Ep. 119: Inner Conflict: What Happens When You Silence Half of Yourself

There's a civil war happening inside you — and you may not even know one side of it exists.

After 30 years as a psychotherapist, I've noticed something remarkable: every person who walks into my office with depression, anxiety, or compulsive patterns is fighting the same battle. One part of them is running the show. Another part — equally real, equally legitimate — has been silenced.

Drawing on Carl Jung's concept of "holding the tension of opposites," the Core Conflictual Relationship Theme model, and five case studies from my practice — including an architect whose body went on strike and a lawyer who banished her own assertiveness — this episode explores what happens when you silence half of yourself, and what it takes to reclaim it.

The solution isn't winning the war. It's learning to hold both sides at once.

What is The Healthy Compulsive Project?

For six years The Healthy Compulsive Project has been offering information, insight and inspiration for OCPD, obsessive-compulsive personality, perfectionism, micro-managers and Type A personality. Anyone who’s ever been known to overwork, overplan, overcontrol or overanalyze is welcome here, where the obsessive-compulsive personality is explored and harnessed to deliver what it was originally meant to deliver. Join psychotherapist, Jungian psychoanalyst and author Gary Trosclair as he delves into the pitfalls and potential of the driven personality with an informative, positive, and often playful approach to this sometimes-vexing character style.

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  📍 📍 📍   📍 📍 What if I told you that every case of depression, anxiety, or compulsive behavior I've treated in thirty 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 the opposites, and he believed that 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 Clare, 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.

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 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 even 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. Let's talk about Ignatius . The once ambitious architect is now burnt out and depressed.

The issue isn't just that he lost interest in the 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 this just one. His body is unhappy with how he's been living, and he's gone on strike against management. In this case, management is the executive ego and its ambitions.

Management has been running the show with long hours, unreasonable standards, and a dearth of joyous behaviors. 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 that 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.

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's going on. 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 really crazy.

She realizes that Sadness is an important part of her. It helps her to understand herself and help 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. And yes, this is the story of the film Inside Out, which I highly recommend.

But conflicts don't only cause 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.

We all have a few of these conflicts, and 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 high wire. Sometimes we fail to balance, and we fall off. While it might appear that we have many high wires to navigate, it usually comes down to one or two. We need to find the common denominators in the various high wires to see what our fundamental conflicts are.

This can save a lot of trouble. Well-being requires us to look beneath the superficial level of problems and conflicts to our deepest fundamental areas of conflict. Here are some basic inner conflicts with variations that many of us experience.

Safety versus mastery, and along with that, or a variation, comfort versus achievement.

Stasis versus awareness and growth.

Connection versus identity,

and a variation of that is how I look versus how I feel,

or community versus independence.

Another one is integrity versus ambition, a variation of which is over-conscientiousness versus reality.

And finally, virtue versus happiness and limitations versus freedom.

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 watches 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 then 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.

So you extract the essence of each of these, put them together, and you see her very basic conflict, safety or fulfillment.

Once she sees that basic conflict underlying it all, she knows what she needs to do. Hers is a very common conflict to be sure. It's the basic tale of the hero or heroine, but it's not the only conflict that affects us.

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, and by the way, go to Yale, the pizza is better in New Haven, or whether to dump the casserole you worked so hard on, on 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 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 also to 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.

This is why therapists often look for what's called the core conflictual relational theme, also known as CCRT, core conflictual relationship theme. 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. We have a wish. For instance, we want to love or be loved. We experience a fear of how others will react if we do pursue the wish. For instance, rejection. Then the third step, we develop a strategy for handling those consequences, EG avoidance Here are some examples of that.

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 I'm afraid to because others will shame me, so I hide.

I want to be true to myself, but I'm 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. The preference for focusing on relationships in therapy, though, is also based on an extroverted assumption that people are the main thing that matters when you get down to the deepest levels.

But there are other issues that matter to some of us just as much as relationships, and these 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 might think it's a waste of time to go for a hike, but I really need to.

