Inner Conflict: What Happens When You Silence Half of Yourself

What if I told you that every case of depression, anxiety, or compulsive behavior I’ve treated in 30 years has one thing in common? Not trauma. Not brain chemistry. Something simpler — and harder to see.

In every case, the person was at war with a part of themselves, causing inner conflict. One side was running their life. The other side had been banished.

Tell me your problem and I’ll show you your inner conflict, for therein lies the problem. One side of the conflict dominates, the other is repressed, and that prevents a resolution. Underlying conflicts are the cause of many of our mental health issues, especially when we aren’t aware of them or avoid them.

Carl Jung called this “the tension of opposites.” And he believed the single most important skill for mental health was learning to hold that tension — rather than silencing half of who you are.

My name is Gary Trosclair, psychotherapist, Jungian psychoanalyst and author of the healthy compulsive project book, blog and podcast. Today I’m going to walk you through how our conflicts lead to many of our problems, give you examples of how they cause them, and tell you how to deal with them. I’ll also talk about how our failure to consciously prioritize values makes us vulnerable to these conflicts.

Ignoring One Side of the Inner Conflict

One of the adaptive things about humans is that we can have two opposing feelings at the same time and ignore one of them.

One of the maladaptive things about humans is that that we can have two opposing feelings at the same time and ignore one of them.

So you may not be aware that you’ve got a conflict soaking up energy inside.

It may be expedient or calming to ignore one side for a short period, but practiced regularly, it’s an inner version of conflict avoidance. And in the long run it’s self-defeating.

Once you notice your central conflict, a lot of things start to make more sense. And then you can make more conscious decisions about how to handle the conflicts.

So let’s dive into some short examples, starting with the relationship between depression and conflicts.

Some Inner Conflicts Underlying Depression

Let’s talk about Ignatius. The once ambitious architect is now burnt-out and depressed. The issue isn’t just that he’s lost interest in things he used to be interested in, gets irritable, has low energy, has gained weight and can’t sleep. Those are just his symptoms. Medication might even help with some of those symptoms. But the deeper issue is a far-reaching conflict between his ambitions and his body.

He could have lots of conflicts that contribute to his depression, but let’s take just this one. His body is unhappy with how he’s been living and has gone on strike against management (the executive ego and its ambitions). Management has been running the show with long hours, unreasonable standards and a dearth of joyous endeavors.

So he overheated. And there was a method to his sadness.

The body says, “I can’t go on like this anymore.” But until he had to take medical leave, Ignatius ignored it. And then his body ignored the consequences of using a depression to go on strike.

And then there’s Constance, whose conflict is related, but slightly different. She feels she should be more capable than she is. Part of her rages about her deficits. And part of her just gives up.

Like most people, Constance identifies with one side and silences the other. Either “I should be able to,” or “I can’t.” Either conclusion is a downer, because she either fails to acknowledge the extreme difficulty of the task she’s set for herself, or she loses the energy to persist.

So, when we say, “I’m depressed,” we’re really only describing half the story. To know the whole story, we have to ask, “Who’s locked in the attic?”

If we don’t acknowledge both sides of the conflict, it’s like watching a play missing a major character. Imagine Romeo and Juliet without Juliet. It just doesn’t make sense.

Not only do we need to find Juliet, we also need to understand the meaning of her part in the story, and why she got run out of town.

Banishing Sadness

Let me tell you a story about this. Riley is an 11-year-old girl whose family moves from Minnesota to San Francisco. She’s not happy about any of this and her mean-girl classmates don’t make it any easier. But her identity is upbeat, can-do, and strong, so in order not to let herself or her parents down, she puts on a happy face and tries to ignore her distress.

This sets up a conflict between the “Joy” part of her and the “Sadness” part of her. Joy decides it’s going to win the conflict and tries to banish the “Sadness” part. Riley refuses to tell her parents what she’s going through. And worse, she refuses to admit to herself what she’s going through.

