change our sheets or open our mail or get our child to school or do a first edit on the project we hold so dear. We let go, because we have to. We also receive all the accolades for all that we do well. We celebrate! We remember joy.

Ambivalence is a state of being human; it cannot be annihilated and as well, no remedy is a panacea. The resolution is in the practices of acceptance, truth telling and asking and receiving of support in any of its forms. When we let go, we can’t be trapped.

 

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