Ambivalence &
Behavior Change

There is a particular kind of stuck that almost every human being knows intimately, even if they have never had a word for it. It is the experience of wanting two things at once — wanting to change and wanting to stay exactly as you are; wanting the relationship and wanting to leave it; wanting to stop drinking and wanting, badly, a drink; wanting to be well and wanting, somehow, to be allowed to remain unwell a little longer.

This state has a name. It is called ambivalence, and it is not a flaw, a weakness, or a failure of will. It is a normal, healthy, and deeply human feature of how we make decisions about things that matter. Understanding it — what it is, where it comes from, and how to work with it rather than against it — is the beginning of nearly every meaningful change a person will ever make.

What Ambivalence Actually Is

Ambivalence is the experience of holding two conflicting feelings or desires about the same thing at the same time. The word itself comes from Latin roots meaning, literally, "both forces" — and that is exactly what it feels like: being pulled in two directions simultaneously, with neither pull able to fully override the other.

It is not indecision, exactly. Indecision is not knowing which option you prefer. Ambivalence is knowing — often with painful clarity — that part of you prefers each option, and that choosing one means giving something up that the other would have given you. The drink would give you relief tonight and cost you tomorrow. Sobriety would give you tomorrow and cost you the relief tonight. Both are real. Neither is imaginary. And so you sit, suspended between them.

This is why simplistic advice — "just do it," "make up your mind," "commit fully" — fails so completely in the face of ambivalence. The advice assumes there is one clear right answer that the person is simply failing to choose. But ambivalence is not a failure to see the right answer. It is an accurate perception that there are two answers, each carrying real costs and real benefits, and that no choice will be free of loss.

Why Ambivalence Is Normal, Not Pathological

It is worth saying clearly, because many people experience their own ambivalence as a kind of moral defect: ambivalence is not a sign that something is wrong with you. It is a sign that the decision in front of you genuinely matters, and that the stakes on both sides are real.

People who feel no ambivalence about a major life change are often either not yet in contact with what they will lose, or they have already done the internal work of resolving the conflict. The person who says, breezily, "I just decided to quit and that was that," is often describing the end of a process, not its beginning — a process that, beneath the surface, involved weeks or months of weighing, grieving, and slowly shifting.

The clinicians who study behavior change — most notably the psychologists who developed Motivational Interviewing, perhaps the most evidence-based approach to helping people resolve ambivalence — treat ambivalence not as an obstacle to be overcome but as the central material to be worked with. It is the door. Walking through it requires understanding it, not pretending it isn't there.

The Two Voices

One of the most useful ways to understand your own ambivalence is to recognize that it is almost always a conversation between two distinct parts of you — two voices, each advocating for a real need.

The first voice is the change voice. It is the part of you that can see the cost of the current pattern clearly. It knows the drinking is damaging your relationships. It knows the avoidance is shrinking your life. It knows the anger is costing you the people you love. This voice speaks in the language of values, of the future, of who you want to be.

The second voice is the status quo voice. It is the part of you that understands, often without being able to articulate it, what the current pattern is doing for you. The drinking is managing pain you do not yet have another way to manage. The avoidance is protecting you from a fear that feels unbearable. The anger is, in its distorted way, standing up for a need that has gone unmet for a long time. This voice speaks in the language of safety, of the present, of what you cannot afford to lose.

Neither voice is wrong. The change voice is not more evolved or more virtuous than the status quo voice, and the status quo voice is not more honest or more grounded than the change voice. They are both describing real things. Resolving ambivalence is not about silencing one of them. It is about understanding both well enough that a genuine choice — one you can live with, one that accounts for the real losses on whichever side you choose — becomes possible.

The Cost of Disowning a Voice

Most people, when they struggle with ambivalence, try to resolve it by disowning one of the voices. They decide the status quo voice is "the problem" and try to suppress it through force of will — which works, sometimes, for a while, until the disowned need reasserts itself and the pattern returns. Or they decide the change voice is "unrealistic" and abandon the effort entirely — which produces a particular kind of resignation that is quieter but no less costly.

The trouble with disowning either voice is that the disowned need does not disappear. It goes underground. It waits. And it tends to return at the moment of greatest vulnerability — when you are tired, stressed, grieving, or stretched — precisely because those are the moments when the need it represents is most acute.

