Two decades have passed, but I still feel nervous when I think of a former boss. One day she nominated me for a service to organization award. She then threatened to fire me for raising a concern about mistreatment of a colleague. “If you ever speak out of character again, I’ll get you fired,” she said. I was careful what she said in her presence until the day she quit.
We often think of relationships on a spectrum from positive to negative. We gravitate towards loving family members, caring classmates, and supportive mentors. We try our best to avoid cruel uncle, playground bully and idiot boss.
But the most toxic relationships are not the purely negative ones. They are the ones who are a mixture of the positive and the negative —so-called friends who sometimes help you, and sometimes hurt you. But they are not just friends. They are the in-laws who offer to take care of your children, but look down on the way you raise them. The manager who praises your work but denies you a promotion.
Everyone knows how relationships like that can make your blood boil. But research by psychologists Bert Uchino and Julianne Holt-Lunstad shows that ambivalent relationships can be detrimental to health. One study found that adults had higher blood pressure after interacting with people who evoked mixed feelings than those who evoked negative feelings.
I had assumed that in the case of a neighbor or a colleague, having a few positive interactions was better than all the negative interactions. But being encouraged by the same person who tripped you doesn’t dampen bad feelings; amplifies them. Even a single ambivalent interaction can take its toll. In one experiment, people gave impromptu speeches on controversial topics in front of a friend who offered feedback.
Unbeknownst to the participants, the researchers had randomly assigned the friend to make ambivalent or negative comments. Receiving mixed feedback caused higher blood pressure than pure criticism. “I would have approached it differently, but you’re doing it right” turned out to be more distressing than “I totally disagree with everything you’ve said.”
The evidence that ambivalent relationships can hurt us is strong, but the reasons may be harder to read. The most intuitive reason is that ambivalent relationships are unpredictable. With a clear enemy, you raise a shield when you cross paths with him or her. With so-called friends, you never know if Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde is going to show up. Ambivalence short-circuits the parasympathetic nervous system, triggering a fight-or-flight response. It’s unnerving to hope for a hug while preparing for a fight.
Another factor is that unpleasant interactions are more painful in an ambivalent relationship. It’s more annoying to be disappointed sometimes by people you like than to be disappointed all the time by people you don’t like. When someone stabs you in the back, it hurts more if they’ve been nice to you in the front.
Finally, ambivalence is an invitation to rumination. Ambiguous comments cause us anguish, not knowing how to take them and whether the people who make them can be trusted. We brood over our mixed feelings, torn between avoiding these people and holding out hope that they will change.
Although these are the people who hurt us the most, we are much slower to turn our backs on them than on enemies. In our lives, we have about the same number of ambivalent relationships as supportive connections. And it doesn’t seem like we get better with age at handling them.
Early in my career, I invested a great deal of energy in mentoring a student. I thought it was a positive relationship, but he chose a different advisor. When I asked for feedback, I found out that she was looking at the relationship in a different light. On one hand, she appreciated my quick responses and clear guidance. On the other hand, my answers were too directive: I was silencing her voice and leaving no room for her ideas. What I thought was support was actually undermining her autonomy.
It is very rare that we exchange this type of feedback. Sometimes we end up avoiding people who stress us out like this. It is not always a deliberate decision; we put off answers and postpone meals until the relationship fades. Other times, we just tolerate them as they are.
A relationship where you can’t be honest is not a relationship at all. Research shows that we tend to underestimate how open people are to constructive suggestions. Feedback doesn’t always lead to change, but change doesn’t happen without feedback. The goal is to be as sincere as possible in what you say and as careful as possible in how you say it.
I have seen people try to address ambivalence by declaring, “This relationship is not healthy for me.” That’s not nice: it’s often received as “You’re a bad person” when the reality is inevitably more complicated. An ambivalent relationship deserves a more nuanced and precise message: “The mix of good and bad here is not healthy for us.”
Not all relationships can be saved. A few years ago, my former boss contacted me to say that she had enjoyed one of my articles. It seemed too late to tell her how stressful it had been for me to be in constant limbo, not knowing if she would pick me up or kick me to the ground. I wonder if she’ll end up reading about it here—and if she, too, remembers our interactions with mixed feelings.
By: INTELLIGENCE/Adam Grant
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6742982, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-06-02 16:10:09
#friends #dangerous #toxic #enemies