Unresolved Conflict Quotes

As soon as we are alone,...inner chaos opens up in us. This chaos can be so disturbing and so confusing that we can hardly wait to get busy again. Entering a private room and shutting the door, therefore, does not mean that we immediatel;y shut ou all our iner doubts, anxieities, fears, bad memories, unresolved conflicts, angry feelings and impulsive desires. On the contrary, when we have removed our outer distraction, we often find that our inner distraction manifest themselves to us in full force. We often use the outer distractions to shield ourselves from the interior noises. This makes the discipline of solitude all the more important.

Divorce lawyers stoke anger and fear in their clients, knowing that as long as the conflicts remain unresolved the revenue stream will keep flowing.

Two decades of observing human nature have revealed a few notable differences between the way men and women approach conflict: men will knock each other out and then hug it out, while women tend to leave deep, unresolved scars on the souls of their victims.

We expect our spouses to fill voids in our lives or hearts that only God can fill. Unmet expectations reduce a journey expected to be amazing to ordinary. Unmet expectations breed hurt feelings, misunderstanding, and unresolved conflict.

In any free society, the conflict between social conformity and individual liberty is permanent, unresolvable, and necessary.

Sinful habits are usually indicative of unresolved conflicts.

Midlife dynamically, for both straight and gay males, is often challenging as we face the reality that many of the dreams we had for our lives might not become a reality and unresolved conflicts come to the surface. For us to successfully transition in to the next phase of our lives we must find reconciliation of these issues. And for the gay male there is a sense that the gay self we have tried to keep in the closet or so many years begins to scream out. "Time is running out. When do I get to live?" You can't ignore that voice in the end, you can try and suppress it, and you can try and deny it, you can try and silence it by filling your life with other noises and diverting attention ......but that voice still exists. "Will my entire life be a lie?

here are the main lessons to make each challenge into a source of growth. 1. Don’t avoid conflict, which is your family’s opportunity to learn and grow if you understand where it originates and manage it appropriately. 2. You naturally think compatibility is key to relationship success, and difference brings conflict. In truth, you need enough compatibility to function, but not all that much. What you really need is complementarity to complete you as a person. 3. The culture of a family can get sick from the virus of negativity. This is a basic emotional-management issue, but applied to a group instead of to you as an individual. 4. The secret weapon in all families is forgiveness. Almost all unresolved conflict comes down to unresolved resentment, so a practice of forgiving each other explicitly and implicitly is extremely important. 5. Explicit forgiveness and almost all difficult communication require a policy of honesty. When families withhold the truth, they cannot be close.

Again I thought about the family. There was a puzzle in it, something unresolved. What is a person to do, I asked, when their obligations to their family conflict with other obligations—to friends, to society, to themselves?

But unresolved conflict spreads like a cancer in human relationships, and sometimes there’s no cure. Despite everything, I still have some happy memories of us all together, tucked away inside the folds and creases that forced us apart.

A friendship has but one chief adversary and that is envy. It is sired by resentment with the potential consequence of unresolved estrangement." She looked at the woman in conflict and said, "Do not envy her but imagine what it took for her to have what you resent her for. Would you want to embark upon her journey instead of your own to procure it? You notice her abundance but overlook her losses; do not envy her because she would rather have your friendship than your envy." The woman looked at her and nodded in accord, "And how do you do that?" she asked. The woman sighed in reflective thought. "By changing the way you think.

women have helped women birth, and there is a support a trained labor coach can provide that many partners can—and should—not. Labors can proceed more slowly when your adrenaline is higher than it ought to be, and a partner hovering over you can make your adrenaline go through the roof. This is not only because of the observation factor but also because of the complex emotional and psychological relationships we establish with our partners; expectations, preconceived perceptions about behavior and support, and even unresolved conflicts can unconsciously find their way into your brain during labor, and these can sometimes get transferred right to your cervix, causing it to close when you want it to open!

We use the word cross in our hymns, in our piety, in our prayers, and in our pastoral language. But we use it too cheaply. We say that a person has to live with some sort of suffering in life: a sickness that cannot be cured, an unresolvable personality conflict within the family, poverty, or some other unexplainable or unchangeable suffering. Then we say, “That person has a cross to bear.” Granted, whatever kind of suffering we have is suffering that we can bear in confidence that God is with us. But the cross that Jesus had to face, because he chose to face it, was not—like sickness—something that strikes you without explanation. It was not some continuing difficulty in his social life. It was not an accident or catastrophe that just happened to hit him when it could have hit somebody else. Jesus’ cross was the price to pay for being the kind of person he was in the kind of world he was in; the cross that he chose was the price of his representing a new way of life in a world that did not want a new way of life. That is what he called his followers to do.

Problems kept unresolved invite more problems.

The American narrative is morally unresolvable because the society that saved humanity in the great conflicts of the twentieth century was also a society built on enormous crimes—slavery and the extinction of the native inhabitants.

I found I could read with focus. I could hold thoughts in my head besides anger and self-accusation. I returned to the chapter I had written nearly two years before at Harvard. Again I read Hume, Rousseau, Smith, Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Mill. Again I thought about the family. There was a puzzle in it, something unresolved. What is a person to do, I asked, when their obligations to their family conflict with other obligations—to friends, to society, to themselves?

A bad fight is anything which does not help to move the relationship and the people involved forward. If one dominates the other, it will eventually be at the expense of the relationship. Everything depends on the intention. If the intention is to hurt, belittle, ignore, reject or win then good will struggle to come from that. If the intention is to wrestle with some boundaries and deal with unresolved issues then that is positive and important. Love for the other person and respect for their rights, as well as our own rights, will set a steady course for any argument. Of most value is a sincere desire to make the relationship work which, after all, is often why we fight. We want the relationship to honestly work.

