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Your Inner Conflicts and How to Solve Them
a book by W. Hugh Missildine and Lawrence Galton
(our site's book review)
The authors approach inner conflict resolution from the perspective of the inner child, inner parent and the inner adult—i.e., the TA (transactional analysis) perspective. It specifically includes a self-parenting perspective (see John Pollard’s Self-Parenting) and a self-talk context. The most important fact in this book is also one of the most important facts of life: “. . . the way we treat ourselves in adult life is critical for our mental health, happiness and productivity. It affects everything we feel and everything we achieve or fail to achieve. If we do what comes naturally, we tend to treat ourselves in adult life as we were treated when we were growing up. We re-create the old home atmosphere of long ago. We have a built-in tendency to do this. It’s almost as if a great flywheel inside keeps pulling us back to the old atmosphere. Particularly when we are tired, ill, overloaded with responsibility or under stress, we ‘go home.’ And going home means treating ourselves as we were treated back in childhood.”
Flywheel
Positive self-talk is one approach for addressing and reversing this pull towards the negatives of the past. Improving the quality, depth and intimacy of one’s irl social network is also important and enhace the quality of your cyber-social-network as well. We need to avoid what “comes naturally” and concentrate on what leads to functionality and good mental health rather than dysfunctionality and mental negativity.
Registering for MC search and match
(MCs are designed for just this purpose. See Why Register for an MC?.) Finally, to avoid wrecking our kids, we need to do Parenting From the Inside Out, which means parents need to look inside themselves, learn to understand and accept their pasts, and thereby avoid laying their past baggage on their kids.
Parents need to look inside themselves, learn to understand and accept their pasts, and thereby avoid laying their past baggage on their kids