Bonus Episode: Your Questions Answered

Susan (0:04): Have you ever felt torn, experienced that inner struggle of clashing needs, yearnings and beliefs, not a fight with others, a fight within yourself? It's confusing, it's painful, it's inner conflict. I'm Susan,

James (0:25): I'm James,

Caitlin (0:27): I'm Caitlin.

Susan (0:28): 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 in a conflict. 12 episodes in, we've now concluded the first season of torn podcasts, or rather we haven't concluded it, because here we're adding an extra bonus episode this time, that bonus is about the conflicts we found in our research, our conversations and in our first Community webinar. We originally intended for this bonus episode to be a Q and A session, but as we listened to the questions you were sending us, we realized that again and again you wanted to know what the top inner conflicts actually were. So we've gone through our research interviews, we've looked at the conversations we've had. We've asked our subscribers what they think are the most common in a conflict, and here we're sharing the top five that we found Caitlin. Are you surprised that people want to know which are the top inner conflicts?

Caitlin (2:04): No, I don't think so at all. I think it's it's really understandable that people want to know what people are most often conflicted about, because people want to feel less alone in their inner conflicts.

James (2:18): Inevitably, there are some commonalities, aren't there. There are some front runners amid all the topics we have. And I guess the research and the conversations are showing that these conflicts can be split into three kinds. I tend to think of them as three time frames. Those, for example, short term instant resolution. They may be urgent, they may be small, they may be big, but they're short term framing. Really. I need to figure this out now, and we often use somewhat superficial examples around this, such as, What do I want to eat now? What do I want to wear now, what do I want to do now? Because that's a really neat way to get further into the process. So what appears superficial is always just a first step. Then there are more significant topics which tend to have a beginning and a middle and an end, so they take a period of time, and that might be months and it might be years. Let's think about work issues, this job, that job do I change my career? Let's think about family, having children or not. Let's think about moving house, health, things that last a while and definitely come to a conclusion, and then the largest are the ones that may have started, perhaps even before we were born, lifelong issues that often echo around, what are our really deeply held values? What are our belief systems? And they rise to the surface, but they're there all the time.

Susan (4:30): It's a lovely summary that and you reminded me, James, of the wide variety of inner conflicts that we've heard about since we've been running the project. But now let's cut to the chase. Which are the five most common inner conflict we've been noticing at the moment? Let's drill down a bit. Let's start with one which will resonate with almost all of our listeners, and was, in fact, the lifestyle issue most mentioned in all our research interviews, and that is eating inner conflicts around food. Haitlan, what are your thoughts about this?

Caitlin (4:38): Well, we all need to eat every single day, and we all face choices about what we eat, and they are all kind of indicative, I think of something we believe about ourselves underneath the surface. I. Think that framing is maybe a useful place to start. How about you, Susan,

Susan (5:04): what I notice in the interviews that we've done about this is that there are many, many motivations for eating. Pleasure is mentioned a lot. You know, I love to eat my food. I love to eat ice cream, or I love to eat pizza or whatever. Very few people said they had an inner conflict because food was simply for fuel. A lot of people talked about the money they spend on eating or they love to eat for social company. But there is a sense of a conflict between what people are doing and what they feel they should be doing. There are so many messages at the moment about what you should be eating, and that seems to conflict with what we're actually doing,

Caitlin (5:54): absolutely, I mean, but it's also kind of hard to keep pace with the shoulds, right? It feels like this is an area where there are constant new trends and advice, and people are saying all sorts about what we should and shouldn't be doing in terms of our food. And so it's just a topic that seems to be always on our mind, and every day is, is part of our choice, right?

Susan (6:23): Yeah, I was going to say three times a day, but I think for a lot of us, it's a lot more than that. You know, put a lock on the fridge. I think that's an interesting point here about food is not just for putting in your mouth. It is. There's something about the meaning of food, you know, it means comfort. It's a reward. You know, you get to the end of the day, or you get to the middle of the day, and you feel, Oh, I've been working hard. I've had a bit of a hard time. I was also noticing the idea of control around food. A lot of people seem to have an issue, very, very understandable around I love my food, but it seems to control me, and I'm pulled between, well, very simply, eating and not eating. I don't know whether you've seen that. Caitlin,

Caitlin (7:15): yes, I think at its basis, the conflict around food is often just, do I have this, or do I not have this? And as you say, the trick is to go deeper and to think about what is the meaning of food, and to ask whether there are other ways to meet the needs that actually serve the meanings that you're looking for, but on this, just simply, do I do this, or do I not do this? That, in itself, is also a deeper meaning and something that we see again and again in all sorts of inner conflicts, right? So that's the thread that kind of links us to other inner conflicts. What do I allow myself and what do I not?