He had believed once that life must lead to something, all the unresolved conflicts and questions leading on towards some great culmination. Curiously underexamined beliefs like that, underpinning in his life, his personality. Irrational attachment to meaning. All very well as far as it goes, the question of constitutionality arises, and so on. Couldn't go to work in the morning if he didnt think something meant something else. But what is it all leading up to. An end without an ending.

Had believed once that life must lead to something, all the unresolved conflicts and questions leading on towards some great culmination. Curiously examined beliefs like that, underpinning his life, his personality. Irrational attachment to meaning. All very well as far as it goes, the question of constitutionality arises, and so on. Couldn't go to work in the morning if he didn't think something meant something meant something else. But what is it all leading up to. An end without an ending.

Had believed once that life must lead to something, all the unresolved conflicts and questions leading on towards some great culmination. Curiously underexamined beliefs like that, underpinning his life, his personality. Irrational attachment to meaning. All very well as far as it goes, the question of constitutionality arises, and so on. Couldn’t go to work in the morning if he didn’t think something meant something meant something else. But what is it all leading up to. An end without an ending.

Like it or not, we all carry the past of our country. The unresolved conflicts of race and class lay coiled, ready to erupt, unless we set our minds to an honest reckoning with that past and a search for solutions grounded in genuine truth and justice. Unlike the cursing anonymous voice on a telephone, or the menacing face, or the billy club that split John Lewis's head in Selma, Alabama, at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965, implicit bias is hard to see; implicit bias is a silent snake that slinks around in ways we don't notice.

In focusing on “cultural change” and “conflict between cultures,” these studies avoid fundamental questions about the formation of the United States and its implications for the present and future. This approach to history allows one to safely put aside present responsibility for continued harm done by that past and the questions of reparations, restitution, and reordering society.9 Multiculturalism became the cutting edge of post-civil-rights-movement US history revisionism. For this scheme to work—and affirm US historical progress—Indigenous nations and communities had to be left out of the picture. As territorially and treaty-based peoples in North America, they did not fit the grid of multiculturalism but were included by transforming them into an inchoate oppressed racial group, while colonized Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans were dissolved into another such group, variously called “Hispanic” or “Latino.” The multicultural approach emphasized the “contributions” of individuals from oppressed groups to the country’s assumed greatness. Indigenous peoples were thus credited with corn, beans, buckskin, log cabins, parkas, maple syrup, canoes, hundreds of place names, Thanksgiving, and even the concepts of democracy and federalism. But this idea of the gift-giving Indian helping to establish and enrich the development of the United States is an insidious smoke screen meant to obscure the fact that the very existence of the country is a result of the looting of an entire continent and its resources. The fundamental unresolved issues of Indigenous lands, treaties, and sovereignty could not but scuttle the premises of multiculturalism.

In some sense, a broken marriage is due to the unresolved tension between two tribal identities. All marriages are crosscultural, so a good therapist will help raise to the surface the issues and resources of each culture in the relationship and then help the two conflicting cultures come together as complements.

What has stripped their conversation of its richness and enjoyments? First, despite the apparent success of their numerous discussions, they may have arrived at the solutions to family problems at a great cost to the relationship. In many relationships, a whole sequence of little kinks gradually adds up to produce stress. These kinks may also be a sign of important differences between the partners in their outlook and values—differences that their surface agreements never resolve. Thus, the free flow of conversation is inhibited by the threat of intrusions of unresolved conflicts. Perfectly tuned conversations are interrupted by signals of possible discord that introduce static into the communications. Second, although the partners may get along when they are dealing with practical problems, their conversation may be devoid of references to the more pleasurable aspects of the relationship. The partners have not learned to demarcate problem-solving discussions from pleasant conversations. Thus when one partner starts a conversation with a loving comment, the other may decide that this is a good time to bring up some conflict. As a result, there is a dearth of conversation that revolves simply around expressions of caring, sharing, and loving.

It seems like an indulgence to take the time to cultivate mindfulness when so much is being lost. But this is the tension - to find a considered way of acting not based on reaction. Building a different kind of sanity requires a stable base for careful action. It means being willing to know all the dimensions of the reality of destruction, being willing to breathe with the tension of emotional response, being willing to cultivate tolerance for unresolved conflict. This nonverbal form of ethical deliberation depends on the careful work of paying attention to the whole thing. Meditating, walking slowly, calming the mind by centering on the breath - these painstaking, deliberate practices increase the odds for acting intelligently in the midst of crisis.

Although Galileo was a devout Catholic, it was his conflict with the Vatican, sadly mismanaged on both sides, that lay at the basis of the running battle between science and religion, a tragic and confusing schism which persists unresolved. More than ever today, religion finds its revelatory truths threatened by scientific theory, and retreats into a defensive corner, while scientists go into the attack insisting that rational argument is the only valid criterion for an understanding of the workings of the universe. Maybe both sides have misunderstood the nature of their respective roles. Scientists are equipped to answer the mechanical question of how the universe and everything in it, including life, came about. But since their modes of thought are dictated by purely rational, materialistic criteria, physicists cannot claim to answer the questions of why the universe exists, and why we human beings are here to observe it, any more than molecular biologists can satisfactorily explain why – if our actions are determined by the workings of a selfish genetic coding – we occasionally listen to the voice of conscience and behave with altruism, compassion and generosity. Even these human qualities have come under attack from evolutionary psychologists who have ascribed altruism to a crude genetic theory by which familial cooperation is said to favour the survival of the species. Likewise the spiritual sophistication of musical, artistic and poetic activity is regarded as just a highly advanced function of primitive origins.