When Joy tries to deport Sadness, Riley gets disconnected from her family and from her own feelings, and things really go south.  Actually, she tries to take a bus north. And then she realizes this is crazy.

She realizes that Sadness is an important part of her. It helps her to understand herself and helps others understand what she’s going through. Trying to resolve the inner conflict between Joy and Sadness requires that both take part in the plan.

Yes, this is the story of the film Inside Out.

But conflicts don’t cause only depression. I’m using depression here to make a larger point: many of our problems are caused by inner conflicts, conflicts in which we only recognize one side, the side that management (the executive ego) favors, and we try to banish the other.

All of these problems may be difficult to untangle because there seem to be multiple conflicts. But once we do identify the conflicts, we find core themes among them, and then we have a better way to work with them. Otherwise, we’re up a bleak without a paddle.

The Ubiquity of Inner Conflicts and Basic Conflicts

We all have a few of these conflicts. Some of us have just one. These are recurring patterns, the themes which define our lives. Life requires ongoing effort to maintain balance, as if we live on a highwire. Sometimes we fail to balance and we fall off.

While it may appear that we have many highwires to navigate, it usually comes down to one or two. We need to find the common denominators in the various highwires to see what our fundamental conflicts are. This can save a lot of trouble.

Wellbeing requires us to look beneath the superficial level of problems for our deepest, fundamental areas of conflict. Here are some basic inner conflicts, with variations, that many of us experience:

• Safety Vs. Mastery

 ° Comfort Vs. Achievement

° Stasis Vs. Awareness and Growth

• Connection Vs. Identity

° How I Look Vs. How I Feel

° Community Vs. Independence

• Integrity Vs. Ambition

° Over-conscientiousness Vs. Reality

•Virtue Vs. Happiness

Limitations Vs. Freedom

The Core Conflict of Cynthia’s Anxiety

To understand how to get down to a deeper level, let’s look at how Cynthia experiences her anxiety. She loves the comfort zone of her living room couch and watching endless episodes of How I Met Your Mother, but she also craves the adventure of new experiences like surfing. She longs for the security of a relationship, but also likes the freedom of the single life. She wants everyone to like her, but she also wants to be able to speak her mind when she hears an idea that smells like a geriatric billy goat before its bath.

Just the thought of these conflicts makes her anxious. “What if I get it wrong? I’d never forgive myself and I’d never try anything again!”  She usually tries to lock up the part of her that wants more adventure, freedom and authenticity, but it keeps banging on her door like someone that’s been locked away in a closet and is terrified they’ve been forgotten.

Extract the essence of each of these, put them together, and you see her very basic conflict: safety or fulfillment. Once she sees the basic conflict underlying it all, she knows what she needs to do.

Hers is a very common conflict, to be sure, the basic tale of the hero or heroine, but it’s not the only conflict that affects us.

Psychotherapy and Inner Conflicts

We can shed some light on this issue by looking at how therapy works and doesn’t work.

Good therapy helps us to identify the basic patterns of our thoughts, feelings and behavior so we can make conscious decisions about how to live. It’s not about telling you whether your friend crossed a boundary, whether to go to Yale or Harvard (go to Yale BTW, the pizza is better in New Haven), or whether to dump the casserole you worked so hard on onto your husband’s unappreciative head.

To give advice like that cheats you of the challenge and gratification of learning to make your own decisions, and of summoning the nerve to carry them out. It bypasses the opportunity to bring the conflict into view so that you can not only get to know yourself better, but to also make your own decisions.

Besides, it inflates the therapist’s ego for them to think that they have the answers. And you should never do that. It only encourages them.

The real job of the therapist is to bring the patient’s central conflicts out of the dark and into the light. Often this means shining a light on the part of the conflict that’s being avoided or abandoned.