Susan (8:05): Oh, that's nice. And if I don't allow myself, or indeed, if I do allow myself, what does this mean about the way I think about myself and the way I approach life? I like that we're going to offer this same sort of not an instant solution, but our first step advice on each of our five most common conflicts. So the one for eating is go deeper, don't stay surface, and look at food maybe in healthier ways. And I don't just mean physical healthier ways, but healthier in the way of thinking about food. I think it's very, very, very common one. Okay, so moving on to the next inner conflict that we identified. Given the central place that work holds in all our lives, it's certainly no surprise to us that a lot of inner conflict stems from that. If we look at the questions that we've had coming in, if we look at conversations we've had. It's a topic that rates really, really highly when we when we look at the life conflicts that we have on a daily basis and on a broader basis as well. I guess you are finding that too, James, well,

Caitlin (9:34): it's

James (9:35): not surprising, is it? I think most of our waking hours are spent working or thinking about work. It is where we spend most of our time. It is where we develop, not necessarily through choice, some of some long lasting relationships, often with people we struggle with. So it is a field that is for. Fertile for in the conflict to arise?

Caitlin (10:04): Yeah, I think there's a piece about our adult development at any level that really intertwines itself with work. I think a little bit about Maslow's hierarchy of needs and just thinking that, well, work is, you know, a place where you establish that first rung, that first piece about safety and security and meeting your basic needs, because we need jobs to make ends meet. It's also that place where we seek out belonging and validation, and that that next rung is about self esteem, like, am I contributing? Is this right for me? Am I doing a good job? And then finally, that that top rung of development, at least according to this hierarchy of self actualization, of realizing your purpose. And so it's almost like no matter how you look at it, there's going to be a sense of, Am I reaching the potential in my development that I could be right now through my work? And if I'm not, you know, why not? And how can I be doing this better? Or should I be changing jobs? Should I be doing more? So there's a lot of questions that come up for for any stage in one's career, any level of development anybody might be at in their adult lives.

James (11:35): There's a huge population of people who I think don't really get to choose their work. Their work options are constrained by where they live and what's around and what's available for them. That becomes, how do I fit in this box that they are putting me in? And it becomes, where's my pay packet at the end of the week, and work becomes this thing that's necessary for everything else, and the self actualization goes on outside work, and work is just a means to an end, which I imagine to be quite stultifying. I think that's reality for an awful lot of people. I think that leads to an ambivalence that some people can see work as a way into their lives and really finding out and becoming who they want to be and be very proactive. And for other people, we work actually to escape work, just raise the money, go on holiday, raise the money, get my pension and retire. Can I retire early? Excellent work is something to be got rid of as soon as possible.

Caitlin (12:41): Yeah, but in the way you articulate that no matter, no matter which lens you are relating to work, you can see why inner conflict would would pop up, right? And I think it's, it's it's also another way of just looking at this is the timeline, like, how do I get my first job? Am I good enough to get my first job? You know, am I valuable enough? Am I contributing enough to get, you know, promoted and paid more and to move up and to change jobs? And how will I handle retirement ultimately? You know, there's so many different places where inner conflict can come up along along the journey, just through time as well. And I wanted to raise like, I feel like inner conflict at work and with work is going to be a huge issue for tons of people over the coming years, as AI accelerates, and, you know, begins to take over huge parts of work across the knowledge economy. And I think what we were saying before people who have traditionally found a lot of meaning and value and identity in their work are going to have a huge challenge as as AI comes for their job. So who am I if I am not valued at work, and in fact, a bunch of my work can now be done more efficiently, more effectively, by an AI. This is a big can of worms, which we won't open at right now, but, but I wanted to put it out there because I think it's an interesting one for the future.

