You're listening to the Allender Center podcast with Dr. Dan Allender.

This week, Dan continues wrestling with the category of ambivalence, particularly the ambivalence

many of us feel about engaging the messy hard work of pursuing healing and restoration for our

stories of trauma and abuse. After launching our new Healing the Wounded Heart online course,

we have heard many stories of ambivalence from individuals who want to pursue healing, but are also

aware of the cost of engaging their deepest wounds.

Dan invites us to name that ambivalence, to bless it,

and to ask for the help we need to begin moving toward our desires one inch at a time.

Last week, we began thinking about the issue of ambivalence, and whether or not we have a core stance of being able

to bless what ambivalence brings to our life and to our experience.

The basic assumption that I operate with is that most people do not like that level of tension,

and they work very hard to find a way to escape in many ways the bind of what ambivalence brings.

Let me tell you about a study that was done, a study done by a Dutch researcher at the

University of Amsterdam. And I love the lab that he works with. He works in something

called the Uncertainty Lab, a gentleman by the name of Frank Van Harveld. I certainly can pronounce

it the way a good Dutchman would be able to do.

But what he did was he was trying to do a study on the experience of ambivalence.

And he set up a study in which he told a group of students, divided a group of students in one group, two groups.

And in one group, he told about a new

employment law that was highly controversial. And he simply presented all the negative things this

law would bring into Holland as a result of his passage. A second group, he presented the same information,

but he presented some of the pros and cons to how this law might affect employment in the Netherlands.

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