What do we get torn about?

Caitlin (0:02): Have you ever felt torn, experienced that inner struggle of clashing, needs, yearnings and beliefs, not a fight with others, but a fight within yourself? It's confusing, it's painful, it's inner conflict. I'm Caitlin.

Susan (0:24): I'm Susan.

Caitlin (0:25): We are coaches with different areas of expertise and a shared passion for helping everyone understand and navigate torn feelings. Welcome to our podcast, where we share stories, resources and hope around all things inner conflict.

Susan (0:46): The Torn Project is all about inner conflict. But what do we get conflicted about? Our research interviews have suggested some interesting patterns. So are your conflicts the same as other people's? And how can you help other people look at what they get torn about? Today is a conversation between Caitlin and I about just what we get torn about. And I think you'll agree Caitlin that the scope is huge. We can get torn about almost anything.

Caitlin (1:23): Absolutely, I think we want to cover off that we get torn about anything from the small stuff of daily life to the huge kind of character- and life-defining stuff. And I think our conversation today wants to give listeners a sense of the many flavours of inner conflict. And hopefully, by giving you this sense of what we get torn about, you can begin to understand it even more and sort of spot it in your own lives and in other people's lives, and just understand that this is a hugely normal human experience that we're all having.

Susan (2:00): I love that word flavour that's really lovely. And I'm thinking that we have so many flavours from so many sources, talking to friends, talking to family, but also our research trawls, our research interviews are, are real life stories, of which we now have about 120 and of course, our own experiences. I mean, I'm thinking about this before we're doing this podcast, mine have often been about relationships and what career direction to take. And of late, I have to admit that as I get older, my inner conflicts have often been about health and how I want to live my life. What about you, Caitlin?

Caitlin (2:44): Gosh, I feel like all of the flavours under conflict, probably many more I don't know that are still to come. I definitely have one about staying and going and kind of the next leap and the next adventure. I have moved around a lot in my life. I'm not a stranger to change, but that also means I quite frequently revisit that topic, should I should I take this next leap, or should I stay put? And that's been in location. It's been in connection with family and friends. It's been in work moves. So that's a big recurring one for sure.

Susan (3:45): So one of the things that was really interesting when we started looking at the types of conflict we have is that they happen in life at different times. So there are the short term ones, the ones that happen in daily basis. The longer term ones, significant but time limited, changing a job or choosing a relationship. And then, surprisingly, the lifelong ones, the ones that may start in childhood, but whenever they start, they're going to be with you to the greater or lesser extent right the way through to the end of your life.

Caitlin (4:23): And it's worthwhile us going into each of these with a couple of examples, if we begin with the short term, somewhat momentary kind of inner conflict that we experience in the day to day. Common ones we heard in our interviews were, do I exercise today or not? That's a big one. I have a huge to do list, and wouldn't it be useful if I just went straight down to my computer and got to it? Or should I do this early morning exercise? Even though I don't really feel like it, and I know it's good for me. We also heard things like, do I choose this type of food or that type of food? The healthier option, the more delicious treat myself option, and even things like, What should I wear today? But these were always actually symptomatic of deeper inner conflicts, weren't they? Susan, there's something kind of interesting going on, and you unpack even these day to day ones.

Susan (5:25): Yes, we asked our interviewees about daily inner conflicts, almost as a lead in thinking that, you know, we pass over those very quickly, and then we'd start talking about the real stuff. And the daily conflicts turned out many times to be the real stuff, or at least the tip of an inner conflict iceberg around self belief or self care, where your duty lies, where your responsibility lies. So those seemingly trivial ones are actually not trivial at all.

Caitlin (6:00): Yeah, and they are often repeating right over and over again that they're they're happening all the time. So they mount up and become a kind of regular stressor, as well as indicative of a deeper or longer term conflict. And then the next one, the next category, right? Was that longer term, more significant life event, but still time limited. These are things like, should I stay in this job or go and pursue my entrepreneurial dreams? Should I stay or leave a relationship, really intense things that alter the course of our lives.

Susan (6:42): And those may seem time limited, but of course, the impact goes forward into life, the choices we make or the directions we take, and there can be reverberations all the way down our life, of changing the job, Choosing or not choosing the relationship or having a child. Should we have a child or not that dictates the direction of the rest of your life.

