Conflict, inner

For most children and adolescents, multimodal therapies are recommended. However, if antidepressant medications are used alone, psychosocial maintenance strategies should be implemented to help the patient manage inner and interpersonal conflicts, improve coping and social skills, deal with the psychosocial and personal scars left by the depression, and improve academic and social functioning. The reduction of family stress, promotion of a supportive environment, and the effective treatment of parents and siblings with psychiatric disorders may also help diminish the risk for... 

I think of wishing as part of a whole cultural picture people s wishes mirror their feelings and position in the rest of society. My experience reading and listening to thousands of people s wishes has made me realize that wishes are not casual but rather are rooted in the wisher s present life and concerns. In fact, it seems that wishes often replay people s lives in depth, dredging dreams that are almost subconscious until written down. You can read many of the wishes I collected at Pickover.com. As you ll see, a wish can give both literal information and also symbolic information revealing a person s inner world with all its conflicts. 

Weakness of will, as traditionally conceived, is a problem of impulsive behaviour. It is clear, however, that impulsiveness is neither sufficient nor necessary for weakness of will. It is not sufficient, since the totally impulsive person, in whom there is no inner conflict, cannot be subject to weakness of will. That notion requires both that there is a conflict between two opposed wishes, and that the wish that the person himself judges to be the more decisive loses out. Nor does weakness of will always take the form of giving in to impulsive urges. As noted by Davidson (1980, p. 30), compulsive, rigid, rule-governed behaviour can also be a form of weakness of will, that is, acting against one s own... 

More abstractly, then, there arc many different dimensions to, and expressions of, the possibility of seeing each individual as a multifaceted unity, having different aspects and being alive to different types of consideration which may be difficult, or even impossible, to render readily commensurable. There are many reasons for and ways of seeing the individual as multi-faceted, as a structure, as subject to inner conflict. 

The squares indicate family relationships, and circles signify friends. A double line around a square or circle indicates the relationship has been neglected. Not all family members qualify as inner-circle members. Distance often makes it impossible to include a relative, and sometimes an irreconcilable conflict is present. Even in ideal situations, a balance between relatives and friends is a good idea. The closer a relative or friend is to the center of the circle, the more important the relationship. 

For our purposes, abnormal behavior can be defined as behavior differing from the accepted cultural standard as a result of an inner conflict or crisis in the life of the individual, regardless of the standard of normative behavior in the society in which the life-crisis occurs. One of the basic distinctions between normal and abnormal behavior lies not in the outward manifestations of the conflict, but in differing cultural attitudes toward the life-crisis and its resolution. 

Recently I heard a great spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, talk about promoting world peace. I was very moved by his lecture, for he spoke from his heart as well as his mind. He stressed the many ways that external conflicts between people and nations stem from internal conflicts within ourselves, rather than arising only from external sources. We have to work on the external reasons for conflict, but if we want lasting external peace, we must work for it from a solid, inner foundation of personal peace. 

This book is about waking up, a necessary step to create the foundation for inner peace as well as greater effectiveness in the world. It is about the psychological and cultural processes that create inner conflict, delusion, needless suffering, and hostility in us, that unnecessarily divide us from others, that deepen our sleep. Few of us may be in a position to have a decisive influence on world peace, but the cultivation of our own inner resources can create peacefulness and effectiveness in action in ourselves and the people we come into contact with, and this can spread. As we attack those near us less and care for them more, we start to have an effect on the kinds of political processes that need enemies for hidden psychological reasons. It is my hope that furthering the creation of inner peace in people will contribute to outer peace in the world. 

In the language of dissonance theory, the cognition that "someone else has Z" is neither consonant nor dissonant with the two premises. It is simply irrelevant and thus cannot contribute anything to the resolution of inner conflict.92 One could argue, perhaps, that the displacement process is a "blindly" causal mechanism and that there is no presumption that it will solve, even partially and temporarily, the conflict that causes it. That would be, however, to go against the grain of all writings on the defense mechanisms from Freud onward. "The... 

The cause is thought to be disturbance of the vestibular apparatus of the inner ear, which controls balance, brought on by unaccustomed types of movement. During travel conflicting stimuli are received in the brain from the eyes... 

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