Who we are: Introducing The Torn Project Team

Caitlin (0:06): Welcome back to the Torn Podcast. Today, we bring you a different kind of episode as we turn the questions on each other. Your hosts, Caitlin, Susan and James, will be interviewing one another so you can learn a bit more about us, our work, what motivated us in creating the Torn Project and our hopes for what this endeavor might become. 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, I'm Susan, I'm James. 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

Caitlin (1:21): you're going to hear from each of the Torn Project founders in today's episode, and we're beginning with me interviewing Susan, the original creator of this work. Let's dive in. So, Susan, how did you dream up the Torn Project?

Susan (1:41): I like the word dream, because it was a dream. This began in the 2020 lockdown, when everyone was facing daily conflicts, stay indoors, go outside, visit, don't visit. And what it boiled down to was, do we live or do we die? And I suddenly became aware of the inner conflicts that I and everybody else was experiencing. And I thought, right, you know, I'm a psychologist, let's have a look at what there is in the research, in the knowledge. And there was surprisingly little, if you if you went to therapy, yes, there was lots of help. But what about for people who weren't going to therapy, or didn't need therapy, or weren't interested in therapy, and there was nothing? I then realized there was a real need for us to look at inner conflict and see what was there. And maybe the idea grew very gradually, maybe start offering information and support for inner conflict myself.

Caitlin (2:45): Doesn't get more fundamental than that, as an inner conflict to wrestle with. Can you tell me a little bit about how your role has changed since 2020? And what you're up to now in the Torn Project?

Susan (2:59): The main thing that's happened is that I have a team? Well, I don't have a team. We have a team that as I started researching and getting ideas and talking to people, first you and then James said to me, this sounds like something we want to be part of. So all of a sudden, one became three, and everything changed because there was more energy and more ideas and more inspiration from that. My role has not been a freelancer working on my own. It's been somebody who's giving and taking from a team. Everything's got bigger, more challenging, so much learning to be done, and it feels far more that we are a whole and we're doing something which has real promise.

Caitlin (3:45): And what are you up to outside of torn these days? What's What's the shape of your working life?

Susan (3:52): Well, I began being interested in personal development many years ago, but before torn and continuing through my involvement with torn I'm a coach, particularly on relationships, and so I see clients, and I give interviews to the media, and I am what they call in England, an agony aunt, an advice columnist, giving advice on relationships. And I write articles. I write books, all of this is fed back into torn, but also torn feeds back into my work, and it's the perfect fit for me. It's the perfect mission and the perfect professional life.

Caitlin (4:35): Amazing. Tell us a little bit about how you got here, so I want to hear a bit more about your background and how you arrived at this work?

Susan (4:43): Well, my original background began when I failed my end of school exams, which in the UK are called A levels, advanced levels, and I was doing four of them, and for a number of reasons. Yes, I didn't do as well as was hoped, and it took me about three hours to realize that this was a good idea, because my first choice had been law, and my second choice was to go to university to read psychology in English. And after the disappointment of failing my exams, I realized that where my passion was, was for psychology and English. I I'm not sure I'd have been a good lawyer, to be honest with you. And then I moved into teaching, and I discovered the joy of helping people learn. And then I discovered that I could write as well as teach, and it became a whole profession around communication, and I moved into coaching, which is different sort of teaching, and that spread out to broadcasting and using, using every single sort of media to communicate what I know, what I'm learning all the time, to all sorts of people. And then that resulted in a passion for teaching and communicating about inner conflict. So it's been an interesting, very varied professional career. I'm way past retirement age, but in particular, I'm interested in helping people have the best relationships they can and now that manifests itself as helping people resolve in a conflict, that inner relationship, relationship with oneself.

Caitlin (6:26): Yes, you might have already alluded to this, but what's the kind of passion or red thread that has been with you throughout your work and remains today. I

Susan (6:41): think I probably got interested in relationships when I was very young. You know, we're born into a world where we only survive because we have relationships with others. And that particular passion has taken me throughout my life. It informed the studies I did on psychology in English. English is way to communicate. Psychology is a way to understand what you want to communicate. And so yeah, that's a passionate thread that's run through my whole life. If one works with people in coaching and therapy on relationships, one discovers that where people hit problems in relationships, it's where there are conflicts. And what I gradually realized was that all interpersonal relationship conflicts are usually underpinned by usually born from internal conflicts, and that have hugely informed my interest in and my my passion to talk about and communicate about within relationships. So it's like a big jigsaw. Everything comes together.

