Having Mixed Feelings? Why That Might Be A Good Thing, From A Psychologist

You can love and hate a person. You can feel excited and fearful about what you're going to do next. You can hate the suffering from your regular body training regimen and yet feel satisfied. 

Welcome to the world of mixed emotions. Plenty of my clients come to me disliking their feelings—but they're even more distressed by their mixed feelings because they can leave us feeling conflicted, confused, and uncomfortable.

Mixed emotions are, by their very nature, vague and ambiguous. Especially when they involve very different emotions that vary in intensity over time. And if nothing is clear-cut, then people believe they can't trust themselves and don't know what to do next. 

Humans are fundamentally complex creatures, and life only adds to that complexity. Even in more collectivist societies where people have prescribed socially acceptable milestones to hit, there are multiple shades of how we experience and what we feel about those milestones.

At the simplest, mixed feelings are two feelings coexisting with each other, like love and hate. Then, there are feelings that arise as a result of our feelings, aka "meta-emotions."

We can feel sad that someone died, for instance, and yet relieved they're no longer suffering. The burden of worrying and caregiving is gone, and we might judge ourselves for that, thinking we aren't good people or didn't love them enough. Or, we might feel ashamed about our anger because it's a "negative" emotion.

Mostly, you'll have two coexisting feelings, more meta-emotions along with them, and even more nuances and layers that vary depending on what's going on.

If you're stressed out at work too, then that might make you feel incapable of handling things, which ups anxiety. Or if you aren't feeling well in your body, you can feel helpless and despair. What's more, these different layers are not obvious, and they feel like an amorphous mass that clouds our head and body. 

If we can see having mixed feelings as emotional complexity, then that's where the magic happens—because the ability to handle and grow from complexity actually indicates emotional maturity.

Mixed feelings temper each other; instead of being volatile emotional roller coasters of pure emotions, mixed feelings make us even-keeled. In fact, low emotional complexity is a risk factor for1 developing various mental health challenges. Drawing from studies on aging, authors Epel and Blackburn write in The Telomere Effect that mixed emotional states help us avoid dramatic ups and downs and exercise more control over how we feel.

Having mixed feelings means we can see situations from other perspectives, opening new avenues of possibilities. For instance, losing one's job could be an opportunity to create a more fulfilling direction or examine one's priorities and spend more time with the family. A 2016 study of 16 cultures by the University of Waterloo, for instance, found that people living in self-oriented cultures (e.g., U.S., UK, Canada) were less emotionally complex than those living in other-oriented cultures (e.g., Asia and Russia), which emphasizes duty and familial bonds. 

In that same vein, having mixed feelings means you can see from the vantage points of the different parts of you. Different psychological theories describe a person as made up of various parts, from wanting instant gratification to keeping ourselves in check; the suppressed parts that carry the shame and hurt of the past, and those that avoid pain.

Our life experiences mean there are parts of us that have been traumatized, deprived, or abandoned. Then, the different cultural expectations, roles, and ideas we are exposed to shape our different parts. Having mixed feelings, then, tells us the various parts of ourselves have their own needs and wants, and our decisions are a blend of taking care of those parts. 

Moreover, you can't simply have only positive feelings about something positive. Maybe the outcome of your career move is overall positive, but that doesn't mean that the process will be completely positive. You will feel a host of different things—challenged, doubt, reward, joy, anxiety, etc.—you may even feel inspired by a win but fearful of what lies ahead.

The overall journey, which you can see as the Hero's Journey, can be one of many changing mixed emotions rather than emotional smooth-sailing.

The ability to work with mixed feelings helps us to learn and grow. By bravely facing what's going on inside and around us, we understand what leads to the present moment, what this is teaching us, and how we can architect our future.

The ability to make sense of confusing, disparate events in life can help us grow from traumatic events instead of suffering indefinitely from worsening traumatic symptoms. This is because we work to create a coherent narrative to put what happened in context, and stories release oxytocin to help us get closure.

Alongside working with our nervous system, especially with deep breathing and receiving support from safe individuals, we also metaphorically refile the incoherent traumatic memories from our amygdala, neatly into our hypothalamus. 

Therefore, as you practice welcoming emotional complexity, people typically experience more positive emotions than negative ones as they age. Epel and Blackburn say this translates to more enriching daily experiences, and people live longer years with a good quality of life.

Many Type A personalities hate feelings, feelings, feelings. In fact, it's the one thing that repels them from therapy because most of us think it's only about feelings. And as a psychologist, I stand with them. 

Being obsessed about feelings—and overanalyzing them—leads to paralysis. Feelings can be used to justify why we do (or don't do) certain things. Emotions happen as a result of something internal or external to us, and when we ruminate excessively on them, they become stuck. And we become stuck and stop functioning.

We all know the person who said their "feelings" made them do something bad or stupid. But the thing is, they were likely suppressing how they felt by denying it or applying way too much logic. Feelings are like gases: You can compress more and more within a given space before they eventually explode with an outburst.

Essentially, something that leads you to regret, see yourself as less worthy, and have more messes to clean up. So to clarify, that's not what feelings made you do but rather pent-up feelings that you neglected. 

Feelings get a bad rep, but if you want to develop emotional intelligence (EQ), you have to understand and befriend emotions because EQ isn't just about reading and responding to others—it's about reading and responding to ourselves. 

Feelings are essentially data that tell us a lot of things. For instance, we evolved anger to tell us that something is unjust and needs to be changed. Depression tells us to withdraw and conserve our resources to regroup. Anxiety, to step back from an uncertain situation to plan better. Happiness, to repeat an action again.

To begin with, you might benefit from connecting with your feelings in a helpful way, meaning to use them as data. The truth is, we function best when our heads and hearts play a symphony with each other instead of suppressing either one and letting the other dominate. 

When the dorsal vagus nerve is activated, we go into a freeze state and feel numb. Otherwise, neurodiverse people are likelier to have alexithymia, a difficulty in recognizing, expressing, and processing one's emotions. It is useful to figure out when your feelings and you have little or no relationship with each other. 

As you develop fluency in naming your emotions and read about what the basic ones are (anger, sadness, guilt, fear, joy), you can then match them.

Feelings aren't always comfortable, even supposedly positive feelings of happiness and pleasure. Sometimes we wonder what we did to deserve them, wonder when they'll disappear, or sabotage ourselves by doing things that make things worse.

Check in with yourself, what are your main thoughts and feelings about your feelings? In particular, notice how you may judge them and what you do after. 

Figure out which parts of yourself are being activated by the environment. For instance, the company of very noisy people can be overwhelming and make everything feel harder to deal with, or a carbohydrate-laden meal can make you feel sluggish and hopeless. Separate yourself from the situation and go for a short walk. 

You can also ask yourself which emotions are raw replays from the past. Here, deep breathing will help you to teach the timekeeper in your brain that "then is now."

A curious thing I've noticed is that my clients who think in Eastern languages tend to ride their mixed emotions better, and when I think in Chinese, the same thing happens for me.

A part of this may come down to the philosophical notion of the dialectic, where both extremes of a concept are entertained and resolved by taking on parts of each other. So, instead of simply being 100% black or 100% white, it may end up becoming 65% gray.

One of the most surprising things was telling my feelings, "I'll take care of you, I'm in charge now," when I realized they had simply evolved to protect me and sometimes went a bit too far in doing that. I'd always feared that naming how I felt would make me weak or completely inundated by them. How would I function otherwise?