Intra-personal Conflict:

Everyone has a set of psychological tapes automatic responses often learned in childhood that get triggered by high stress. Let's take Max as an example. He grew up in a family where questions were asked like accusations. As an adult, when people ask Why do you he actually hears, You shouldn't be doing that! When feeling accused, he blows up and overreacts. Max is usually a dependable employee who responds appropriately to situations. But under heavy stress, his old tape from childhood can suddenly start playing and it plays in stereo. Instead of answering a question, he'll argue back with statements like, You have no right to question me! or Just who do you think you are?î As a result of interpersonal conflict, his behavior is out of proportion to the triggering event.

Resolving Intra-personal Conflict 

When a conflict is intrapersonal, it is most often resolved through one-on-one coaching and feedback from trusted friends or professionals. Gradually, the individual works through their ìold tapesî causing the problem. Solutions are found by inviting the person to invent new, more effective responses to conflict situations. 

Managing Conflict:

It's a Skill Conflict resolution is a learned skill based on understanding the type of conflict at hand. For interpersonal conflicts, use the Conflict Styles Matrix to discover the different personality types behind the conflict. Knowing this, your group can separate conflicts from stress, then work toward resolution using the four steps of Originate, Negotiate, Validate, and Communicate. Finally, underlying problems can be addressed in ways that improve the skills of individuals as well as the group. The result? A stronger, happier team.

RESOLVING CONFLICTS:

(Must watch Kids!)

HOW I RESOLVED MY INTRAPERSONAL CONFLICTS:

"Sometimes, I'm also experiencing Intrapersonal conflicts. I always criticize myself and I always have lack of patience. At first, I don't know how to deal with them. I get angry into something or someone, and then later, regret it. When I'm experiencing this conflicts to myself. I don't know what to do. I just let myself do what it has to do but I don't think some conflicts have been solved. Then, when I learn how to handle my conflicts, I'm starting to feel the changes in me. Physically, emotionally, and socially. I know that I have lack of patience so when I get irritated easily, I'll just inhale and exhale and I'll count one to ten until my irritation subsides. And also, If I'm feeling that I may criticize myself again, I turn it into positive comments to inspired myself and to motivate myself more so that I can build enough self-confidence. Every conflict has a solution. You just have to believe in yourself and find ways on how to deal with them so that you can continue to enjoy your life."

-MirabelCortelPelayo 

• Intrapersonal Conflict occurs within an individual. The experience takes place in the person’s mind. Hence, it is a type of conflict that is psychological involving the individual’s thoughts, values, principles and emotions. Interpersonal conflict may come in different scales, from the simpler mundane ones like deciding whether or not to go organic for lunch to ones that can affect major decisions such as choosing a career path. Furthermore, this type of conflict can be quite difficult to handle if you find it hard to decipher your inner struggles. It leads to restlessness and uneasiness, or can even cause depression. In such occasions, it would be best to seek a way to let go of the anxiety through communicating with other people. Eventually, when you find yourself out of the situation, you can become more empowered as a person. Thus, the experience evoked a positive change which will help you in your own personal growth.

Intrapersonal Conflicts

Resolving Conflicts

"To be human is to experience conflicts"

RESOLVING CONFLICTS:

Signs of Having Intrapersonal Conflicts

Signs of Inner Conflict

I use the term inner conflict interchangeably with its more precise term, intrapersonal conflict.

Years ago, a Canadian Aexecutive walked into his first session with me, sat down and said, “Mike, sometimes I feel like I’m two people. I’m one person at work and a different person at home. One I call my ‘business face,’ and the other my ‘personal face.’ I’d like to be able to bring my personal face into business but I just can’t.”

That was the easiest diagnosis of intrapersonal conflict I ever made. As we say, “It was handed to me on a silver platter.” We got right down to work on what I call a Split Circuitry IntegrationSM, a method I’d developed and been using for some time for resolving intrapersonal conflict. He had quite a story and there was a deep imprint experience he’d had at 12 years old which, in a later session, we did a reimprint with.

Recognizing intrapersonal conflict is usually not that easy, and sometimes quite difficult. Often a client is not as self-aware as my Canadian executive and does not know they are experiencing inner conflict. To use the common cold as an analogy, every parent teaches their child what having a “cold” is all about, with its sniffles and sneezes and stuffy noses. So everyone knows from this “common knowledge” what a cold is, when they have it, and what to do about it—get some rest. There is no such body of common knowledge about what intrapersonal conflict is, what its symptoms are, and what to do about it.