Caitlin (7:53): Yeah, it certainly does. It's beautiful. Love to hear a little bit more about where you think the Torn Project is going. Where is the future for the Torn Project? What are we hoping to achieve?

Susan (8:06): I do believe that inner conflict is a global all humanity issue, whatever culture you are in, whatever gender you are, whatever belief system you have, whatever values you have. Inner conflict is something that you grapple with. My test, my are we getting there? My passion for the future, for the Torn Project, would be if I went up to anybody in the street and said, in a conflict, what? What do you mean by that? Now I'm not sure whether people could answer, and if they did answer, they'd be like, Oh, you're in a conflict. It's really painful. You know, I feel a bit ashamed if I'm conflicted, I'm torn, I feel I'm torn apart. What I really want is to speak to somebody in the street and say, in a conflict, and they go, oh yeah, yeah, I know about that. It's it's a way of growing it's a way of meeting challenges. As somebody I interviewed on in a conflict once said to me, it's a way of becoming more human, resolving in a conflict. So, so that's the the ultimate goal, but in the near future, I want as many outlets, as many channels of communication out there, to the world, to individual people, to groups of people, which say, if you have an inner conflict, These are ways of resolving it. If you're supporting somebody that has an inner conflict, these are really good ways to help. I'm feeling it. It's hard, but it's also useful. And so everybody is engaging with it and feeling that they can resolve and. And help others resolve.

Caitlin (10:01): I love that, and I love you. Just pointed towards a few different audiences that we have. Maybe you can say a little bit about who our users are and what we hope to share with them and offer them.

Susan (10:16): It's interesting when James and you and I sat down at the start of working together, which is, is the point at which I feel that the Torn Project became realistic and possible. We thought, Okay, who we? Who are we talking to? You know, let's define our market. And probably wasn't as formalized as that, but all of us work as coaches. Were all really, really aware of the fact that we need to be aware of who we're talking to, who we're communicating with, what they need from us. And we found that we've got four very distinct audiences. The first is people are simply curious. You know, what's in a conflict. They may not be suffering from feeling torn, but they're interested the second market, and obviously the one that is going to be arguably in the most pain is those who are going through an inner conflict right now, this minute, that might be a conflict around should they stay in a relationship. Could be a conflict around should they leave their job? Should they have a child or the lifelong ones like, well, all my life, I've been conflicted between, well, do I put myself first, or do I put other people first? Or you might be conflicted about, Do I hang on in this situation, or do I actually leave? Do I walk away? And that's the best thing to do, moving on from people who are torn, who may need the resources we have to offer. We're also talking about people who support those who are torn. We've done a number of interviews. We've done well over 100 interviews with a wide range of people, and a lot of people who are in pain, who want to talk to us about this, are not suffering in a conflict themselves, but they are supporting those who are so a parent whose child is conflicted, whether that child is 12 or 32 people who are supporting a partner. And then moving on to our fourth segment, the professional market, the practitioners who are supporting their clients and who who maybe want to weave in in a conflict theory. Want to weave in the resources we're offering and the insights we're offering, and want to weave that into their professional practice. So the curious, the torn, those supporting the torn, and practitioners working with the torn, and also anybody else who is interested.

Caitlin (13:01): Amazing. I would love to shift to something a little personal. If that's okay with you, what is your most memorable inner conflict and how was it resolved? Or or not resolved?