Working with ambivalence, by contrast, means keeping both voices in the room. It means listening, with genuine curiosity, to what the status quo voice is protecting, and what the change voice is pointing toward. It means refusing the false comfort of pretending one of them isn't real. This is harder, in the short term, than picking a side and suppressing the other. But it is the only approach that produces change that actually lasts.

Where This Guide Is Going

The chapters that follow will take you through the landscape of ambivalence and behavior change in a deliberate sequence. We will look at the stages every meaningful change moves through — including the stages that look, from the outside, like failure. We will examine the language we use to talk to ourselves about change, and why most of it backfires. We will explore what it actually takes to resolve ambivalence rather than merely override it. We will dismantle the myth of willpower, which has caused more failed change attempts than perhaps any other single idea. And we will look at what happens after change begins — because ambivalence does not disappear when you start moving; it returns, predictably, and knowing how to meet it when it does is what separates a change that holds from one that collapses.

If you are reading this, you are probably ambivalent about something. That is not a problem to be fixed. It is the beginning of the work.

One of the most liberating discoveries in the psychology of behavior change is the recognition that change is not a single event. It is a sequence of stages, each with its own tasks, its own challenges, and its own characteristic forms of ambivalence. Understanding which stage you are in — honestly, without judging yourself for not being further along — is the single most useful piece of self-knowledge you can bring to the work of change.

This understanding comes from a body of research known as the Transtheoretical Model, developed by psychologists James Prochaska and Carlo DiClemente through decades of studying how people actually change addictive and health behaviors. Their work revealed that successful change almost never follows the dramatic, single-moment narrative we tend to imagine. It follows a predictable, looping path — and the path includes stages that most people, and most well-meaning advisors, mistake for failure.

Precontemplation: Not Yet Ready

In precontemplation, the person is not yet considering change. They may be aware, intellectually, that others see a problem, but they do not experience it as a problem they need to address. This is the stage the people around a struggling person find most frustrating — and it is also the stage where pressure from others is least effective and most likely to harden resistance.

If you are reading this guide, you are probably not in precontemplation about the change it concerns. But it is worth recognizing this stage honestly, because many people who appear to be "in denial" are simply here — and the task of this stage is not to force change but to allow the awareness of the problem and its costs to surface naturally, without defense being triggered.

Contemplation: The Heart of Ambivalence

Contemplation is the stage of active ambivalence. The person knows there is a problem. They are genuinely considering change. And they are equally genuinely not yet ready to act, because the costs and benefits of both changing and not changing are still vivid and balanced in their mind.

This is the stage most people get stuck in — sometimes for years. It is also the stage where the simplistic "just do it" advice is most harmful, because it dismisses the real internal work that contemplation represents. Contemplation is not procrastination. It is the necessary process of weighing, grieving, and slowly tilting the balance toward change. A person in contemplation is not failing to change. They are doing the work that makes change possible.

The task of contemplation is not to force a decision. It is to let both sides of the ambivalence be fully seen, fully felt, and fully understood — so that when the decision to act arrives, it arrives on a foundation that can support it rather than on a wave of willpower that will inevitably recede.

Preparation: The Tilt Begins

In preparation, the balance has tilted. The person is no longer equally pulled; they have, for the most part, decided. The change voice has become louder than the status quo voice, not because the status quo voice has been silenced but because the person has come to understand the costs of the status quo more completely than they understood the costs of change.

Preparation is the stage of small, concrete steps toward action: setting a date, telling someone, removing triggers, making a plan. These steps are deceptively important. They are the bridge between the internal decision and the external action, and skipping them — jumping straight from contemplation to action without preparation — is one of the most common reasons change attempts collapse.

Action: The Visible Work

Action is the stage most people think of when they think of "change." It is the stage where the behavior actually shifts — the first drink refused, the first therapy session attended, the first difficult conversation had. It is the stage that looks, from the outside, like the real work.

And it is real work. But it is not the whole work, and it is not even the hardest work. The hardest work was often done in contemplation, invisibly, over months. Action is the stage where that internal decision is tested against the friction of reality — and where the skills and supports that were built in preparation either hold or reveal their gaps.