Caitlin (7:08): Yeah. These are the inner conflicts that are those sliding door moments. Right? You can imagine that one choice provides an arc to your life that follows one story and another choice would be something totally different. And quite frequently, we can see, you know, a desirable story on either of either side of that coin. And sometimes it's not just one choice in a direction or another direction, but it's many directions pulling you.

Susan (7:39): And then there are the inner conflicts that run lifelong. I can't say they're deeper, but they're more often, they come back. You find yourself doing this again and again. So one of the key ones we found is what you might call the I-Thou conflict. Do I choose myself or do I choose other people?Take that further: Do I do what I want, or do I do what other people want, even if I don't want to? And that's perhaps one of the most painful that we heard about in our real life stories.

Caitlin (8:13): Yeah, and these ones, they really anchor towards our sense of identity or towards our sense of values or beliefs. They say something really significant about who we are and how we are in the world, you know, and grappling with that huge existential question, as we do at different stages of our lives, maybe at one stage of our life, in the I-Thou conflict, we we we choose ourselves, and then we learn that there's really negative repercussions of that, and society judges us and shames us and puts us back in our box. That could be about sexual orientation, it could be about your your beliefs. It could be about how you show up in the world, and then later on, you know, you begin to make yourself small and fit expectations of others and society and culture at large. And then, and then, maybe you realize the ills of that as you turn against yourself, and you try to go back and work out and struggle with how do I choose between myself and and what's expected of me?

Susan (9:26): You used an interesting word there: shame. And what we found a lot was that all of these types of conflict we've mentioned are the ones that draw in the most shame, because they're the most obvious, and if we're struggling with our values, that's one thing. If we're not exercising enough, or we consistently leave a relationship, those are the ones that society is going to judge us most about. And so there's an extra level of pain on top of the conflict we're already experiencing.

Caitlin (9:59): There's one other thing I wanted to bring into this, which is deciphering the whether the conflict really belongs to you or started with you, or if it belongs to or started from another place. Did it potentially arise in your parents or your caregivers? Did it arise in your school or in a system that that you were part of? These identity conflicts quite often have their roots in your past.

Susan (10:48): We also found an interesting distinction between the types of conflict that I guess you could call them deeper ones, the experience is much more internal – conflicts of values, conflicts of beliefs about what one thinks to be right or right for you, the ones you feel are pulling you in different directions. But maybe you can't actually hang them on Job or Love. They're much more almost vague and much more internal.

Caitlin (11:19): It may take a while for you to really get to grips what the conflict is about. It might start out with a sense of unease. It might start out with, there's something not right about this. Just to illustrate with an example, right? You might have somebody who really values family, cares about their family and the relationships within it, and they might begin to notice that one of the relationships within their family just really isn't quite right, not working for them, or there's something off about it, and it may be hard to explain, it may be hard to name in the beginning, but as they move towards it a little bit and explore it a little bit more, they may begin to unpack that, yes, they have a value in family and the relationships they hold, but also that there could be something problematic and not right for them in one of those family relationships, and that they might need to consider options around loosening that connection or even detaching from that connection completely. But it certainly starts out with a bit of "Hmm, something's not right for me here, and I'm not quite sure what it is".

Susan (12:39): The place I see that most is I do a lot of relationship work with my clients, and the idea that you can have really mixed emotions around a relationship which is supposed to be completely positive. So you know, I love you except when I hate you, it's a really common one, and you do love that person, and yet at the same time, you feel very negative about them. So much more vague than the life-linked conflicts are the ones where emotions are at the heart of that and the conflict between different emotions which just don't seem to fit, and yet we feel them both.

Caitlin (13:23): Both and yeah, making space for both of those things to be true, both of those feelings to be true. How about our mental state or our mental perspective, like seeing the world with optimism and hope versus always looking at the problems and having a degree of skepticism or pessimism, that's an interesting one, where your your mental processes, or the lens through which you see.

Susan (13:52): Yes, and I think on that one again, we get society saying that you should be one or the other, and that adds to the pain, but it's far more confusing than that, because we need hope and we need care that we don't end up in trouble. I want to say at this point that there's a really useful way of thinking that we have found over and over again in our work, which is accepting that, you know, there are parts of us that love and parts of us that hate, parts of us that fear, and parts of us that are happy and parts of us that are sad, and to be conflicted between these is very confusing, but actually, most of us have all of them, you know, we say it, or, you know, part of me feels this, or part of me thinks that So in terms of resolution of these more internal conflicts, I think it's useful to remember that there's an 'and' here there's a 'I feel this and I feel that', and that often helps to move to the point of believing that and realizing it.