That is a big challenge for a practitioner because they must be able to recognize it, then offer their client some “common knowledge” about it so the client can make sense of their own inner experience—see it as inner conflict, and then offer what to do about it. Incidentally, that is one of my major aims for this web site, to create a body of common knowledge about intrapersonal conflict.

So here are some signs for practitioners to watch and listen for that would indicate the presence of inner conflict. I originally wrote these signs as a self-help exercise, using the second person pronoun “you” throughout:

1. You internally criticize and berate yourself through inner conversations, maybe abusively. Some other versions of this are: you don’t like yourself, you don’t like who you are, you feel unworthy, you feel you are deserving of punishment, you feel flawed or defective. You do certain behaviors you don’t like yourself for, or have certain traits you don’t like yourself for.
2. You are impatient with yourself, sometimes angry with yourself. You may or may not show that same impatience with others.
3. You get angry and later regret it.
4. You have some outburst of expression, whether it’s enthusiasm, excitement, or something else, and later feel embarrassed or ashamed that you have “exposed” yourself.
5. You have trouble making certain decisions because you have “mixed” feelings.
6. You think you must keep yourself in check, because you don’t trust yourself. Or you may believe you have a “dark side” you must control.
7. You make great effort to control emotions, keep them in check, and do your best not to experience them.
8. You make effort to speak logically, articulately, accurately, considering your words, and not allowing what you think are inappropriate colloquialisms into your speech.
9. You’re a perfectionist and often do not measure up to your own standards. You may or may not apply those same standards to others. An example of this is being a workaholic and not liking it.
10. You are never satisfied with yourself, often frustrated with yourself, even when you achieve successes.
11. You are afraid of failure; and/or you may be afraid you are a failure or “fraud,” even though others may view you as a successful person.
12. You are uncomfortable with and don’t like to get too familiar/close with people.
13. You are uncomfortable showing and/or discussing your feelings, or the feelings of others.
14. You believe you are like two people, two personalities, and one of them is a problem, or even sinister, and needs to be controlled.
15. You often use the 2nd person pronoun, “you,” in place of the 1st person pronoun, “I.” For example, instead of saying, “I don’t do that,” you say, “That’s something you just don’t do.” Or, instead of saying, “I enjoy doing a good job,” you say, “You always want to feel like you have done a good job.” (Frequent use of 2nd person pronouns in this way is often a method for avoiding the experience of emotions in the moment.)
16. It is difficult for you to fully enjoy things or life. You may not laugh much—belly laughs rare, if at all.

WHAT IS INTRAPERSONAL CONFLICT?

An intrapersonal conflict occurs when a person has a conflict with himself or herself.

When we describe a conflict using the DIG Conflict Model, the letters of the word, “DIG,” helps to remind us to first dig to find the DESIRE, then something that INTERFERES with the desire, and finally, the GUILT.  Earlier, we looked at the following example of an intrapersonal conflict:

When we looked earlier at this example, I provided the following tentative description of Charlie Brown’s intrapersonal conflict:

Charlie Brown seems to desire that he not yell at his baby sister, but the fact that he did has led him to perceive that, interfering with his desire, he is likely to continue his yelling at his sister.  He appears to feel guilty for his actions by saying he feels terrible and hates himself.

It would be simpler to describe this conflict by saying:

Charlie Brown desired that he not yell at his baby sister, but he interfered with his desire by yelling at her.  He felt guilty about it.

In this simpler description, we still have all of the three conditions for a conflict–that is, the desire, the interfering act and the guilt.  But they all took place in the past.  To become an expert at dealing with conflicts, we must learn to describe an existing conflict as something relevant to the future.  This skill will help us to prevent similar conflicts from recurring over and over again.

Whenever we have a conflict with ourselves, we often times present to ourselves some negative criticism.  In the above three panels of the Charlie Brown comic, Charlie Brown indicates he has evaluated how he treated his sister and he makes it clear that he doesn’t like what he did.  When we evaluate something and state we don’t like what we evaluated, we have provided negative criticism.

Introduction about Resolving Intrapersonal Conflicts:

All of us are experiencing conflicts in our daily lives. Many already knows how to dealt with them but how about the other people who kept on running away from their conflicts? Remember, running from your own problems doesn't fix anything at all. It only makes things worse. So in order to live a happy life, you should learn how to handle yourself more. You should also learn how to deal with yourself and also with other people that surrounds you. You should learn how to RESOLVE CONFLICTS.