After the big holidays each year – such as Labor Day or the Fourth of July – the statisticians announce the total of lives lost on the nation’s highways through reckless driving. The public shudders, parents warn their young, and committees ponder as to how to prevent such a waste of human life. Yet the highway casualties are trifling in comparison with the human waste caused by unresolved racial conflicts in this country.

Just as unresolved, formerly subordinated or traumatized individuals can collude with or identify with bullies, so can unresolved, formerly subordinated or traumatized groups of people identify with the supremacy of the state. In both cases, the lack of recognition that the past is not the present leads to the newly acquired power to punish rather than to the self-transformation necessary to resolve conflict and produce justice.

I know that these things will never come back. I may see the rocks again, and smell the flowers, and watch the dawn sunshine chase the shadows from the old sulphuric-colored walls, but the light that sprang from the heightened consciousness of wartime, the glory seen by the enraptured ingenious eyes of twenty-two, will be upon them no more. I am a girl no longer, and the world, for all its excitements of chosen work and individualistic play, has grown tame in comparison with Malta during those years of our anguish. It is, I think, this glamour, this magic, this incomparable keying up of the spirit in a time of mortal conflict, which constitute the pacifist’s real problem — a problem still incompletely imagined, and still quite unresolved. The causes of war are always falsely represented; its honour is dishonest and its glory meretricious, but the challenge to spiritual endurance, the intense sharpening of all the senses, the vitalising consciousness of common peril for a common end, remain to allure those boys and girls who have just reached the age when love and friendship and adventure call more persistently than at any later time. The glamour may be the mere delirium of fever, which as soon as war is over dies out and shows itself for the will-o’-the-wisp that it is, but while it lasts no emotion known to man seems as yet to have quite the compelling power of this enlarged vitality.

We react constantly through life. Breathing, noticing, thinking, swallowing, feeling, and moving are all reactions. Most reactions are not really observed because they are commensurate with their stimuli, but a triggered reaction stands out because it is out of sync with what is actually taking place. When we are triggered, we have unresolved pain from the past that is expressed in the present. The present is not seen on its own terms. The real experience of the present is denied. Although reacting to the past in the present may make sense within the triggered person’s logic system, it can have detrimental effects on those around them who are not the source of the pain being expressed, but are being punished nonetheless. They are acting in the present, but are being made accountable for past events they did not cause and cannot heal. The one being falsely blamed is also a person, and this burden may hurt their life. The person being triggered is suffering, but they often make other people suffer as well. There is narcissism to Supremacy, but there is also a narcissism to Trauma, when a person cannot see how others are being affected. Although the triggered person may be made narcissistic and self-involved by the enormity of their pain, both parties are in fact equally important. And it is the job of the surrounding communities to insist on this.

This is not psychiatry,” Olivia says. “It is not therapy. It is poetry, my dear. The talent was there before awful things happened to you, it came with the original equipment just as your brother’s did, but talent is a dead engine. It runs on every unresolved experience—every unresolved trauma, if you like—in your life. Every conflict. Every mystery. Every deep part of your character you find not just unlikeable but loathsome.” One hand goes up and makes a fist. Barbara can tell it hurts Olivia to do that, but she does it anyway, closing her fingers tight, nails digging into the thin skin of her palm. “Keep it,” she says. “Keep it as long as you can. It’s your treasure. You will use it up and then you will have to rely on the memory of the ecstasy you once felt, but while you have it, keep it. Use it.

happen, and it’s not uncommon for them to happen for some people. What people usually see, if their experiences are real, is what needs to be seen, what needs to be freed. As one great Buddhist abbess said to me, “You usually don’t have a past life that shows you what a sterling example of enlightenment you were, because enlightenment leaves no trace; it is like a fire that burns clean. There’s no karmic imprint it leaves behind.” She said if you have any past lives, you’re probably going to see what a grade-A jackass you were—which I loved, and which has corresponded to my experience. I didn’t necessarily always see what a grade-A jackass I was, although in some cases, I saw that I was a lot more than a grade-A jackass. Most of the past lives I saw were moments of confusion, moments of unresolved karmic conflict.

The European and the African have an entirely different concept of time. In the European worldview, time exists outside man, exists objectively, and has measurable and linear characteristics. According to Newton, time is absolute: “Absolute, true, mathematical time of itself and from its own nature, it flows equitably and without relation to anything external.” The European feels himself to be time’s slave, dependent on it, subject to it. To exist and function, he must observe its ironclad, inviolate laws, its inflexible principles and rules. He must heed deadlines, dates, days, and hours. He moves within the rigors of time and cannot exist outside them. They impose upon him their requirements and quotas. An unresolvable conflict exists between man and time, one that always ends with man’s defeat—time annihilates him. Africans apprehend time differently. For them, it is a much looser concept, more open, elastic, subjective. It is man who influences time, its shape, course, and rhythm (man acting, of course, with the consent of gods and ancestors ). Time is even something that man can create outright, for time is made manifest through events, and whether an event takes place or not depends, after all, on man alone. If two armies do not engage in a battle, then that battle will not occur (in other words, time will not have revealed its presence, will not have come into being). Time appears as a result of our actions, and vanishes when we neglect or ignore it. It is something that springs to life under our influence, but falls into a state of hibernation, even nonexistence, if we do not direct our energy toward it. It is a subservient, passive essence, and, most importantly, one dependent on man.