Core Conflictual Relationship Themes

This is why therapists often look for their patient’s Core Conflictual Relationship Theme (CCRT). The CCRT is the patient’s primary pattern of relating. Therapy aims to learn if and how it gets in the way of meeting emotional needs. These themes are characterized by three steps:

1. We have a wish (e.g. love).
2. We experience a fear of how others will react to it if we pursue the wish (e.g. rejection).
3. We develop a strategy for handling those consequences (e.g. avoidance).

 

Some examples include:

• I want to be able to rely on someone else, but they will inevitably let me down, so I won’t let myself depend on others at all.

• I want to be seen and known, but am afraid to because others will shame me, so I hide.

• I want to be true to myself but am afraid of losing connections if I do, so I adopt a persona that’s much different from who I really am.

• I want to have sex but I’m afraid something bad will happen, so I make myself look really frumpy.

• I want to tell Frankie to go get fucked but I’m afraid he’ll push back harder, so I placate him.

• I feel that others should always meet my needs but they usually don’t, so I just rehearse my rage inside.

• I want to feel good about myself but I still fear my mother will put me down if I do since I’m not supposed to be “big,” so I don’t apply for promotions.

It helps all of us to know our central relationship conflicts. One of the reasons therapists have focused on CCRTs is that since you have a relationship with your therapist, you can use that to work on your central conflict, in real time.

This preference for focusing on relationships in therapy is also based on an extraverted assumption, that people are the main thing that matters when you get down to the deepest levels.

Other, Neglected, Conflictual Themes

But there are other issues that matter to some of us just as much as relationships, which are not always valued in the Core Conflictual Relationship Theme approach to therapy. Notice that the second part of the model is seeing how others respond. That assumes the primacy of other people.

For instance, one common internal conflict which is unrelated to others is the one between perfectionism and peace. “My mind keeps yelling at me to be perfect but my body screams out for peace.” Therapists often need to advocate for the body as the forgotten stepchild, but also need to realize the value that healthy perfectionism has for the patient.

Here are some other common inner conflicts:

• The need to engage with Nature versus a need for efficiency. I think it’s a waste of time to go for a hike.

• Security or Comfort versus FOMO (fear of missing out on opportunities). I do things don’t want to do because I don’t want to miss out on something everyone else does.

• The desire for pleasure (delicious food etc.) versus the desire for wellbeing. I either indulge big time or neglect everything else to go to the gym every day.

• The ambition to improve physical capabilities (running speed, number of touchdowns, number of quadruple axels,) versus the effects on the body. I keep letting my ambitions get the best of me and I injure myself.

Common Inner Conflicts in the Compulsive Personality

The obsessive-compulsive personality has some related, non-relational, conflicts that are have a big impact. If these are not recognized in therapy, some people with OCP will find the treatment as dreary as a lecture on tire size for agricultural tractors. Their particular conflicts may not be identified, or the therapist may side with only one part of the conflict, not realizing the importance to the patient of the other side.

Here are some other conflicts common to people with OCP. See if any of them resonate with you:

• Your need for mastery (overcoming challenges) conflicts with a fear of experiencing severe disappointment in yourself for not succeeding (need for control).

• You want to succeed (mastery) but you can only do it in an absolutely ethical way (over-conscientiousness).

• You only feel good when you’re productive, but you can’t tolerate making things that aren’t perfect (need for order).

• Your desire for Peace of Mind (order and resolution) conflicts with a need to prove your value and goodness to yourself (virtue).

• You feel compelled to express yourself freely but that feels chaotic and as if it could bring down the world of order you’ve created in your life.

• You want to finish a painting, but you feel a responsibility to spend time with your family.

• You want to save money, but you need to spend money to make your living room feel perfect.

• You feel a responsibility to get other people to behave reasonably and ethically, but you don’t want to have unrealistic expectations or become too domineering.

Odysseus Avoids His Conflicts, Until He Can’t

Since Odysseus is back in theatres again, featured in his namesake film, “The Odyssey,” we’ll use him as an example.