Susan (13:17): That's a lovely question. I've thought about this a lot, and I have to say that the last years when we've been working on the Torn Project, probably been the most torn of my life. So to begin with, feeling that in a conflict of is this something I want to engage with? It feels huge. Is it possible to do it? And then that was in large part resolved when James and you came on board. But then how are we going to resource it? Is there going to be enough support? Enough Yeah, enough funding, enough support, or do we just walk away now, during the time we've been working on the ton project up to now, I've certainly had personal struggles, and there have been points, particularly around my health, where I thought, no, do I carry on with this? Or do I just let it go? Is it that important that was resolved fairly quickly and easily around? Yeah, it is that important. And if we possibly can carry on, and I can be involved in that, then I should do it. But also, will it work? Will people listen? And although I don't want to predict the future of the Torn Project, more and more people are listening. More and more most weeks, sometimes even on consecutive days, I meet people. They ask what I'm doing. I mention in a conflict. And they go, oh yeah, yes, okay, that's important. And more and more we're getting people to add to that and say, any way I can contribute, which, of course, we always say, yes. So the decisions and the conflicts and the challenges that I've met doing the project is the one that is real for me, but it's also the most memorable, and I could argue, the most important of my life.

Unknown Speaker (15:38): Next up Susan interviews James,

Susan (15:43): So James, we've been working together on the Tom project for years now. Can you remember to how you became involved?

James (15:51): Well, I can, if my memory serves. It was a sunny day in Cambridge when I came to your office to discuss some technical consulting work I could do to help you that started a long term and ever expanding relationship, where we talked about tech things and then realized that we had much more in Common. As that widened, I guess our interests started to converge, didn't they? And you started talking more about this project. I'm not even sure it was a project at that point. And then life really threw up all sorts of huge global examples. The obvious one is people's responses to covid and covid lockdowns, and out of that, the project grew, and I was continuing my tech support work for you with that. But you know, those conversations just got deeper and broader and more engaging, until we realized we were both investing quite heavily into the idea of this. And I think that is how correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that's how the Torn Project went from your project to our project.

Susan (17:18): You're completely right. We started talking, and you helped me develop the ideas. I got so many ideas from you. So when I was wanting to partner with people, I knew Caitlin elsewhere, but when I was starting to partner with people, you were the obvious choice. So tell us a little bit about what you're doing now, in the Torn Project, it's not just tech, is it?

James (17:41): No, it's not just tech. One of the delights of being a small project team on a project that's growing is you can't stay in your silo for very long. Things spill and we are all sounds rather rude, but we're all juggling each other's balls quite a lot of the time. So yes, I think of most of my work as about setting up the tech required to get this off the ground and keep it going and help it expand. But we also have really interesting thinking meetings where the three of us come together, and it's a little bit hard to say precisely what I'm doing there, other than thinking and talking, but the way the three of us work together always leads to much richer outcomes than saying I do tech for the project would lead us to expect.

Susan (18:41): And I want to add that when I said just tech, it was capital letters all the way through. I mean, we you are our tech person. Caitlin knows a lot. I know less, but yeah, you offer thoughtfulness, you offer creativity, you offer insights that the other two of us don't come up with, which is the same. It's the same for all of us. What do you do when you're not tawning, when you're not in a conflicting.

James (19:11): Well, officially, I do technical consultancy work. I also teach and coach embodiment work, which I'll probably come back to in a moment. However, my main identity at the moment is that of being a parent, and parenting, even though, funnily enough, of the two children, one has already left home and the other may soon follow, teenage is a particularly interesting time, and we are doing a lot to support our children out into the world. I rather assumed that things would ease off as they became more independent. That's not, turns out, not automatically the case. So a very main part of my day is about parenting, actually. However, I anticipate that soon enough, as they grow up, I will enter a period of rediscovering and recasting my priorities. Still to be defined ...

Susan (20:11): There's something there for me around we all bring our professional knowledge and we bring our personal commitment, but also we bring our other roles in life. Your being a parent is hugely important to inform what we do. So what about you when you were the age your children are now? Did you go to college? Did you I mean, what do you do in your 20s?