Central to Individuation is the child archetype. The child functions to correct the one-sidedness of the conscious mind, to 'pave the way for a future change of personality,' and it 'a symbol which unites opposites [conscious and unconscious]; a mediator, bringer of healing, that is, one who makes whole'. The child is the being which matures toward independence, and it accomplishes this through voluntary separation from the mother archetype – the psychological symbol of familiarity and protection – and subsequent exploration of nature and/or the unknown. Said separation is spurred by a conflict which is unresolvable by current conscious means, which is why the child must abandon the infantilizing safety of the mother so that he can enter the unknown and retrieve or receive the wisdom necessary for the heroic transformation necessary to resolve the previously unresolvable conflict.

Treating Abuse Today 3(4) pp. 26-33 TAT: I want to move back to an area that I'm not real comfortable asking you about, but I'm going to, because I think it's germane to this discussion. When we began our discussion [see "A Conversation with Pamela Freyd, Ph.D., Part 1", Treating Abuse Today, 3(3), P. 25-39] we spoke a bit about how your interest in this issue intersected your own family situation. You have admitted writing about it in your widely disseminated "Jane Doe" article. I think wave been able to cover legitimate ground in our discussion without talking about that, but I am going to return to it briefly because there lingers an important issue there. I want to know how you react to people who say that the Foundation is basically an outgrowth of an unresolved family matter in your own family and that some of the initial members of your Scientific Advisory Board have had dual professional relationships with you and your family, and are not simply scientifically attached to the Foundation and its founders. Freyd: People can say whatever they want to say. The fact of the matter is, day after day, people are calling to say that something very wrong has taken place. They're telling us that somebody they know and love very much, has acquired memories in some kind of situation, that they're sure are false, but that there has been no way to even try to resolve the issues -- now, it's 3,600 families. TAT: That's kind of side-stepping the question. My question -- Freyd: -- People can say whatever they want. But you know -- TAT: -- But, isn't it true that some of the people on your scientific advisory have a professional reputation that is to some extent now dependent upon some findings in your own family? Freyd: Oh, I don't think so. A professional reputation dependent upon findings in my family? TAT: In the sense that they may have been consulted professionally first about a matter in your own family. Is that not true? Freyd: What difference does that make? TAT: It would bring into question their objectivity. It would also bring into question the possibility of this being a folie à deux --

issue, as if that should stop us from living together. A marriage has to have some flaws, some unresolved issues, some conflicts that can be worked through. Hopefully long-term marriages move beyond chemistry to compatibility anyway.

Countertransference is described as the therapist's reaction to the patient's transference. Like transference, countertransference is a reflection of earlier events and unresolved conflicts in the therapist's own life that are now "projected" onto the therapy situation.

According to psychologist and author John Gottman, she was right. His groundbreaking research revealed that a whopping 69 percent of problems in marriage do not get solved.3 His good news, though, is that many problems can be managed. Gottman states that couples can live with unresolvable conflicts about perpetual issues in their relationship if the issues are not deal breakers. Simply put, it is not the presence of conflict that stresses the relationship; it is the manner in which the couple responds. Positive, respectful communication about differences helps keep a marriage thriving.

The obscure scientific term explaining why we see most other people as unintelligent or crazy is naïve realism. Its origins trace back to at least the 1880s, when philosophers used the term to suggest that we should take our perceptions of the world at face value. In its modern incarnation, it has almost the opposite meaning. Stanford social psychologist Lee Ross uses the term to indicate that although most people do take their perceptions of the world at face value, this is a profound error that regularly causes virtually unresolvable conflicts between people.

I was a lover of myself rather than a lover of God (2 Timothy 3:2, 4). And it was killing me. The unresolved conflict in my heart spilled over into my mind and body and led to that fateful January night in 1994.

Just as unresolved, formerly subordinated or traumatized individuals can collude with or identify with bullies, so can unresolved, formerly subordinated or traumatized groups of people identify with the supremacy of the state.

Being without knowledge of the other person’s feelings or intent will put communication in peril, frequently resulting in unresolved conflict or damage to the relationship.

A mother was supposed to go to the temple after the death of a child. She was supposed to speak to the spirits of the Dead until she had said all she needed to say to the child, until all her unresolved feelings were spent, all conflicts resolved, all grudges laid to rest, until the finawu were satisfied that the deceased could move on in peace.

The growth of Israeli influence in Europe presents a curious historical milestone and an unresolved contradiction. After the annihilation of Jews in the Holocaust, Germany has become the most consistently pro-Israel nation on the continent and is Israel’s biggest trading partner in Europe. German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited Israel in October 2021 on one of her final overseas visits before leaving office; it was her eighth trip during her sixteen years in power. She did not travel to the West Bank or Gaza. She praised the Jewish state, despite acknowledging that Israel did not embrace her favored two-state solution to the conflict with the Palestinians, but this did not matter because “the topic of Israel’s security will always be of central importance and a central topic of every German government.

This is not psychiatry,” Olivia says. “It is not therapy. It is poetry, my dear. The talent was there before awful things happened to you, it came with the original equipment just as your brother’s did, but talent is a dead engine. It runs on every unresolved experience—every unresolved trauma, if you like—in your life. Every conflict. Every mystery. Every deep part of your character you find not just unlikeable but loathsome.