Maintenance: The Long, Quiet Stage

Maintenance is the stage that gets the least attention and deserves the most. It is the long, largely invisible period after the behavior has changed, during which the new pattern is consolidated, the old pattern is resisted, and the person learns to live in the new way as the new normal.

Maintenance is not dramatic. It is mostly ordinary. It is the thousand small choices, day after day, that keep the change in place. And it is the stage where ambivalence returns — not as a failure, but as a predictable, normal feature of a life in which the old pattern still exists as a possibility. Understanding maintenance as a stage with its own tasks, rather than as the "end" of change, is essential to making change that lasts.

Relapse: The Stage That Is Not Failure

Relapse — the return to the old pattern after a period of change — is the stage that causes the most shame and the most despair. It is also, statistically, a normal and expected part of nearly every significant change process. Prochaska and DiClemente's research found that most people cycle through the stages multiple times before a change becomes stable, and that relapse is best understood not as a return to the beginning but as a return to contemplation — with the added knowledge of what the change felt like, what triggered its interruption, and what will need to be different next time.

This is not a license to relapse. It is a reframing that prevents relapse from becoming collapse. The person who relapses and concludes "I've failed, it's hopeless, I might as well give up" has converted a normal stage into a permanent verdict. The person who relapses and concludes "I've learned something specific about what I need next time" has kept the change process alive.

Locating Yourself Honestly

Take a moment, with whatever change you are considering, to ask yourself — honestly, without the impulse to be further along than you are — which stage you are actually in. Not which stage you wish you were in. Which stage you are in.

If you are in contemplation, your task is not to force action. It is to let the ambivalence be worked through. If you are in preparation, your task is to build the bridge to action, not to leap across the gap. If you are in maintenance, your task is to expect ambivalence's return and to meet it with the skills you have been building. And if you have relapsed, your task is to learn from it and re-enter the cycle — not to abandon it.

Knowing your stage does not make change easy. But it does make it possible — because it tells you what work is actually yours to do right now, rather than the work you imagine you should already have finished.

The way we talk to ourselves about change — and the way others talk to us — has a profound and largely underappreciated effect on whether change becomes possible. Much of what passes for motivation, in our culture and in our own internal monologue, is actually a form of pressure that makes change harder, not easier. Understanding the difference between language that resolves ambivalence and language that deepens it is one of the most practical skills this guide can offer.

Why "Should" Makes Change Harder

Consider the difference between these two statements, both about the same behavior:

"I really should stop drinking so much." "I don't want to keep drinking the way I have been."

The first is the language of obligation. It positions the change as something required, imposed, expected — and it positions the self as failing to meet the requirement. The second is the language of desire. It positions the change as something the person themselves wants, rooted in their own values and their own experience.

The difference matters enormously. Decades of research in Motivational Interviewing have shown that change driven by internal motivation — "I want this" — is far more durable than change driven by external or internalized pressure — "I should do this." The "should" voice, even when it comes from inside your own head, functions like an external authority: it provokes resistance, because human beings naturally resist being controlled, even by themselves.

This is not a semantic quibble. The person who repeats "I should stop" to themselves, daily, often finds that the very repetition strengthens the part of them that wants to continue. The voice of obligation calls forth the voice of rebellion — and the ambivalence, rather than resolving, deepens.

The Righting Reflex, Turned Inward

Clinicians have a name for the impulse to fix other people's problems: the righting reflex. It is the well-meaning, deeply human urge to point out what is wrong and prescribe what should be done. When directed at someone else, the righting reflex reliably backfires — it triggers defensiveness, argument, and a deeper commitment to the very behavior being challenged.

What is less recognized is that most of us run a constant internal righting reflex on ourselves. We lecture, scold, catalog our failures, and rehearse the case against our own behavior. And, just as it does with others, this internal lecturing backfires. It does not produce change. It produces a sharper, more defended version of the ambivalence it is trying to resolve.

The alternative is not to abandon the goal of change. It is to change the register in which the internal conversation happens — from prosecution to curiosity.