James (20:35): Gosh, I would just like to say to the listeners that question wasn't on the list. Here we go. Buckle up everyone. When I left school, I'm old enough that I took O levels and a levels, and after I finished O levels, I really didn't want to continue. So I wanted to go off and have a year off before continuing a levels. Couldn't do that, so I rather lazed my way through a levels and then took a year off, which was absolutely the right thing to do, as the gods willed it. I ended up in Indonesia for a year teaching English and deeply immersed in Sundanese culture, which is the culture of West Java. By living with a Sundanese family for that year, which exploded my little white, Western middle class brain, I discovered how different the world is and how the best way to understand one's own culture is to go and view it from another culture and see the differences. And I got that experience when I was 18, for which I am forever grateful. Thereafter, back to university, and I had originally intended to read English, and ended up studying Southeast Asia as a whole, because it was such a fascinating part of the world, and I've spent quite a few years on and off living there, since learning more about the cultures there. Fast forward to the time when I met you, which was in Cambridge. I was already doing this technical work.

Susan (22:17): Soon after that, we moved up to the Scottish Highlands, where we have been ever since. We are all in different countries, and it still works brilliantly. Even while we've been talking, I've heard passion come into your voice and enthusiasm. What would you say is your your passion, either in your work or in your life, or even about the Torn Project?

James (22:40): My passion really is how we might all show up in the world, by which I guess I mean how we all contribute, how people can show up as themselves without being too constricted or shaped by daily demands or social pressures. So my ongoing questions are, how do we participate without quieting down the unique parts of ourselves to do so? And on the flip side of that, how might we increase the capacity the tolerance of society to accept those uniquenesses of the individuals. How do I get there? I think I need to say a little bit about some of the other stuff I've done over the years. The main study, which is over 30 years now, so it's kind of a lifetime study, is Aikido, which is most often framed as a Japanese martial art. However, once you've learned the basics, you start realizing you're studying something else, and that something else is in my case, how can we perform at our best with grace and compassion and skill under pressure? Hence, these questions about, How do we live life without falling into the shapes put upon us by society and others expectations.

Susan (24:08): And now we have the top project. What do you like about it and where do you want it to go? You know, Where's where's your energy in it?

James (24:17): When we first started talking about it, you had a little vision, something along the lines of you wanted people in the street to know what's meant by inner conflict. That is very much what I'm interested in, and I think it's really good starting point, making inner conflict a conversation that people can have, something that people understand enough to say. I've heard of that. I think it means this Oh, and for me in my life, this is how it looks individually. Each one of us is the sum of many parts, and those many parts may at any time, have very different opinions about things. Our heart may have different views to our mind is a major storyline in most rom coms. So we're familiar with that idea that mind and heart might pull in different directions. But I strongly have a sense that we are repositories of many different parts, and every different part has a different opinion, a different voice, which, if we can hear that, then perhaps we can start to listen and negotiate with all of those with the possibility of finding a congruent whole being response to whatever challenges we're facing. I want us to reclaim being in two minds about something that's is quite often used to say, Oh, you're uncertain. That's not right. Fix it. Pick a pick a mind and go with that. But actually, we are wonderfully more complex than that, and we should a, celebrate and B, get to know that, and get to know the richness that that makes available by just getting a little bit more fluent in our inner conversations. And in case this is too sounds too introspective, I think it's important to say from my perspective, from my experience, these inner opinions are the source of many, almost all of our externally orientated actions. So when I have difficulties out in the world, it is quite often because I haven't quite resolved how I feel inside. We do need to be single minded in acting in the world in a way that says, I have spoken to and listened to all my parts, and right now, this is the path we're going to follow. It is a richer single mindedness than the single mindedness that pretends there are no other voices, no other opinions inside. So this isn't just completely introspective. It is very much about being out and acting out in the world, but starting by gathering all the rich intelligence and wisdom that we have to take the first step,

Susan (27:14): I so agree. I mean, it's one of the great things about working with you and Caitlin, that we do all have a set of common values, I'm wondering, and there may not be one that comes to mind for you right now. Do you have an inner conflict that you particularly remember?