Caitlin (15:14): We sort of started out saying these types of inner conflicts can creep up on you with a sense of vagueness and a sense of eerie, ooh, something's not right, and how do I deal with that? And I think what we're trying to leave you with in this section is: that's okay. It's totally normal. We all contain multiplicity. We all contain many different colors and shades of gray in our thinking and our thoughts and our feelings and values, and we should approach that with a sense of curiosity and self compassion and understanding that that's what it means to be human. It's not at all unusual.

Susan (15:54): So the next type of conflict that we discovered, and this wasn't a surprise, was it an awful lot of conflict start in the past and then surface in the present. It's always useful question to ask, Well, I'm conflicted about whether to stay in my job, but actually that reminds me that I was conflicted about whether to go to college because both options seemed wonderful and, or maybe my parents were pushing me one way and, and it all comes home to roost, if you like, in the present, when 30 years later you're wondering whether to change jobs or not. So the past has a huge influence on how torn you are and in what ways you are torn?

Caitlin (16:44): Yeah, I think this is we're trying to offer now a lens through which you can analyze and understand the beginnings, some of the sources of your inner conflicts, right? And it applies to any of the inner conflicts that we've talked about any of the categories, right? So those short term do I wear this thing or that thing, or do the exercise or not do the exercise? That could come from the past. You might have seen that in your parents. You might have seen your mother deliberate in front of the mirror, what to wear and how to present herself to the world, and carried that forward, just as you might take a deeper, weightier conflict around to stay or to go, that could, too have its roots in the past

Susan (17:37): And in trauma. Trauma is on my mind at the moment, because a few years ago, I slipped and I fell downstairs, and for nearly a year afterwards, I was conflicted about walking downstairs. I avoided I took lifts, I delayed going downstairs to get something. What am I doing? What am I doing? And then I realized, what am I doing is I'm holding with me the memory of the fall. I mean, not consciously. And that was affecting the conflict I had creating. The conflict I had about whether to choose to walk down the flight of stairs seems trivial.

Caitlin (18:21): There's something else that pops up for me about the past and the sort of cyclical nature of revisiting the past in one of our interviews, it's actually Paul's story. You might hear this in other podcasts. He recognizes that he had a certain nature as a sort of precarious boy, wanting things, looking at the shiny, you know, most exciting thing, and trying to go after that. And then he recalls being punished for that. And you know, in the environment, in the context of his carers, he was told, No, you cannot have the things that you want. And he internalized that and said, Okay, I'm a person with big, big wants, big yearnings, big feelings, but they are not valid, and I shouldn't follow them. I'm not right to want them. And he carried that through, repeated it across many examples, and only really came to unpack this pattern when he realized he was in the wrong relationship and choosing the wrong partner. And perhaps when a partner appeared that he did want, perhaps he would begin to question whether he could, in fact, choose his wantings. And he began to really make the links into his past and choose differently in his present. Was quite an interesting one.

Susan (19:49): You've made such an important point there. Caitlin around being able to change the impact of the past. It's such a trap to say, well, that's. Happened. I know it happened. I remember it. It was real, and therefore I will stay with that pain, and I will let it affect me throughout life. We as coaches have the luxury of seeing our clients be able to change not the past, of course, it happened, but the meaning of the past. So Paul was able to work through his past experiences and act differently as an adult, as I say, we have the luxury of having seen clients do that, and therefore we know it's possible. You don't have to be stuck in the past and allow that to create conflict in you day after day after day.

Susan (20:56): So having talked about the past, unsurprisingly, we found a theme around the future, in particular, fear of the future. Very often when we're torn, we found ourselves frightened of both options, or all options, all directions that we could take, and we focus in on what could go wrong each time and so working out what's going to happen in the future is hugely important, and it's another big category of what we get torn about.