From Prosecution to Curiosity

Curiosity is the language Motivational Interviewing uses to replace the righting reflex, and it works internally just as powerfully as it does in conversation with others. Instead of building a case against yourself ("Why do I keep doing this? What's wrong with me?"), curiosity asks open, genuinely interested questions:

What does this behavior give me that I am reluctant to lose? What need is it serving, even imperfectly? What would I be giving up, concretely, if I changed — and is there another way to meet that need? What do I actually want, underneath the behavior?

These questions are not rhetorical. They are real inquiries, and their answers — often surprising, often uncomfortable — are the material from which genuine motivation is built. A person who understands, precisely, what their drinking is doing for them is in a far stronger position to change it than a person who has only cataloged its costs.

Sustain Talk and Change Talk

Motivational Interviewing distinguishes between two kinds of self-statements: "sustain talk" (statements that favor maintaining the current behavior) and "change talk" (statements that favor change). The research is clear: the more a person articulates change talk — in their own words, on their own behalf — the more likely change becomes. And conversely, the more a person articulates sustain talk, the more committed to the status quo they become.

This has a practical implication for how you talk to yourself. If your internal monologue is dominated by sustain talk ("I can't," "It won't work," "I'll start tomorrow," "One more time won't matter"), you are, quite literally, strengthening the neural pathways that favor the status quo. If you deliberately cultivate change talk — articulating, in your own words, your reasons for changing, your hopes for what change will bring, your confidence in specific steps — you strengthen the pathways that favor change.

This is not positive thinking. It is the deliberate practice of giving voice to the part of you that wants to change, in specific, personal language, rather than letting the sustain talk run unchallenged.

Listening for Your Own Values

Underneath the surface arguments of ambivalence, there is almost always a set of values — things that genuinely matter to the person, that the behavior is in tension with. The drinker who values being a present parent. The avoider who values courage and connection. The angry person who values the relationships their anger is destroying.

Change talk, at its most powerful, is the voice of these values. When you can articulate not just that you "should" change but that the change is in service of something you deeply care about — and when you can say it in your own words, not in the words of whoever is pressuring you — you are doing the work that resolves ambivalence at its root.

The task of this chapter, in practice, is to begin listening to your own internal language about change with the same attentiveness a skilled therapist would bring. Notice the "shoulds." Notice the sustain talk. And, deliberately, make room for the change talk — the real, specific, personal reasons you have, underneath the ambivalence, to move.

Ambivalence, left to itself, can last indefinitely. The two voices can argue for years without either gaining ground, because each is describing something real and neither can be refuted by the other. Resolving ambivalence is not a matter of finding the argument that finally wins. It is a matter of changing the relationship between the two sides — from a debate to be won to a choice to be made, with full awareness of what the choice costs.

This chapter is about the concrete practices that move a person from the stuckness of ambivalence to the clarity of decision — not by overriding the ambivalence, but by working through it.

The Decisional Balance: Making the Invisible Visible

One of the most effective tools for resolving ambivalence is deceptively simple: write it down. The decisional balance is a structured exercise, used in Motivational Interviewing and in cognitive-behavioral approaches, that lays out the four columns of the ambivalence explicitly:

1. The benefits of the current behavior (what you would lose by changing) 2. The costs of the current behavior (what you are paying now) 3. The benefits of changing (what you would gain) 4. The costs of changing (what changing would require or sacrifice)

The power of this exercise is not in producing a score. It is in making the invisible visible — in forcing the vague, circling internal debate into specific, nameable terms. Most people who have been stuck in ambivalence for a long time have never actually written these four columns out. They have felt them, vaguely and repeatedly, but they have not seen them, all together, in a form that can be examined.

When you do write them, something often shifts. The costs of the current behavior, which have been diffuse and easy to minimize, become specific. The benefits of change, which have been abstract, become concrete. And the costs of change — which the status quo voice has been protecting you from fully reckoning — become visible in a way that allows them to be planned for rather than simply feared.

The Values Card Sort: What Actually Matters

Another practice that helps resolve ambivalence is clarifying your values — not in the abstract, but in ranked, specific terms. What matters most to you? Health? Family? Integrity? Freedom? Connection? Achievement? Peace?