Susan (14:24): I think it's a really, really interesting one to sort of bridge the gap between all the inner conflicts we're looking at. Again, there's a need to go deeper. But I also want to add at this point that when it comes to work, one of the things that can really help is to get information. It may not solve the immediate problem, but it will give us framework. It gives us information that we can use to adjust our career goals and in our AI to find out where we fit after AI and. Grabs everything, but there's a wealth of research, there's a wealth of guides and career advice and management and online resources. It's a topic that we at the torn project are moving into. We're going to explore work a lot more as we go forward than we have done up to now. So I think it's a really interesting one. So moving on to the third conflict that people have alerted us to as being really important. As we record this episode, we are in the middle of a series of external conflicts in the world. Not surprisingly, this is stressful, and we've all noticed in our conversations with friends and family and workmates and people we sit next to on the bus or on the tube, people are handling this. We are handling this with distraction. I've had a lot of conversations with people even over the last few days about No, I've turned off my notifications. I'm not looking for information about these international conflicts because I just want to forget for a few moments. But we feel torn. We feel conflicted about distracting. We feel we need to face the global issues, but we also feel we need to face many difficult issues in our own lives, but it can just get too much, and so we distract, and then we circle around, feel guilty and torn about that same distraction. Am I? Am I being too dramatic about this? James,

James (16:47): no, absolutely not. I will be speaking from personal experience. Here it is all that distraction is. Can be an art form. Distraction can be a way when the pressure seems too intense to reduce our exposure to it, and that is a very important thing to do. And it can become less useful if we spend all our time in distraction, and there's a really sort of interesting and difficult edge there for us all to dance on. How do I use distraction to look after myself so that then I can come back and face the thing again. For me, that's the skill that we need to learn, is how to navigate, turning away from the pressure, recovering and then turning back to face it again and interact with it again. And how we learn to pendulate between those two.

Susan (18:11): I've heard you say, James, that wonderful phrase, Dancing with the fear, and I guess that on this our our first step, one shot advice would be, explore the fear, face the fear, dance with it. Maybe find smaller goals that won't frighten you too much. Break down the action you need into less risky practical steps. Of course, it is not a complete answer to a global crisis, but it might be a useful answer to what you are experiencing at the moment. So here's a really interesting one among the emails we received recently was one from one of our supporters, Loredana, and she was, in fact, one of the participants in our recent webinar, and what she wrote was a completely new thought for me, well, a completely new thought for us. But once she said it, or once she wrote it, it really struck a chord, and this is what she wrote. We're all torn when trying to understand new codes of behavior, because what used to be indefensible is now the new norm. We are torn as to how to behave. We excuse lack of compassion, rudeness and unacceptable behavior because old certainties are questionable and we can glorify a certain. To bombastic attitudes, in spite of the demise of compassion and empathy. What she seems to be saying here, and I think it's a really good point, is that our standards are lowered, and there's no way we don't feel uncomfortable about that. I'm not going to argue whether she's right. And I'm not going to say, well, you know, I agree or disagree, but I think she makes a really useful point. There are changes in society as a response to what's happening around us, on response to social media, in response maybe to AI, this may be causing a completely new set of inner conflicts, one around what is the right way to behave, and we had to think about this. And what we came up with for our one piece of device is it comes back again and again to well, what is right for you to be doing? What's What's the behavior that you feel right with, a... (line truncated to 2000 chars)

Caitlin (21:36): You

Susan (21:46): Let's now move on to number five, love relationships. They promise so much in terms of reward, and research suggests that good relationships extend life. They make everybody happier, but they also impact on our health and vice versa. When things go wrong, they can make life a misery. So it's no wonder they're in our top five inner conflicts. Let me hand over to you, Caitlin and James, what about you? And relationships and the way they're creating conflicts at the moment,

Caitlin (22:23): kind of that, that opening that James had about work feels similar here with relationships, right? Like it's it's widely known that we spend most of our time at work. It's also widely known that the quality of our relationships impacts the quality of our lives. So it's no wonder that these two pieces hit our top five.

Susan (22:50): That's interesting Caitlin, because one of the things we discovered, particularly in our recent research and what's been happening since the start of the year, is that in a conflict about relationship often centers around difference. We want to be similar to a partner that's seems to be a proof of love, that we love each other, we agree with each other. I think it's probably more complicated than that. Did either of you have any thoughts on that?

Caitlin (23:22): I think we want we want similarity and difference, right? We want them both so that therein lies maybe part of our clues around why relationships get us into inner conflict, right? We want similarity because it's very comforting when we see our beliefs and our values and our interests mirrored in others, and it's a joy to enjoy the things that you love with others, and we want difference because that that challenge, that gap between you and another, also creates curiosity and spark, and in the case of romantic relationships, it creates, you know, intimacy and a sense of eroticism. And all of that is also important so relationships present this holding of both all the time that, by its very nature, is conflicting.