The River Between, by James Ngugi (later Ngugi wa Thiongo), redoes Heart of Darkness by inducing life into Conrad’s river on the very first page. ‘The river was called Honia, which meant cure, or bring-back-to-life. Honia river never dried: it seemed to possess a strong will to live, scorning droughts and weather changes. And it went on in the very same way, never hurrying, never hesitating. People saw this and were happy.’51 Conrad’s images of river, exploration, and mysterious setting are never far from our awareness as we read, yet they are quite differently weighted, differently—even jarringly—experienced in a deliberately understated, self-consciously unidiomatic and austere language. In Ngugi the white man recedes in importance—he is compressed into a single missionary figure emblematically called Livingstone—although his influence is felt in the divisions that separate the villages, the riverbanks, and the people from one another. In the internal conflict ravaging Waiyaki’s life, Ngugi powerfully conveys the unresolved tensions that will continue well after the novel ends and that the novel makes no effort to contain. A new pattern, suppressed in Heart of Darkness, appears, out of which Ngugi generates a new mythos, whose tenuous course and final obscurity suggest a return to an African Africa. And in Tayb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, Conrad’s river is now the Nile, whose waters rejuvenate its peoples, and Conrad’s first-person British narrative style and European protagonists are in a sense reversed, first through the use of Arabic; second in that Salih’s novel concerns the northward voyage of a Sudanese to Europe; and third, because the narrator speaks from a Sudanese village.

Even though the victims of spiritual abuse have suffered greatly (more on this topic in the next chapter), one tactic of abusive leaders is to talk about how much they’ve suffered. They will go to great lengths to describe how much pain they are in because of the unresolved “conflict” with those accusing them. They will tell how they have lost sleep, been wracked with anxiety, and are “deeply saddened” by the whole affair.28 Even Saruman wanted to talk about the “injuries that have been done to me.”29 This move is designed to engender sympathy not for the victims but for the abuser. Again, it is designed to flip the script. To produce even more sympathy, some abusive leaders then appeal to how the whole situation has affected their spouse or their family. They might point out how much their wife has suffered or how their kids are heartbroken and disillusioned.30 This tactic is effective precisely because we ought to feel sympathy for the family members harmed by the scandal. Often the spouses and children are unaware of how the pastor has mistreated others (though some spouses enable and defend their husband’s abusive behavior and sometimes even participate in his deceptions). Indeed, some church courts feel less inclined to prosecute such a pastor because they feel sorry for his family, which “has suffered enough.

We build our most sacred relationships on the battleground where evolved appetites clash with the romantic mythology of monogamous marriage. As Andrew J. Cherlin recounts in The Marriage-Go-Round, this unresolved conflict between what we are and what many wish we were results in “a great turbulence in American family life, a family flux, a coming and going of partners on a scale seen nowhere else.” Cherlin’s research shows that “[t]here are more partners in the personal lives of Americans than in the lives of people of any other Western country.

There was no more nonsense about shock waves and concussions. When you went under in 1941 to 1945 it was not because of shock waves rattling your brains, but the sudden surfacing of emotionally unresolved, though persistent conflicts. The soldier who broke did not break so much from the fear of having someone trying to kill him or even from the harrowingness of battle, but from some neurotic tendency, deep-seated, that had always been there eating him away, or ready to eat him away. “The Newmans had been trained to address themselves to the eradication of psychiatric symptomatology, to intrinsic psychopathology, to the symptoms of conflict within the patient. Armed with what were essentially individual theories and techniques, they were suddenly presented not with one or two patients, who, subjected to the normal stresses of living, had decompensated, but thousands who had been exposed to the unique and terrifying prospect of war. Viewed from the outside, the Newmans’ reactions to this flood of patients was either to withdraw into the spotty use of intensive psychotherapy or simply to wring their hands and abandon the mass of patients to the V.A. system as treatable only if more psychiatrists were provided, which of course they weren’t.

disappeared into the water. Seeing this lifetime and the confusion at the moment of death, I immediately knew what I had to do. I had to rectify the confusion and explain to the dream of me that I died, that I fell off a boat and drowned. When I did this, all of a sudden the confusion from that lifetime popped like a bubble, and there was a tremendous sense of freedom. Many past life dreams appeared, and each one of them seemed to focus on something that had been in conflict, something that was unresolved from a different incarnation. I went through each one of them and unhooked the confusion. TS  Were you lying on a carpeted floor with your eyes closed, or something? ADYA No, actually, the strangest thing was that

Pay attention to unresolved conflicts in your life.

When we seek to escape from inner conflict and pain, we are running away from unresolved childhood trauma or original pain. Most people with serious addictive natures who are in the process of recovery have found that trauma played a huge role in escalating their addictions. It certainly did for me.

The neurotic expects to rid herself of the consequences of her unresolved conflicts without changing anything inside her at all.

An unresolved territorial conflict will impede Ukraine’s westward march while at the same time it will be a violent reminder of Europe’s inability to deal with military threats, the Achilles’s heel of the post-modern political architecture built in Brussels.

another person’s behalf? Aren’t you also thankful that others have summoned Him on yours? Our homes today are threatened by fevers of all sorts—far beyond the physiological: unresolved conflict, unforgiveness, unfaithfulness, compromising media communications, pornography, and more. We need Jesus in our homes. Do you have a sense of Christ’s activity in your home? I’ve a good reason for asking you this question. Almost every spiritual marker of Christ’s heightened activity in my home came as a direct result of some threatening situation. Right now both my daughters are walking with God, but I assure you this did not simply happen in the natural evolution of their lives. I’ve watched their relationships grow through situations in which some threat convinced them to cleave closer to Christ. God is so faithful. He can use the worst of circumstances to introduce us to the best of relationships. I am intrigued by the fact that Simon’s mother-in-law immediately began serving Christ and the others. Few people are more compelled to serve than those who have experienced the healing power of Christ.

It’s worth taking the time to untangle, however, because properly leveraging collaboration can increase the quality of deep work in your professional life. It’s helpful to start our discussion of this topic by taking a step back to consider what at first seems to be an unresolvable conflict.