The exercise is not to identify the "right" values but to see, honestly, where the current behavior sits in relation to what you say you care about most. Often, the resolution of ambivalence comes not from a new argument but from a clearer view of the gap between the behavior and the values — a gap that, once seen clearly, becomes difficult to live with indefinitely.

This is not a guilt exercise. It is a clarity exercise. The point is not to feel bad about the gap. It is to let the values themselves do the motivating — which they do, reliably, once they are genuinely in view.

Tipping the Decisional Balance

The decisional balance does not tip because one column has more entries than another. It tips when the weight of the values-aligned reasons for change begins to outweigh, in the person's own felt experience, the weight of the reasons to stay. This is a felt shift, not a logical one, and it cannot be forced — but it can be cultivated, by repeatedly bringing the values and the specific, personal reasons for change into focus.

Practically: spend more time articulating your change talk than your sustain talk. Revisit the decisional balance when the ambivalence spikes. Remind yourself, in your own words, of the specific future you are moving toward, not just the present you are moving away from. Over time, the balance tips — not because you bullied it, but because you gave the part of you that wants change enough attention and specificity to become the stronger voice.

The Role of Small Experiments

One of the reasons ambivalence persists is that the change being considered feels enormous and irreversible. "Quitting drinking forever" is a prospect large enough to generate overwhelming ambivalence in almost anyone. "Not drinking for the next thirty days, and then deciding" is a much smaller, more tractable proposition — and it allows the person to gather real data about what change actually feels like, rather than relying on imagination, which tends to catastrophize.

Small, time-limited experiments are one of the most powerful tools for resolving ambivalence, because they convert the hypothetical question ("What would it be like if I changed?") into an empirical one ("What is it actually like, now that I'm trying?"). The data gathered from a real, lived experiment is far more persuasive than any amount of internal argument — and it often surprises, in both directions. Some people discover, upon trying, that change is more bearable than they imagined. Others discover that the need the behavior was meeting is more urgent than they knew, and that real change will require addressing that need first. Both discoveries are progress.

When the Decision Arrives

There is a moment, if the work of these practices is done, when the decision arrives — and it arrives, characteristically, not as a dramatic event but as a settling. The ambivalence does not vanish. But it shifts from being the central, consuming question to being a background noise that the person has learned to live with while moving in the direction they have chosen.

This is the moment action becomes possible — and it is the moment the next chapter addresses. But it is worth noting, before we get there, that the arrival of this moment cannot be forced or scheduled. It comes from the accumulated weight of honest self-examination, of values clarified, of small experiments tried, and of change talk given room to speak. It comes, in other words, from doing the work of ambivalence rather than trying to skip past it.

If there is a single idea that has caused more failed attempts at change than any other, it is the belief that change is fundamentally a matter of willpower — that the people who succeed in changing are the ones who simply want it more, try harder, and refuse to give in, while the people who fail are weak, undisciplined, or insufficiently committed.

This idea is not merely unhelpful. It is empirically wrong, it is psychologically destructive, and understanding why it is wrong is one of the most important things any person trying to change can learn.

What Willpower Actually Is — and Isn't

Willpower, in the sense most people use the word, refers to the deliberate, effortful suppression of an impulse in service of a goal. It is the white-knuckled refusal of the drink, the forced march to the gym, the grim clamping-down on the urge to text the ex.

The first thing to understand about willpower is that it is real. You can, through deliberate effort, override an impulse in the moment. The second thing to understand — and this is the part the myth leaves out — is that willpower is a finite, depletable resource. The research on this is extensive and consistent: the capacity for effortful self-control is diminished by use, by stress, by fatigue, by hunger, by emotional distress, and by the sheer number of decisions a person has made in a day.

This means that a change strategy based on willpower is a strategy that works only when conditions are favorable — when you are rested, fed, unstressed, and not overwhelmed. And it is precisely during the difficult moments — the moments when the impulse is strongest and the need for change is most acute — that willpower is least available. The strategy fails exactly when it is needed most.

Why Force Strengthens the Resistance

There is a second, deeper problem with the willpower approach. When you try to force change by suppressing the status quo voice, that voice does not go away. It goes underground, gathers strength, and returns — often with greater intensity — at the next moment of vulnerability.