James (27:30): This was a an intense technical project in a company I was working at, and the project was behind the schedule, and there was a fixed deadline. There deadline. There was an event that we had to be ready for, and we were behind schedule, and we had the three people actually doing the work on the team had just worked 24 hours non stop to meet a new deadline, which was the client coming in to have a meeting, and we were given 24 hours notice that they were coming in, and we need to get the project into this state for that meeting, which we did. Yay. Well done. Us. We were absolutely exhausted, and the three of us went home because we weren't required for the meeting. The following day, we were called into the office seven o'clock in the morning for a meeting which the three of us were absolutely bawled out. And the chief operating officer was the title told us that we would work every hour that we were not sleeping from now till the end of the project. She was a powerful person, and I sat there because I knew I had other this, I think was a Friday. It was a Friday because on Saturday, I had a big event that I was traveling down to and that I was not prepared to miss, and I had to sit with it and say, which is more important? Is it I go to this event and lose my job? Is it that I miss the event and continue the job. How do I speak up? First of all, what is my what is my truth? And then how do I express it? And I took a quick survey of my head and my heart and my gut and my head. Said, stay in the office. Do the work. If she says, You work every hour that you're not asleep, then you work every hour You're not asleep, and if that's the case, you're actually going to sleep in the office. And my heart knew that I couldn't do that and be useful. My heart knew that if you want the wholeness of James, then you have to let James breathe and sleep and see his then new girlfriend and go to this event. There are more things in my life than your demand that I finish the project. And my gut went solid and just went, now's the time James. And so I said, No, I'm not going to do that. And the whole oppressive silence collapsed. It. Was really interesting that I had taken a moment to listen to head and heart and belly and discover quite quickly. I mean, this was, this is a lovely, easy example to discover quite quickly the alignment between those three. And then I could say it, and then the response was, Well, what are you going to do? And suddenly it had flipped around to me stating the terms of my engagement, which were entirely reasonable. I said, I'll work 12 hours a day. I have no problem with that, but I'll only work six days a week, and I'm not working tomorrow because I have an event. And as soon as I said that, every other person in the room said, Yes, me too. And it completely changed the meeting. Everyone got what they want. Everyone was able to go back to work. And at the end of the project, I got a promotion. And it was explicit. I got that promotion because I spoke up when no one else would. So it's, it's an interesting little thing, because it's inner in a world of outer pressures. You know the conflict? The obvious conflict is the outer conflict, but the inner conflict is one of, how do I reconcile the possibility of being of losing my job? How do I reconcile that I'm going to struggle to perform the way they want me to perform? If I do what they say, I'm just going to be exhausted. And so there was a certain amount of inner conflict resolution that went on. Thankfully, it was fairly clear and easy, and then it went out into the world, and the external world responded to which is why I'm kind of at pains to say whilst we're talking about inner conflict, it's not just inward, looking introspective. It is really about finding an internal congruence that allows us to participate without quietening down those parts of ourselves or perform as we want to whilst under pressure, be the person we want to be whilst under pressure.

Susan (31:57): I think that's wonderful, James, and you've made this hugely important point, which is so much part of the tong project, that in order to work with your external world, it is a good idea to pay just as much attention to your inner world, because that helps both. Yeah, it's brilliant. You.

Unknown Speaker (32:27): And last up. Susan interviews me.

Susan (32:31): Caitlin, I'm really interested to know how you came to be involved with the torn

Caitlin (32:36): project. Well, Susan, I've known you for 10 years now. I can't quite believe it's 10 years. It's more than 10 years now, but in the last six or seven years, I've been lucky enough to have you as a mentor and a supervisor as I trained up and transitioned my career from a business consultant in London to more of coaching and and doing the work that I'm doing today. And I think it was in 2022 or 2023 that you began to tell me about your ideas for the Torn Project. And I think I remember simply saying, Well, how can I be involved something along those lines?

Susan (33:18): So now, what is your role in the Torn Project?

Caitlin (33:23): Well, like all of us, I find myself wearing a few hats, and I think one of them is as somebody who's working on the strategy for the Torn Project. I led the branding process and trying to strategize about where we're heading and the types of media that we want to be seen in. And I'm also doing the social media at the moment. But of course, before we started getting the Torn Project kind of out in the world, you and I also did more than 100 interviews and quite a big chapter of analysis on that. So that's been part of my role, too.