These independent systems of the subconscious may be regarded as complexes in the classic sense. They are islands of unresolved conflict that have been pushed away instead of integrated. Psychotherapy would be the treatment of choice for these complexes, whereby the therapist would help the patient reintegrate all of the emotional baggage he or she has pushed out of focus and awareness. Since mind and brain are two ways of expressing the same underlying reality, even these functional complexes reflect changes in the neural networks of the brain.

...a perceived abandonment at any point in life will cause the individual to revert back in her mind to the very first traumatic separation— AND—the earlier the first trauma, the greater the panic and anger generated when perceived abandonment occurs again. [...] McKenzie proved in his massive study that the same regions of the brain were reactivated—the same brain cells ignited—all still hard-wired to the rest of the body as though stuck in the past. More simply—a perceived abandonment in later life triggers the brain back to the earlier stages of brain development when the first perceived abandonment occurred. For example, a woman’s husband leaves or dies— she shifts brain activity to the region of her brain that was developing at the time of the initial separation to sometime during infancy [...] She becomes the helpless little girl once again, developmentally: the same neurotransmitters and all. This is the McKenzie TwoTrauma Mechanism. Everyone has an inner child that will never mature with unresolved conflict from early separation panic. However, as Dr. McKenzie showed, the earlier that the separation trauma occurs, the more it sets the stage for enormous rage later in life.

But unresolved conflict spreads like a cancer in human relationships, and sometimes there’s no cure.

The talent was there before awful things happened to you, it came with the original equipment just as your brother’s did, but talent is a dead engine. It runs on every unresolved experience—every unresolved trauma, if you like—in your life. Every conflict. Every mystery. Every deep part of your character you find not just unlikeable but loathsome.

Rambam, the great medieval philosopher and synthesizer of Jewish law, said that Teshuvah, this kind of moral and spiritual turning, is only complete when we find ourselves in exactly the same position we were in when we went wrong—when the state of estrangement and alienation began—and we choose to behave differently, to act in a way that is conducive to atonement and reconciliation. But this objection was raised: What happens if the circumstances in question don’t repeat themselves? How do we make complete Teshuvah then? Don’t worry, the Rambam replied. They always do. The unresolved elements of our lives—the unconscious patterns, the conflicts and problems that seem to arise no matter where we go or with whom we find ourselves—continue to pull us into the same moral and spiritual circumstances over and over again until we figure out how to resolve them. They continue to carry us into harm’s way until we become aware of them, conscious of them, and begin to change them. And we all have recurring motifs in the dark, unresolved corners of our lives—in the domestic unhappiness we replicate from one marriage to another, in the problems that seem to follow us from one job to the next, in all the mistakes that turn out to be the same mistake, which we make over and over.

This is not psychiatry,” Olivia says. “It is not therapy. It is poetry, my dear. The talent was there before awful things happened to you, it came with the original equipment just as your brother’s did, but talent is a dead engine. It runs on every unresolved experience—every unresolved trauma, if you like—in your life. Every conflict. Every mystery. Every deep part of your character you find not just unlikeable but loathsome.” One

Palestinian and Israeli narratives diverge over far more than the words that are commonly used for their respective national heroes, not least over the nature of the long and unresolved struggle between them over the same small territory on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. Both are reflected throughout this book. Each is authentic, even if dismissed by the other side as propaganda or lies. Neither can be ignored. The conflict between these two peoples can only be understood by paying attention to how they see themselves and their history as well as each other. Narrative, in its simplest definition, is ‘the story a nation tells itself about itself’.

This story reveals the formation of the ‘new states’ that were arbitrarily imposed on the continent and the identity of the colonial power that would oversee them for the next two or three generations. This is significant, for a future generation of largely culturally assimilated African leaders would treat these colonial boundaries as sacrosanct. In doing so, the colonial powers and their successors left unresolved conflicts of cultural and political identity that were to plague independent Africa even into the twenty-first century.

THE MIDPOINT OF life represents the moment of maximal conflict between our drive to seek external solutions to our emotional dilemmas and our recognition that, ultimately, they don’t work. In the rough patch we are forced to realize, often against our will, that the life-building activities of youth—job, relationship, children, house—have not taken care of what’s unresolved within. We still yearn—for what

Her psychoanalytic training led her to conclude that there was an unconscious level of motivation within each of us. According to Dr. Hunt’s training and beliefs, unconscious memory, thoughts, and feelings stem from earlier parts of life, including childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. These unconscious recollections, notions, and emotions affect what we think, what we say, and how we act. Unresolved conflicts from earlier life experiences may be hidden in the unconscious and influence behavior, which is especially important to people such as divers, who engage in high-risk activities.

Political authority, the authority of the State, may arise in a number of possible ways: in Locke's phrase, for instance, a father may become the "politic monarch" of an extended family; or a judge may acquire kingly authority in addition, as in Herodotus' tale. Whatever its first origin, political authority tends to include all four pure types of authority. Medieval scholastic teachings of the divine right of kings display this full extent of political authority. Even in this context, however, calls for independence of the judicial power arose, as exemplified by the Magna Carta; in this way the fact was manifested that the judge's authority, rooted in Eternity, stands apart from the three temporal authorities, which more easily go together, of father, master, and leader. The medieval teaching of the full extent of political authority is complicated and undermined by the existence of an unresolved conflict, namely that arising between ecclesiastical and state power, between Pope and Emperor, on account of the failure to work out an adequate distinction between the political and the ecclesiastical realms. The teachings of absolutism by thinkers such as Bodin and Hobbes resolved this conflict through a unified teaching of sovereignty that removed independent theological authority from the political realm. In reaction to actual and potential abuses of absolutism, constitutional teachings arose (often resting on the working hypothesis of a "social contract") and developed—most famously in Montesquieu—a doctrine of "separation of powers." This new tradition focused its attention on dividing and balancing political power, with a view to restricting it from despotic or tyrannical excess. Kojève makes the astute and fascinating observation that in this development from absolutism to constitutionalism, the authority of the father silently drops out of the picture, without any detailed analysis or discussion; political authority comes to be discussed as a combination of the authority of judge, leader, and master, viewed as judicial power, legislative power, and executive power. In this connection, Kojève makes the conservative or traditionalist Hegelian suggestion that, with the authority of the father dropped from the political realm, the political authority, disconnected from its past, will have a tendency towards constant change.