The great warrior and brilliant tactician goes to war. Though his side wins, it’s cold comfort because the side effects are devastating to him. He and his comrades had to break Zeus’s laws in order to prevail and, as a result, civilization as he knew it no longer exists. The rules are gone.

Mastery has trumped conscientiousness. He’s failed to resolve Conflict One.

Realizing that things have changed dramatically, part of him doesn’t want to go home. Things will never be the same. Chaos will prevail. And those things will be most clear when he gets back to Ithaca, his wife and his son.

Problem is, he can’t admit his reluctance to go home to himself. Instead, he avoids it all by taking a risky route home, not paying tribute to the gods, hooking up with seductress Calypso and her mind-numbing lotus leaves, and generally putting off reality until the alarms in his head are too loud for him to keep lying around like he’s on his first summer vacation in decades.

For someone so smart and talented, it’s taking him an awfully long time to get home. Ten years for a skilled warrior? A clever dog could have done it in 6 months. Ya think maybe, just maybe, he’s ambivalent about getting home? “Ambi-valent” means there is value on both sides. But he only acknowledges one side, thinking he wants to go home when he’s really dreads it.

He unconsciously votes with his feet. He fails at resolving Conflict Two. His need to believe that there will be order trumps his desire to re-unite with his family.

So, his conflict is that he both wants to go home to his wife, son and city, but he also doesn’t want to face the feeling that it will never measure up to what it was before.

Calypso eventually points out his ambivalence and tells him he’s got to give up control and cast his fate to the winds. He ties himself to a raft and drifts out to sea.

The rest is him facing the music, and it’s not Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World.” He finally acknowledges what’s been lost but remains true to his ideals. He finally sees the conflict and manages it.

He could have saved the lives of his soldiers and lots of grief if he had simply called his therapist, acknowledged his conflict, and found a better way to handle it rather than faffing around for ten years.

Have you ever done anything like that?

Models and Strategies for Handling Inner Conflict

Research confirms that how we handle conflict has a huge impact on our wellbeing. The return on investment for dealing with conflicts consciously is up there with investing in Apple stock in the early 80’s.

Clarify Values in Advance

The first step is to clarify and list your values. I mean it and this means you. Write down, in order, the 5 or 10 things that are most important. Learning? Safety? Ice Hockey? Family? Health? Virtue? Peace of Mind? Generosity?

This is essential so that you can make conscious decisions about how to handle conflicts in advance. And then you can make them more quickly when they come up.

Research also tells us that unresolved ambivalence (e.g. not making a list of priorities) is predictive of poor outcomes in therapy and the duration and intensity of symptoms. See? I told you!

Sometimes it’s wise to make some decisions on a case-by-case basis, but then you may have to choose under pressure, your urgency complex gets triggered, and you tend to default to your comfort positions. Better safe than sorry serves as the excuse for rapid decisions and a sequestered existence. Comfort decisions are often black and white, right and wrong, and absolutist rather than nuanced because we don’t like tolerating the discomfort of conflict.

But, if you’re trying to get sober, you don’t stop and ponder whether it would be good to use cocaine in this particular circumstance whenever it comes up. You know in advance that it’s never a good idea to get trashed.

If I decide in advance that self-expression is more important to me than reputation, I don’t have to torment myself with doubts every time I press “Publish.” While reputation is important in my field, authentic self-expression is higher in my list of values.

Here are some similar types of issues you can choose in advance:

• I choose to be happy rather than resentful.

• I choose to be in the present rather than worry about the past or future.

• I choose to be gracious rather than prove that I’m right.

• I choose to focus on what’s in my control rather than what isn’t.

This requires knowing what your values and priorities are. I highly recommend my post [episode 42] about this entitled: OCPD, A Disorder of Priorities.

But the choices are not always so clear. Which leads us back to Carl Jung.