Caitlin (21:33): And one of the images that pops up for me is this idea of like you're at a crossroads, and there are all these different directions that you could take. And it's in many circumstances, not just you traveling down those possible roads, right? So you're imagining the future of all of these possible roads, not just for you, but for any loved ones who will experience the consequences of the direction that you take. It's a huge weight to bear, right? And we cannot predict the future. So try as we might, it is always going to end with some kind of unknown and some kind of taking a leap, you know, which is incredibly scary.

Susan (22:17): The future fear, as you've just said, we don't know what the future is. I think the future fear is informed by the past. I also believe that it can be informed by what other people tell us about a possible future. So the if you like, what do we get torn about? We often get torn about, should we believe others' predictions or not, or should we go with our own instincts?

Caitlin (22:43): I think there's something else here, which is when you're thinking about the future, you're quite often having to rise to the future. You're quite often having to challenge and change yourself in order to reach a possible future. And that's scary, right? We might be scared of stepping into a role in a new job that feels like we're not good enough yet, and we have to actually acquire new skills and challenge ourselves and put ourselves out there and and rise to the occasion, right? I think this is part of it.

Susan (23:28): I totally agree that it's part of it. So far we've been talking about our own conflicts, our own feelings of torn and how we cope with them and how to recognize them. And Caitlin said earlier that very often there's just a vague feeling about how we are torn and and that clarifies over time. But there is another way in which we need to be aware of what we get torn about, and that's when it's other people who are getting torn and they might act confused, or they're talking about one direction, and then they're saying they should do something else. It's really useful for us to be able to spot that in other people, and to call it.

Caitlin (24:11): Yeah, to begin by trying to spot the inner conflict in those around you, who you love and care about and where there's a good basis of trust, so you might be able to just mirror back to them. I'm noticing that you are flitting between this idea and that idea. I'm noticing that something's not quite right for you.

Susan (24:37): They might be worried about the future, or they may be getting torn because something happened in the past that makes them fear that it's going to happen again. And certainly, I've had that with a lot of clients, and I remember a time with one particular client where I didn't spot she was. Grieving her father, and he just died. He had passed away when she was out of the country, and we did a lot of work. She grieved fully, and then she just couldn't get past some fear. And it turned out that her mother had died when she was young, and she hadn't been there for that death either, and I had completely missed that. I hadn't realized that there was an inner conflict under the inner conflict, and her inner conflict was I should have been there, and I'm going to do that again. And how can I go forward having let both my parents down. So a complex situation, but based on the past influencing the present and then leaving her conflicted about the future. I had the opportunity to work with her over time, but it's so important, even when you're talking with a friend, to spot is there an inner conflict in there? Name it, what's on the table for them?

Caitlin (26:03): Yeah, and I'm thinking about your example and wondering whether, as part of her work with you, over time, you would be looking at there are other possibilities for how this can play out in the future, and you do not have to follow that script, but now it's been raised to the to the level of conscious awareness. It's been discussed. She can look at it. She can see it. She can have compassion for herself and understanding there's a possible different future in in any future bereavements for her to play out and to be there for future bereavements with people in their final moments, and maybe that changes her relationship to that inner conflict.

Susan (26:50): What I'm realizing as we talk is that the question we began with, what do we get torn about? It's not just a case of listing out the possibilities. It's the first step in working with the possibilities of getting through the conflict. If we identify, if we name, if we acknowledge, if we appreciate, we've already done a lot to get us changing that conflict, because we put it on the table, and if, as we were just saying, we can then give somebody else the opportunity to talk about it and put it on the table, then that's going to be helpful for them. So yeah, this is not just an identification question. It's a question that will put us on the right path to resolution.

Caitlin (27:40): Beautiful. I love that, Susan. I hope we've given you guys a sense of the different flavours of inner conflict, right, and how, how they can come up in small ways and large, how they can time travel across our lives, how we can feel them in both very obvious and also vague and sort of ambiguous ways.

If you're interested in exploring more, the show notes offer you not only a transcript of the podcast, but also link you to helpful resources on our website, thetornproject.com. Please do also follow us on Instagram @thetornproject for regular stories, resources and hope for all things inner conflict.

The Torn Podcast is created by Susan Quilliam, Caitlin Cockerton and James Knight. Thank you to our podcast producer Finn Kinsella of Flume Creative, to our music composers Michal, Mikolaj and Bolek Błaszczyk, to our team of actors and to all those who have contributed their lived experiences, specialist knowledge and professional support.