This is not a moral failing. It is a predictable feature of how the psyche works. A need that is suppressed rather than met does not dissolve; it intensifies. The person who tries to quit drinking through sheer willpower, without ever understanding what the drinking was doing for them, is attempting to remove a coping mechanism without replacing the function it served. The need remains. And the longer the suppression continues, the more pressure builds behind it, until it overwhelms the willpower that was holding it in place.

This is the anatomy of most relapses. Not a sudden failure of character, but the predictable collapse of a strategy that was never going to be sustainable — because it asked a finite resource to do infinite work, and because it treated a real need as if it were merely an impulse to be overridden.

Curiosity as the Alternative

If willpower is the strategy of fighting the impulse, curiosity is the strategy of understanding it. Where willpower asks "How do I stop this?", curiosity asks "What is this for?"

The person who approaches their drinking with curiosity — rather than condemnation — begins to notice patterns: that the urge spikes after a particular kind of stressful interaction, that the drink is reaching for a particular kind of relief, that the need underneath it is specific and nameable. Having noticed this, they are no longer fighting a nameless impulse. They are working with a known need — and a known need can be met in ways that an unnamed impulse cannot.

Curiosity is not a replacement for the discipline of change. It is the foundation that makes sustainable change possible. The discipline that rests on curiosity — "I understand this urge, I know what it wants, and I have another way to meet that need" — is a discipline that can hold under pressure, because it is not asking willpower to do the whole job alone.

Building the Skills That Replace Willpower

Sustainable change, then, is less about increasing willpower and more about reducing the demands placed on it. This happens through several concrete practices:

Meeting the underlying need differently. If the drinking was managing social anxiety, what else could manage it? If the avoidance was protecting against the fear of failure, what would reduce that fear? Change that addresses the function of the old behavior, not just the behavior itself, rests on something sturdier than willpower.

Changing the environment. Willpower is most needed in environments that constantly trigger the impulse. Removing triggers — the bottle in the cabinet, the app on the phone, the route past the bar — reduces the number of moments that require willpower in the first place. A person with fewer triggers needs less willpower to maintain change.

Building the behavior before the crisis. Change is hardest in moments of acute temptation. The practices that sustain change — the alternative coping skills, the support calls, the routine substitutions — need to be built and practiced during easier periods, so that they are available and familiar when the difficult moments arrive.

Accepting the urge rather than fighting it. One of the most evidence-based approaches to managing impulses, drawn from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, is not to suppress the urge but to let it be present — to notice it, name it, and allow it to pass without acting on it, while keeping attention on the valued direction. Urges, it turns out, are like waves: they rise, peak, and subside. Fighting them extends them. Allowing them, while choosing a different action, lets them pass.

The Freedom on the Other Side of the Myth

The most damaging effect of the willpower myth is the shame it produces. The person who has tried to change through willpower and failed concludes, naturally, that the failure is personal — that they are weak, lacking, somehow deficient in the one quality that change supposedly requires. Understanding that willpower was never going to be enough — that no one, however strong, sustains change through force alone — releases that shame and replaces it with a more accurate, more compassionate, and more effective understanding of what change actually requires.

You do not need more willpower. You need a strategy that does not depend on it.

There is a particular moment that catches almost everyone who has successfully begun to change. It comes weeks, months, sometimes years into the new pattern — long after the change has become familiar, long after the crisis that prompted it has faded, long after the person has begun to think of themselves, with some relief, as someone who has changed.

In that moment, quietly, without obvious provocation, the old ambivalence returns.

Not the old behavior, necessarily. The ambivalence — the old feeling of being pulled in two directions, the old sense that the change has cost something real, the old voice whispering that the status quo was not so bad and the change is not so worth it. It returns because it was never fully gone. It was managed, held at bay by the work of the preceding stages, but the needs and the losses that fueled it were real, and reality has a way of reminding us of what we have set down.

This chapter is about that return — and about why understanding it as a normal, predictable feature of sustained change, rather than as evidence of failure, is what makes the difference between a change that holds and one that does not.

