Internal Conflict Transformation Work
From Stuck to Freedom,
From Pain to Peace
For many of us, we miss the gift of conflict and instead see it as something negative or something to avoid. Some of us develop coping mechanisms to attack, defend or hide. We can get stuck in unpleasant feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, anger, depression, and powerlessness. Unfortunately, this misses the opportunity for growth, aliveness, and deeper peace that can result from transforming these stuck places.
Internal Conflict Transformation Work helps you first identify conscious and unconscious conflicts, conditioned responses and behavior patterns, hurts and traumas, and other “stuckness” that hasn’t been effectively resolved. Through experiential exercises, practical skill development, and effective processing, ICTW will assist you in working through this painful “stuckness” to find greater internal integration and a deeper sense of peace and wellbeing. ICTW will also focus on improving internal and external relationships in real time.
Working with the Internal
There are 3 primary parts to working with Internal conflict: Unresolved Past Conflicts, External Conflicts, and Conflict Evolution.
Unresolved Past Conflicts
Most of us come with baggage. We have lived through many situations that were overwhelming and hurtful and that we didn’t have the tools or emotional intelligence to fully deal with or process. Instead, we coped by unconsciously creating pain bubbles and carefully storing them away to be dealt with at some future date. Over the years, more and more of these pain bubbles were made. Very few people finish childhood without quite a collection of them. These pain bubbles can also include beliefs about what kind of person we are or should be.
Anytime we have experiences that poke these bubbles because they mirror, clash with, or are similar to the ones that first caused us to create these pain bubbles, we can re-experience that stored up pain. We can even have thought processes or stories that run through our mind causing us to loop and amplify our own pain - similar to playing a song over and over - except in this instance we are recycling and reusing our own pain. Sometimes we even amplify this process and generate more pain. People often describe this as being “triggered.”
ICTW will not launch a full scale archeological dig into our collection of stored pain. Together, we will instead look to explore where past pain bubbles are erupting and creating current conflict now. Sometimes the work will involve working with specific pain bubbles, sometimes it will involve working with and reframing current conflict, and sometimes it will involve learning new skills and techniques that increase our emotional intelligence and enable us to better process our emotions. When we embrace the opportunity to work through past conflicts, we evolve and transform our “selves” and as a by product, we frequently experience increased energy, and greater feelings of freedom and happiness as a result of this work.
External Conflicts
Many times it seems like external conflicts we are experiencing are out of our control. Of course, this has some truth to it. After all, we are not in control of other people’s choices and actions. External conflicts include any current challenges we are having in life with a spouse, life partner, significant other, kids, extended family, friends, work associates, bosses, strangers, etc.
External conflicts also include attitudes and coping mechanisms for working with conflict in general. Do we avoid it? Become over aggressive? Depressed? Yet, if we are willing to practice deeper self-awareness, we may come to see how many of the external conflicts in our life mirror or relate to internal conflicts within us. ICTW will explore the relationship between external and internal conflicts and teach skills to assist in resolving both.
Conflict Evolution
Have you noticed there is no way to get away from some type of conflict for very long, either internal or external? The real question is- how healthy is our relationship with conflict? What do we do when we experience inner tensions and strong emotions that feel stuck or uncomfortable.
When we consciously choose to work with this “stuckness,” it can be a big part of our evolution. In fact, it may be likely this process is “by design” enabling human beings to move towards greater consciousness, love, kindness, and awareness. In Gestalt therapy this would be called the “force for same” and the “force for change.” The tension between the two forces compels us to grow and evolve and create a new “what is.”
We can also have the opportunity to evolve by working with conflicting tensions between different aspects of our “selves.” Most people are aware that they have different parts of their personalities that can pull them in different directions. We can work with these different aspects to create a healthy balance between them. Otherwise, failure to recognize these different currents and their needs, can often lead to self sabotage. ICTW will help you learn to embrace, evolve, and resolve conflict regardless of where or how it appears. Most of us would like a world with more kindness, peace, love, and compassion. One of the most important ways to help the world become this way is to first help ourselves become more of these things by resolving our own internal conflicts.