Why the colleague who confuses you is worse than the one who dislikes you
7/8/20266 min read
A 4 step framework to work with ambivalent relationships at the workplace
The relationship that confuses you is the one doing the most damage
You know which one I'm talking about.
The colleague who texts you memes on the weekend and blanks you in the Monday standup. The manager who champions your promotion in private and forgets to recognize your contribution in the town hall. The person you've worked with for years, shared weekend stories with, maybe even called a friend, who goes quiet for months and then shows up with a gift and a 5-minute conversation like nothing changed.
We've all been taught to watch out for toxic people. The ones who are consistently difficult. Easy to spot. Over time, easy to wall off.
The ones who confuse you are a different animal.
Bert Uchino, a psychologist at the University of Utah, has spent over 20 years studying exactly these relationships. He calls them ambivalent ties: relationships where you get both genuine warmth and genuine distance from the same person.
His lab measured what happens to your body when you're stuck in one. Higher blood pressure across everyday life. Greater inflammation. Faster cellular aging. In a study of older married couples, ambivalent ties predicted greater buildup of calcium in the arteries.
Uchino and his collaborator Julianne Holt-Lunstad found that ambivalent relationships raise your blood pressure more than the relationships you'd call purely negative -- The people you openly dislike.
The frenemy costs you more than the enemy.
They built a formal model around this in 2019, the SAD model (Social Ambivalence and Disease). When someone is consistently negative, your brain files them under threat and builds a wall. You know what you're walking into. But when someone is warm on Tuesday and cold on Thursday, your nervous system cannot settle. You're scanning every interaction, trying to work out which version of this person showed up today. That scanning burns real resources. Day after day. Week after week.
Jessica Methot, a management researcher at Rutgers, dragged this into the workplace. Her 2017 paper in the Journal of Management ("The Space Between Us") looked at what ambivalent and indifferent professional relationships do to people. She noted that we often send warmth and distance in these relationships without knowing we're doing it. You walk into a meeting already braced for the cold version, the other person reads your body language and mirrors it, and both of you feed a loop neither of you can see.
There's a pattern buried inside the confusion.
Harriet Lerner, a clinical psychologist whose work spans decades, named it: the pursuer-distancer dynamic.
When someone you care about starts pulling away, most of us pursue. We send one more message. We check in with a mutual colleague. We ask "is everything okay?" (sometimes more than once).
Lerner's line is blunt.
If you pursue a distancer, they often distance more.
Your pursuit feels like care. It probably is care. But to the other person it lands as pressure. And pressure in an ambivalent relationship pushes the distancer further into their corner.
Her suggestion is as follows.
Stop the pursuit without cutting the connection. Stay warm. Stay available. Stop chasing. The anxiety that floods the gap between reaching out and waiting is the space in which you need to stay grounded. That's where you find out how much of your distress belongs to the relationship and how much belongs to the story you built about it.
This is where Susan David comes in.
David is a psychologist at Harvard Medical School. Her TED talk on emotional courage has been watched over a million times (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDQ1Mi5I4rg). Her research centers on what she calls getting hooked.
A hook is when an emotion or a story takes the wheel. In ambivalent professional relationships, hooks are everywhere. The canceled meeting becomes "she doesn't respect me." The short reply becomes "I've been sidelined." The gift without time becomes "she's performing care without meaning it."
Any of those could be true. But David's point lands somewhere more useful.
Once a hook takes over, you stop choosing your behavior and start reacting. And reacting in ambivalent relationships almost always makes the ambivalence worse.
Her method for unhooking has 4 moves.
Show up.
Face the emotion. Don't bury it under "I'm fine" and don't feed it by rehearsing the grievance for the 40th time in the shower. The feeling is real. Let it be real without letting it drive.
Step out.
Put language between you and the feeling. "I am hurt by this" fuses you to it. "I notice I'm feeling hurt" opens a sliver of space. That sliver is the whole game. It's the difference between being inside the feeling and watching it from a step back.
Walk your why.
Before you send the next message or poll a colleague, ask what you actually want from this relationship. The answer should come from your values, not your anxiety. If you value directness, have the conversation. If you value self-respect, stop pursuing. If you value something else, act in sync with your values. The question is which one you're picking and why.
Move on.
Small recalibrations. A shift in how much weight you hand this person's behavior. A change in what you expect. Maybe the relationship changed and nobody announced it. Maybe your weekly personal catch-up quietly became a monthly transactional check-in. Naming that shift, even just to yourself, shrinks the ambivalence. It gives you solid ground instead of quicksand.
Brene Brown's research adds the last piece. She found that dodging clarity in relationships erodes trust, breeds passive-aggressive behavior (she names the backchannel, the "meeting after the meeting," the "dirty yes"), and drags down performance because shared purpose goes foggy.
Her phrase:
Clear is Kind.
But clarity in an ambivalent relationship can only be offered. You can't make someone receive it or provide it to you.
You can say: "I've noticed our rhythm has changed over the past few months. I want to understand if something's shifted in how we should be working together. The ambiguity is harder for me than a clear change would be."
Clean. It names the pattern without blaming the person. It gives the other person room to say "yes, things have changed" without it becoming a fight.
And if you've said it, and the answer was vague, and the ambivalence rolls on, then you've done the part that was yours. Now you're in Uchino's territory. Protecting your body from the cost of a signal that won't resolve.
I coach senior leaders . Somewhere north of 2,000 hours, 500+ clients, 100+ orgs. One pattern shows up often, across countries and industries and titles. The relationship that confuses you eats several times the mental space of the one that's clearly good or clearly bad. You lose sleep over it. You rehearse conversations in your head. You check with colleagues to confirm you're not imagining it.
And often the confusion is eclipsing something that gets clearer only with distance and a change in perspective. The relationship has changed. The other person may not have the awareness or the language or the nerve to say so. Your job, for your own sanity and your own body, is to stop waiting for a clarity that may never come.
Name the pattern. Check your pursuit. Watch your hooks. Protect your health. And when you've done all 4 and nothing moves on the other side, give yourself permission to file the relationship under its real name and walk on with your energy intact.
Go deeper
Uchino, B.N. & Holt-Lunstad, J. (2019). Social Ambivalence and Disease (SAD). Perspectives on Psychological Science, 14(5)
Uchino, B.N., Smith, T.W. & Berg, C.A. (2014). Spousal Relationship Quality and Cardiovascular Risk. Psychological Science
Holt-Lunstad, J., Uchino, B.N. et al. (2007). The impact of ambivalence in friendships on cardiovascular functioning. Annals of Behavioral Medicine
Methot, J.R., Melwani, S. & Rothman, N.B. (2017). The Space Between Us. Journal of Management, 43(6)
David, S. (2016). Emotional Agility. Avery/Penguin. TED talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDQ1Mi5I4rg
Lerner, H. (2002). The Dance of Connection. William Morrow
Brown, B. (2018). Dare to Lead. Random House
Grant, A. (2023). Your Most Ambivalent Relationships Are the Most Toxic. New York Times
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