Security or comfort versus FOMO. That is fear of missing out on opportunities. I do things I don't want to because I don't want to miss out on something everyone else does.

The desire for pleasure, such as delicious food, versus the desire for well-being. I either indulge big time or neglect everything else to go to the gym every day.

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

Now let's talk about common inner conflicts in the compulsive personality. The obsessive-compulsive personality has some related non-relational conflicts that 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 sizes 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.

Need for mastery, that is overcoming challenges, conflicts with a fear of experiencing severe disappointment in yourself for not succeeding, that is the need for control.

Another one would be your need to succeed, that is to have mastery, but you can only do it in an absolutely ethical way, and that's over-conscientiousness.

Or you only feel good when you're productive, but you can't tolerate making things that aren't perfect.

Again, that's the need for order and control.

Your desire for peace of mind, and that is having to do with order and resolution, conflicts with the need to prove your value and goodness to yourself, which is 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 to become too domineering

Since Odysseus is back in theaters 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 law 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 six months. You think maybe, just maybe, he's ambivalent about going home? Ambivalent means there's value on both sides, but he only acknowledges one side, thinking he wants to go home when he really dreads it.

He unconsciously votes with his feet, and he fails at resolving conflict two.

His need to believe that there will be order trumps his desire to reunite with his family. So his conflict was that he both wants to go home to his wife and son and city, but he also doesn't want to face the fact that it will never measure up to what it was before 📍 And that it was his fault.

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 Odysseus 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 about for ten years. Have you ever done anything like that?

Now we'll talk about models and strategies for handling inner conflict.

Research confirms that how we handle conflict has a huge impact on our well-being. By the way, if you go to the website 📍 the healthy compulsive dot com , there, there are links to the research that I'm citing here. The return on investment for dealing with conflicts consciously is up there with investing in Apple stock in the early eighties.

Let's start with clarifying 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 five or ten things that are most important. If you've done it already, do it again. These things change. Is it learning, safety, ice hockey, family, vanilla ice cream, 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, that is, not making a list of priorities, is predictive of poor outcomes in therapy and the duration and intensity of symptoms.

See, I told you so.

Sometimes it's wise to make some decisions on a case-by-case basis, but then you may have to choose under pressure, and your urgency complex gets triggered, and you tend to default to your comfort positions. Better safe than sorry serves as the sorry 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, for instance, if you're trying to get sober, you don't stop and ponder whether it would be a good idea 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 that 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's not.

This requires knowing what your values and priorities are. I highly recommend my post about this entitled OCPD: A Disorder of Priorities, and that's episode forty-two in the podcast.

But the choices are not always so clear, which leads us back to Carl Jung. Carl Jung, the pioneering Swiss psychiatrist working in the first half of the twentieth century, was definitely onto 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 very 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 just on the left side of a canoe. You ain't going 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.

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 out to the Overworld and died when she went back to the Underworld, and she didn't even have a TikTok account.

It took me a long time to really appreciate the 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 to be open to the side that we previously wrote off as helplessly depraved.

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 crackerjack graphic artist came up with a symbol to help us remember not to be so rigid. You've probably seen the Taoist 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 feminine.

Now, don't confuse it with men and women. It's about being active and receptive, which both men and women can do.

The yin-yang symbol conveys a helpful concept, but there are two things to bear in mind when considering its message about conflict.

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.

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

And finally, the last thing I'm gonna suggest, in dealing with conflicts is 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 through.

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 are they other people inside of you?

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 perfection?

Well, folks, that's all the neighbors sent in today. If this was helpful, consider subscribing to this podcast so you don't miss a single episode. You might also want to check out my website, thehealthycompulsive.com, with its links to research and resources.

And to build a strong foundation for your personality, get my book, The Healthy Compulsive: Healing Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder and Taking the Wheel of the Driven Personality. It's filled with encouraging and insightful guidance to help you make the most of your determination, meticulousness, and appreciation for order.

And if you think others would find this blog, podcast, or book helpful, please leave a review. Until next time, enjoy the drive