Susan (34:03): And what do you find fascinating about doing the interviews? Because, as you say, they're a really big part of our database, of our content, of what we're offering. So tell me a little bit more about your experience with the interviewing.

Caitlin (34:21): I'm just so glad we have this, this database of real human stories that sits at the heart of the Torn Project. I think you believed, and I believed we all, we all believed that this wasn't going to be three Talking Heads, talking about inner conflict, but that real people's stories had to be at the heart of what we were producing, and the interviews enabled that. The interviews also enabled us just to do what I think was is good. A kind of somewhat academic research, you know, good quality. Let's hear it from people. Let's get lots of different input and inspiration. Let's be curious. Let's analyze it. You know, let's find a way of breaking down. What are these human stories of inner conflict in ways that people find easy to understand and digest. And I think now, as we're working on the podcast series, I'm so glad that we have this anchoring around human stories now read by actors, which is super cool, but then we can digest those human stories, we can talk about what were their ways through, what inner conflicts are being highlighted here, what are the tools? But it's this really nice blend between something that feels journalistic and story led and something that feels informative and useful and tangible and actionable.

Susan (36:02): I would totally, totally agree with that. So, so moving on to your life outside torn. Do tell me a bit more about that, and all the, all the lovely things you do,

Caitlin (36:15): sure. So I am a coach and also a wilderness retreat facilitator. I'll say a little bit more about what that means. I mostly find myself coaching women leaders, founders of businesses, creatives, but my work running wilderness retreats is kind of an interesting piece to highlight. I'm really interested in how we cultivate a new and different generation of leaders, and also how we do leadership development in a really interesting and different way. And I believe that nature is this incredible partner and teacher in personal development work. If we can go outside and immerse ourselves in beautiful environments and actually take heed the lessons that are available to us, we can, we can really advance our personal development, I would say nature is always teaching us about our own ability to be self aware and to be sensing and to be perceptive. So what's going on inside of us and what's going on outside of us? I would say nature is also showing us constantly our ability to adapt, to be resilient, to evolve. And finally, nature is also teaching us that we are all connected. We are all responsible for a kind of connected, caring stewardship for the systems that we are in, in our own system, our systems in families, our systems in workplaces. And I believe that there are certain kinds of leadership development in particular that just get really stagnant and samey. And having spent 10 years of my career in business consulting, probably facilitating most of those years in boring boardrooms, I now feel very privileged and delighted and joyful that my classroom for facilitation is outdoors, where people's brain states are just in a totally different place where there's a kind of ever present mirror that is available as this whole other lens to the development questions.

Susan (38:53): And the question I'm left with on your working life is, well, how did you get there? You know, what's your background? What led you to do the fascinating wilderness work that you're bringing to the Torn Project?

Caitlin (39:13): Yeah, though, and I have to trace back to my childhood. It's not just a career background. I grew up on a farm in rural Ontario, and I had a very expansive backyard, and I think my parents were definitely free range childhood advocates. I kind of got let out the front door, and that was really my playground and my home to be outside. And I think growing up from there, I there's a bunch of career milestones that are that are important, and I'll talk about that in a sec. But nature lives. Lives in my bones as a context that feels like home, that feels like I am connected to who I really am, that feels like I am connected to the messages that I need to receive about what I should be doing in the world. And so it's very important that that you know this piece about my my background and as to why I do what I do. Now, if we step into the more CV led explanation of my background, I then definitely had three phases of work. So far in my life, I was in academia for quite a while, where I studied both sciences, like the sort of hard sciences, of biomedical sciences, but also social sciences. I was really interested in philosophy and sociology, and I did a BASC and a master's and a PhD, and just carried on being a geeky academic for quite a while, and I think it's important, because I amassed a lot of interdisciplinary interest and expertise and throughout all of the different disciplines, the red thread for me is, you know, what makes people tick, and who are they, and how does it go wrong, and how does it go well? And what are the big questions we can ask in order to lead full and meaningful lives. If I step through to the next phase of my career, post academia, that was definitely in business consulting and innovation. And I spent about 10 years doing that, mostly in London, but working with companies of all different sizes and around the world, and moving from, you know, sort of traditional strategic business consulting towards a kind of consulting that was more focused on leadership development, on culture change and so on and so forth. And as I began to feel the pull to live closer to nature again right around lockdown, I also began to feel the pull of doing more and more coaching work. And this is my third sort of phase of my career, I think, in coaching and wilderness retreat facilitation. So for the last five years, my family and I have lived in the French Alps, and I've been working in leadership coaching and these nature retreats,