Dr. Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania is perhaps the world’s foremost expert on optimism and motivation. In his groundbreaking book, Learned Optimism, he suggests that depression is primarily the result of wrong thinking. He writes, “Depression . . . is caused by conscious negative thoughts. There is no deep underlying disorder to be rooted out: not unresolved childhood conflicts, not our unconscious anger, and not even our brain chemistry. Emotion comes directly from what we think: Think ‘I am in danger’ and you feel anxiety. Think ‘I am being trespassed against’ and you feel anger. Think ‘Loss’ and you feel sadness. . . . If we change these habits of thought, we will cure depression.”5

Again I read Hume, Rousseau, Smith, Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Mill. Again I thought about the family. There was a puzzle in it, something unresolved. What is a person to do, I asked, when their obligations to their family conflict with other obligations—to friends, to society, to themselves?

Stories can be incredibly powerful and beautiful devices that form and assist our perception and understanding of the world. However, according to twentieth-century American author Kurt Vonnegut, stories rarely tell the truth. After studying stories from an anthropological standpoint, examining the relationships with various cultures, Vonnegut found that stories and myths across many cultures share consistent similar shapes that can typically be broken down into just a few main categories. These shapes can be found graphing the course of a protagonist’s journey through a story along an axis of good and ill fortune. In all stories, someone or something starts somewhere, either in a good place, bad place, or neutral place. Then things happen related to that person which is conveyed as good or bad, bringing the character up and down the axis of fortune as they traverse forward through the story. Then, the story ends and its shape reveals itself. Vonnegut discovered that many popular stories follow common, consistent curves and spikes up and down the good/ill axis and that most end with the protagonist higher on the axis than where they started. However, what’s perhaps most interesting about Vonnegut’s analysis is this argument that these shapes, and consequently most stories, lie. Vonnegut proposed that a more honest, realistic story shape is simply a straight line. In a story of this shape, things still happen and characters still change, but the story maintains ambiguity around whether or not the events that occur are conclusively good or bad. According to Vonnegut, Hamlet is the closest literary representation of real life. “We are so seldom told the truth. In Hamlet-Shakespeare tells us that we don’t know enough about life to know what the good news is and the bad news is and we respond to that.” One story medium that seems to inadvertently coincide with this idea, is the medium of the television series. The goal of TV series is to keep viewers watching as long as possible. Each episode must be an engaging enough story to keep the viewer watching until the end, but each episode must also be left unresolved enough so the larger season-long and series-long stories continue and the viewer is interested in watching all the following episodes. In order to keep the whole thing going, none of the stories can reach a conclusion, and thus, the main characters can’t find ultimate peace or freedom from the uncertainty between good and ill-fortune. Of course, most shows don’t qualify as the straight-line shape in Vonnegut’s analysis, because most shows attempt to convey conclusively good and bad fortunes within them. However merely by the requirements of the medium TV series are forced to self-impose the same sort of universal truth that Vonnegut suggests. That neither the viewer nor the characters in a series can ever know what anything that’s so-called “good” or “bad” in one episode might cause in the next. And that on a fundamental level, the changes in each episode are futile because they are a part of a never-ending cycle of change through conflict and resolution, for the mere sake of its continuation, with no aim of a final resolution or reveal of what’s ultimately good or bad. Of course, eventually, a show reaches its series end when it stops working or runs its natural course. But the show fights its whole life to stay away from this moment. A good TV series, a series that we don’t want to end, is only a series that we don’t want to end because it can’t seem to resolve itself. In this, the format of Tv series also shows us that there is meaning, engagement, and entertainment within the endless cycle of change, regardless of its potential universal futility. And that perhaps change in life can exist not for the sake of some conclusion or ultimate state of peace, but a continuation of itself for the sake of itself. And perhaps the ability to be in this cycle of continued change for the sake of change is the actual good fortune.

Psychologists have separated needs and wants into two core types of passion: obsessive and harmonious.13 Obsessive passion is highly impulsive and fueled by suppressed emotions and unresolved internal conflict. You become obsessed with something to the point of an unhealthy desperation. You believe you need it, and can’t be happy without it. Obsessive passion is regularly associated with addiction. Also, when you become obsessively passionate about something, you lose sight of the other areas of your life.