Hold the Tension of the Opposites

Carl Jung, the pioneering Swiss psychiatrist working in the first half of the 20^th century, was definitely on to this. One of his favorite phrases and primary treatment tools, was “Hold the tension of the opposites.” This means:

• Respecting both sides of the conflict.

• Balancing active and receptive elements in us.

• Honoring both conscious and unconscious aspects of the psyche.

• Balancing our time in the outer world with time alone to go inside and reflect.

• Aiming for virtue but also respecting the power of our dark side.

Being able to hold two sides together in itself can contribute to a healthy sense of mastery.

But holding the tension of the opposites may feel messy to those of us who like order, having things resolved, having moral clarity, and predicting outcomes. Those coping strategies all have benefits, but they have limitations as well since they make it hard to hold the tension of the opposites.

Imagine paddling on just the left side of a canoe. You ain’t goin’ nowhere but in circles.

Jung drew on both western and eastern data as his evidence base, his point being that these stories and symbols were passed down for millennia because they provided essential guidance for us. Stories have evolved and been told again and again for thousands of years just so that we can get it through our thick, one-sided heads that we need balance to be well.

Persephone Holds the Tension

Our best western example of this is Persephone, the Greek goddess who was gathering flowers when she was abducted into the underworld. Once there, she marries Hades, ruler of the Underworld, known for his association with death, boundaries, rules, law and power. This marriage forces Persephone to acknowledge what we consider to be the dark side of the world; it’s not all just picking daisies.

She ended up living half the time in the Overworld and half the time in the Underworld, representing her holding the tension of the opposites, innocence and knowledge. Persephone is both Maiden of Spring and Queen of the Dead, which is pretty impressive.

Talk about being an influencer! Everything bloomed when she came to the Overworld and died when she went back to the Underworld.  And she didn’t even have a Tik-Tok account!

It took me a long time to really appreciate this story, but I’ve really come to like it because it helps us correct our negative assumptions about Hades, the Underworld and the dark side in general. This story encourages us to be open to the side that we’ve previously written off as helplessly depraved.

Yin and Yang: The Opposites They Move

About the same time Persephone was born, but on the other side of the globe, the Chinese were working on another way of illustrating the same concept. Achieving a balance of dark and light, earth and heaven, receptive and active was also all the rage there. It was known as Taoism.

Eventually their cracker-jack graphic artists came up a symbol to help us remember not to be so rigid. You’ve probably seen this [Toaist Yin Yang] symbol before. There’s a reason it’s been around for thousands of years. It shows us something we need to remember.  It represents the opposites working together in a constant, dynamic movement toward balance. Yin and Yang. Archetypal masculine and archetypal feminine. (Don’t confuse it with men and women. It’s about being active and receptive.)

The Yin-Yang symbol conveys a helpful concept, but there are two things to bear in mind when considering its message about conflict:

1. We should not aim for a perfect and static balance of opposites. It’s always in movement. Trying to get it perfectly balanced is most likely an OCP diversion that will get part of you locked in the attic without a key.

2. We also need to recognize that some things have more value than others. They all need to be considered, not equated. I’ve got my list of values, and some rank higher than others.

 

Get to Know Your Conflicts Like the Back of Your Hand

In order to improve how you handle conflict, here are some questions to ask yourself:

• How do you usually handle inner conflict? Note your default tendencies when making decisions, and be suspicious of them. If you know that your tendency is to be impulsive, slow down whenever you need to make a decision. If you know that your tendency is to procrastinate, cast fate to the winds and break on though.

• Do your decision tendencies align with your values? Or do they usually shortchange one side of the conflict?

• Can you name the parts of you that are most often in conflict?

• What would your Core Conflictual Relationship Theme be?

• Are your conflicts mostly about other people, or the other people within yourself?

• When thinking and feeling are at odds, which do you usually favor?

• How might your way of handling conflict affect issues like depression, anxiety, work addiction, the need for control and perfectionism?

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Until next time, enjoy the drive.