Why Ambivalence Returns

Ambivalence returns for predictable reasons. Stress is the most common: under pressure, the brain reaches for the most familiar, most practiced coping pattern, and if the old behavior was that pattern, the pull toward it will strengthen precisely when life is hardest. Loss and grief can trigger it — the realization, sometimes delayed, of what the old behavior provided that the new life does not. Familiar environments and relationships can trigger it — the old friends, the old places, the old contexts in which the old pattern was the norm.

And sometimes ambivalence returns for no clear reason at all — simply because the change, however beneficial, is also a loss, and loss is not a feeling that resolves once and for all. It surfaces in waves, throughout a life, and the person who has changed a significant pattern will feel those waves for as long as they live.

This is not a flaw in the change. It is the nature of change. And the person who expects it — who knows, in advance, that the ambivalence will come back and who has a plan for meeting it — is the person who sustains the change through the waves.

The Difference Between a Wave and a Relapse

One of the most important skills of maintenance is learning to distinguish between a wave of ambivalence and an actual relapse. A wave is a feeling — the pull, the longing, the momentary wish that things could be as they were. A relapse is a behavior — the actual return to the old pattern.

The wave does not cause the relapse. What causes the relapse is the interpretation of the wave. The person who experiences the wave and concludes "This means I haven't really changed, the change didn't take, it was all an illusion" has, in that interpretation, already begun the slide back. The person who experiences the same wave and concludes "Of course I feel this — I gave up something real, and I miss it sometimes. That is normal. It does not change my decision" has kept the change intact.

The feeling is the same. The interpretation is different. And the interpretation is where the work of maintenance is done.

The Maintenance Toolkit

Sustained change rests on a set of practices that are built during the earlier stages and maintained, deliberately, throughout the long quiet period of maintenance:

Continued connection to the reasons for change. The values that motivated the change do not disappear, but they can fade from view if not revisited. Periodically — not constantly, but regularly — remind yourself, in your own words, of why you changed. Keep the change talk alive.

Maintenance of the supports. The people, the practices, the structures that supported the change during the action stage remain important during maintenance, even if they are needed less frequently. A support group attended monthly instead of weekly. A therapist seen occasionally instead of regularly. A routine that has become habitual but that still needs occasional attention to stay solid.

Awareness of high-risk situations. Certain situations — stress, loss, particular relationships, particular emotional states — will reliably intensify ambivalence. Knowing your own high-risk situations, and having a specific plan for each, means that when the wave comes, you are not improvising. You are executing a plan you made when you were thinking clearly.

Self-compassion in the difficult moments. The harshest internal voice is often the greatest threat to sustained change. The person who meets a moment of intense ambivalence with self-attack — "I should be past this by now" — adds shame to an already difficult moment and makes relapse more likely. The person who meets it with compassion — "This is hard, and it makes sense that it's hard, and I have gotten through hard moments before" — keeps the door to the change open.

When Maintenance Becomes Stagnation

There is a subtler risk to maintenance: the change can become so habitual, so automatic, that it loses its connection to the values that motivated it. The person who stopped drinking becomes someone who simply does not drink — and the meaning of that choice, the freedom it represents, the relationships it protected, fades into the background of a life that has, in many ways, moved on.

This is not a failure. It is, in a sense, a success — the change has become integrated, normal, part of who the person now is. But it carries a risk: when the connection to the original motivation fades, the change becomes more vulnerable to the return of ambivalence, because the person has forgotten, in a lived sense, why the change mattered.

Periodically reconnecting with the meaning of the change — not obsessively, but as a form of maintenance — keeps the foundation solid. The change is not just a behavior you no longer do. It is a choice you keep making, in service of values that still matter.

A Life of Working With Ambivalence

The deepest lesson of this guide is that ambivalence is not a problem to be solved once and for all. It is a companion — sometimes quiet, sometimes loud — that travels with anyone who has chosen to live differently than they once did. The goal is not to eliminate it. The goal is to develop a relationship with it that allows you to keep moving, with it, in the direction you have chosen.

The person who has done this work — who has understood their ambivalence, resolved it through honest self-examination rather than force, built a change that rests on something deeper than willpower, and learned to meet the returning waves with compassion and a plan — is not a person without ambivalence. They are a person who no longer fears it. And that, more than any single behavior changed, is what the work of behavior change is ultimately for.

— Dr. David K. Lubega, LICSW, LCSW-C