James (24:33): I love that thinking of how the early stages focus on similarity, emphasizing the things we like and how close we are. As we develop that closeness, and we develop that bond, and then over time, our differences start to become more apparent or more important. Again, it's a little bit of the idea of work can put you in a certain shape. Shape a box. And in a relationship, you can voluntarily step into a certain shape. Here's the person I'm invested in, here's what they need from me, here's how I will be. But then over the years, I am more than that, or I'm less than that, or I'm different to that, and those parts start to want to be seen, want to be heard, or leak out in less useful ways.

Susan (25:25): I find it interesting that of all the relationship issues we're getting in what we hear in the interviews and the conversations, should I stay, or should I go, or should I put up with this, or should I challenge it? That's the big one. I'm not saying it's the only one there are. There are many other subsections, but the choice of whether to stay in a relationship or to stay and just not commit, not engage to it, and I think that picks up on what you're saying, James,

James (25:57): and it's quite a special relationship that can handle the growing of two partners and the revelation of difference. Sadly, I think some relationships start to feel stultifying, start to feel constrained, and that's where the Should I stay? Should I go? Thing comes from. But I think it's really important to say, Do you know what I entered a relationship as a human being, and going back to Maslow's leaning tower of principles, am I able to express all of those things, particularly, am I able to express them as I learn who I am? Because a lot of relationships start in the 20s, when we don't know who we are yet, and so we are growing in the relationship. And is the relationship able to support that, or does it demand that we commit to its shape and submit to the shape that it has for us?

Caitlin (27:00): I think one other piece I'd love to sort of add to the relationship bucket is what's going on in the social and cultural conversations of the time that change and shape and shift how we view relationships. I think right now, there is a lot more variety of relationships that's out there in the social and cultural discourse. Is a lot more freedom for people to not be in long term relationships, to not be dependent on on one another, financially or socially, or to make a family, there's, there's all sorts of things that are changing in how we view relationships. And if we dug even deeper in that, there's, there's a lot of polarization going on underneath the surface. And you you know these, these issues are impacting, then the norms that are available in relationships, the norms for coming together, the norms for staying together, the norms for leaving there's a there's a whole lot more variety in intimate relationships these days than there was 10, 20, 30 years ago. And I think that also means it's ripe for questioning all the time, what's going on inside of me versus what are the options that are being presented to me in the social and cultural dialog.

Susan (28:34): The difference may seem a little threatening, and as you were saying, Caitlin, there's so much more of it about but if one can, if both partners can, if everybody in a group can see and hold the difference between us all, that is obviously going to make things better. And it's not being different is not a problem. It's normal, it's natural. It's not a sign that you're incompatible or the relationship is doomed to fail. Communication will help. I think we would all offer well, you can get support of professional help, counseling, coaching, that can often turn things around. But the bottom line is differences there. And if you can learn to oh, I'm going to go back to your phrase, James, if you can learn to dance with it, then it will help to resolve the conflict. So these five common inner conflicts. They're not the only ones, obviously, but they are some of the ones that our community have been bringing to our attention as we leave season one and start to prepare Season Two of our podcast. Is there anything you. You. Caitlin and James want to say as we start to bring this episode to an end,

Caitlin (30:06): Remy, just a big thank you to all of our listeners for for tuning in and for providing your input and feedback and questions. Yeah, it's been, it's been wonderful to hear from you, and we look forward to more conversation in next season

James (30:25): here, here to that it's lovely to get feedback, to know that we are not just three people talking into a void, but to hear positive reviews of what we're thinking about and how that chimes in with what other people are thinking. That's wonderful, and it actually leaves me I'm happy to take a pause from the podcast, but I'm also excited and looking forward to Season Two when that comes. We will let you know when it comes for sure.

Susan (31:04): Well, we're hoping at the end of the summer that, as James says, we will absolutely be in touch. So do subscribe, and then we can much more easily be in touch in the meantime, in a world where outer conflict and inner conflict both seem to be present right now. We hope that you have a peaceful summer. This podcast may well have left you thinking about your own inner conflicts, past, present and maybe future. If you're interested in knowing more, the show notes offer you not only a transcript, but also link you to some helpful resources, and that's on our website, the tornproject.com please do follow us on Instagram at the torn project for regular stories, resources and hope for all things in a conflict. And please do spread the word.