Susan (42:43): and I'm really hearing, in all of your wonderful career that there's a real passion there. I guess I'm also interested in the way your passion leads into the Torn Project. I mean, what is it that gets you passionate? What are you bringing of your passion into the project.

Caitlin (43:01): I've always been just fascinated by people and what makes them tick, and how to understand our experiences, how to grapple with big questions, and how to think about what a meaningful good life is in its many, many different forms. For people, I like to talk about coaching, for me as guiding through the inner and outer wilderness. The inner wilderness is equally as interesting to me as the outer wilderness. So I believe there's a real mirroring there, like there's many, many landscapes and features and seasons and parts to explore on the inside as well as out there in the world. And I think our project is really that exploration of the inner wilderness a

Susan (44:01): wonderful, wonderful metaphor that so what do you want? What do you see? The future of the TorM project?

Caitlin (44:10): I think our big aim here is to normalize inner conflict, first and foremost, like this is part of the human condition. We want people to hear real human stories and feel that sense that they are not alone in their inner conflicts, that this happens for us all, that this is part of what it means to be human. And I think we want to give people a sense that there are many, many ways through and so we want to give people tools and skills and stories and ideas from lots of different perspectives and lots of different stories, so that they can hear what resonates most deeply for them, because there's not a one size fits all. A path to resolving inner conflict. But there are many, many paths. So if we can open up a conversation, or to use my nature metaphor more, to sort of roll out a map of lots of different routes through inner conflict, I think that will be time well spent and something

Susan (45:24): well shared. So I notice your emphasis on stories, and of course, they are absolutely the heart of what we're doing. So can I, can I ask, what is your most memorable in the conflict, and was it resolved, or is it still to be resolved?

Speaker 1 (45:44): Yes, I'm gonna, I'm gonna be slightly devious about this and say that

Caitlin (45:52): I have had quite a few interesting and important inner conflicts in my life as somebody who has taken quite a winding path in my career and also in my places to live. I am hail from Canada via, you know, London and Edinburgh and France and various places, but all of my big inner conflicts seem to sit under Should I Stay or Should I Go? And as we have explored these many stories and categorized that there are some, some big themes of inner conflict, this is one of them, right, should I stay or should I go? And that is, should I stay, or should I go in a relationship? I've grappled with that one, should I stay, or should I go in a country? Should I stay or should I go in a job? And for me, I have always tried to work through the Should I Stay or Should I Go conflict by creating a little island of experimentation in the Go camp, because you usually know the stay camp, and I always imagine, how can I create, like a little island that I just hop over to in the Go camp and see how it feels? And can I spend a little bit more time there? Can I, you know, move back and forward a little bit? And it's not always possible, but you can create even little thought experiments for yourself that I think are quite useful, because when you are moving in a in a conflict that really is like jumping off into the abyss, and, you know, doing a huge leap that often feels so weighty and so challenging to just plunge into the unknown, but I find this tool of like, what if you just create this little island where you step into the go and pull back? That's been useful, and I think, with hindsight and experience on this conflict many times over. I've also realized I'm a goer. I have also realized that I quite often want to choose the big leap. I quite often want to, yeah, find myself in a new phase and a new adventure, and there's so much to explore and see and expand into that that always feels kind of exciting for me.

Caitlin (48:59): This podcast may well have left you thinking about your own inner conflict, or what you can do to support others who are in inner conflict. Indeed, maybe you want to know more about us, or your interest is perked in terms of contributions or collaborations. 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, the Torn Project.com and please do follow us on Instagram at the Torn Project for regular stories, resources and hope for all things inner conflict. The Torn Podcast is created by Susan, Caitlinockerton and James. 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.