What do people feel torn about?

Inner conflict is what it says on the tin.

Inner: internal aims, ideas, goals, plans, yearnings, fears, deep inside you.

Conflict: difference, disagreement, friction, opposition, contradiction, struggle.

Inner conflict's usually complex – rarely a simple choice between stay or go, love or hate.

Staying may mean disappointing others as well as pleasing yourself. Going may mean having the freedom you’ve longed for but also leaving behind a life you largely love.

Inner conflict is intrinsically painful, or at the very least uncomfortable. Because whatever direction you take there are likely to be gains but also losses, benefits but also penalties. If you feel that whichever way you go is irrelevant and that there will be a happy ending, then it isn’t an inner conflict.

But if you’re feeling torn then no possible direction feels completely right for you right now. You need to change something before you’re able to go on. And often you have no idea what to change. Even if you do, you often don't know how.

Which leads us to the important question… what do people get conflicted about?

Our research suggests that the first type of inner conflict shows up as seemingly tiny issues around day to day life – what to wear, what to eat, whether to exercise. For most of us on most occasions these issues are solved in a moment by practical solutions. But sometimes, digging deeper, a conflicted decision about what to wear turns out to be linked to an agonising struggle about the way you look. And an inner squabble about what to eat turns out to reflect a battle between a desire to enjoy the food we like and a desire to stay fit and healthy.

The second kind of inner conflict our research suggested was usually time-limited over months or years, often with serious consequences, and focussed on various life arenas.

Your career, with the need to choose between financial reward and quality of life. Your relationship, when you are facing a conflict between wanting to keep your vows and wanting to escape a toxic marriage. Your family, when you weigh the duty to offer full time care to your elderly father against the huge impact this would have on your own children.

These specific, serious, often time-limited struggles are often triggered by life events and life stages. Offspring leaving home; offspring coming back home; a job loss; a house move; an illness; a bereavement… even seemingly happy events such as a wedding can mean something changes. There’s a sudden shift in the way you see the world, or see yourself, or see those close to you. And suddenly your thoughts and feelings, up to now perfectly aligned, begin to clash

Of course you’ll start a family… but now you’ve got that time-consuming upward career promotion maybe it’s not such a good idea … but if you wait will you miss your chance… but on the other hand… Of course you want to retire, so you can do the things you’ve always wanted to do… but maybe not this year because there's that really interesting project… and you'd miss your friends… but on the other hand…

The final set of inner conflicts our research points up are those which last an entire lifetime. Often, though not always, starting at birth or from very early in life, our authentic self clashes with the world we live in so that our personal values, motivations and passions wage continuing war.

So we are quiet and thoughtful in a culture which values the opposite. We have sexual desires that are forbidden in our society. We value both freedom and safety and the two may be incompatible –as the world discovered in 2020 when the global pandemic struck. Or – and our research has found this issue and its variations at the the core of most lifetime inner conflicts – we are torn between pleasing ourselves and pleasing others, what could be called the “I-Thou” dilemma.

As you read about these very varied inner conflicts, you may recognise them in yourself and in those people you know. If so, it may be interesting for you to ask these questions.