The growth of Israeli influence in Europe presents a curious historical milestone and an unresolved contradiction. After the annihilation of Jews in the Holocaust, Germany has become the most consistently pro-Israel nation on the continent and is Israel’s biggest trading partner in Europe. German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited Israel in October 2021 on one of her final overseas visits before leaving office; it was her eighth trip during her sixteen years in power. She did not travel to the West Bank or Gaza. She praised the Jewish state, despite acknowledging that Israel did not embrace her favored two-state solution to the conflict with the Palestinians, but this did not matter because “the topic of Israel’s security will always be of central importance and a central topic of every German government.” It was an emotional connection, Merkel stressed, and one rooted in historical reconciliation and forgiveness. “The fact that Jewish life has found a home again in Germany after the crimes of humanity of the Shoah is an immeasurable sign of trust, for which we are grateful,” she wrote in the guest book at Jerusalem’s Holocaust memorial

If you're a fiction writer, consider reading the first half of The Playwright's Handbook, available on Kindle and as a trade paperback at Amazon. The various exercises on observation skills, sense memory (culled from acting), POV, plot development, setting exploration, character interaction, harnessing the power of the unresolved conflict, conflict and the disrupted ritual, etc., all work well for the fiction writer, as I've been told by a number of writers over the years. Many of the exercises are based on what I've learned taking and teaching drama, literature and creative writing classes. The exercises proved helpful when I moved from playwriting to fiction, including writing the stories in Floating World: Tales of Unrequited Love in '90s New York. My fiction has also been published online and in literary magazines such as Boulevard.

one can be busy and not distracted. One can be busy and prayerful, peaceful and focused at the same time. While being distracted may well have something to do with our outer world, it has much more to do with our inner world. It occurs when our compulsions remain unguarded. Our frustrations unresolved. The hunger for more unabated. The conflicts irreconcilable. The hurts unforgiven. Our pain unhealed. The need to settle our inner conflict is often far more pressing than resolving our supposed lack of time. And if we can, by the grace of God, still the raging ‘demons’ within, a life of intimacy with God becomes a vibrant and exciting possibility, even in the midst of demanding routines.

He believed that narcissism is a chronic search for self-preservation and the need to protect the psyche. In his telling, the origin of narcissism is likely some form of unresolved conflict from childhood that is playing out in adulthood. In one of the wisest descriptions of narcissism, Freud stated, “Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.

Also, abusive pastors often have unresolved conflict. They are typically estranged from many of the people they used to work with.

It has been my hope that now, without more war, we can learn from history that we are more than one side or the other. The unresolved suffering caused by hurt and its result, unrelenting retaliation, can only dissolve by detachment from one role or the other. Perennial spiritual wisdom teaches the same principle: detach from this world, this person, her successes, and failures. Until now, such detachment meant nonviolence and the transcendence of the material plane. Now detachment can have another meaning. Detachment must no longer lead to disinterest in and disconnection from the world, but to a new kind of immersion in the Dreaming. This kind of immersion in conflicts, coupled with appreciation of all sides, can replace transcendence as a goal.

The tension that results from conflicting emotions, especially when family members unresolved grief is not acknowledged, becomes so overwhelming that they are frozen in their tracks. They cannot make decisions, cannot act, and cannot let go.

The unresolved conflict between, on the one hand, a longing for the father and, on the other, a fear of him and a son’s defiance of him, has furnished us with an explanation of important characteristics of religion and decisive vicissitudes in it.” The positive feelings reemerge as one’s concept of God; and the negative feelings as one’s concept of the devil. *

In his telling, the origin of narcissism is likely some form of unresolved conflict from childhood that is playing out in adulthood

While many parents worry about the effect of divorce on children, Janet R. Johnston, Ph.D., executive director of the Judith Wallerstein Center for the Family in Transition, said in our interview that studies consistently find that children's exposure to unresolved conflict and verbal and physical abuse is a better predictor of children's adjustment than the marital status of their parents.

From the very first days of the occupation, the U.S. practiced what appeared from the outside to be a duplicitous policy toward denazification and decartelization of Germany. This was not surprising, considering that the policy was a product of an unresolved factional conflict within the U.S. government that went back a decade or more. The USSR—and particularly Stalin, for it was he who almost single-handedly made key Soviet foreign policy decisions at that point—interpreted the contradictions in U.S. behavior as proof of the Americans’ bad faith.

We had learned long ago that all couples fight, or at least argue from time to time. Mary Ann likes to say that it’s not conflict itself, but unresolved conflict, that causes problems in life and marriage.

The genetic history of his father’s family of origin seemed to be frequently plagued with curses, menacing secrets, and unresolved conflicts of his patriarchal bloodlines, transmitted through their DNA.

An experience is an encounter of mind with world, neither of these ever simple or wholly perspicuous. Often commonplace on the surface, experience shows itself, especially when we trace its roots to the remote domains of the unconscious, uncooperative, evasive, taciturn; the creature of ambiguous impulsions and unresolved conflicts, it often sows confusion and compels drastic misreadings. Far more than simply providing occasions for the stereotyped exercise of thoughts and action, experiences participate in creating the object of interest and passion; it gives form to the inchoate wishes and defends against besetting anxieties.

In talking to a wise older man, I said how haunted I was by guilt in this unresolved conflict. The older man said, “I think the problem is that you are a narrative thinker and you want narrative closure here. You want a plot resolution, and you just have to realize that your life is not a book. You may not ever see ‘closure’ here, and you should trust God with the plot.” He was exactly right. Almost as soon as I saw this, and said to God that I accepted the fact that I may never see this friendship reconciled, my old-and-now-new friend contacted me, with apologies accepted and apologies of his own to offer. That is not a prescription for forcing God to act, just the reverse. In my case, though, I think God wanted me to crucify my need for a life of “plotline consistency

In talking to a wise older man, I said how haunted I was by guilt in this unresolved conflict. The older man said, “I think the problem is that you are a narrative thinker and you want narrative closure here. You want a plot resolution, and you just have to realize that your life is not a book. You may not ever see ‘closure’ here, and you should trust God with the plot.” He was exactly right. Almost as soon as I saw this, and said to God that I accepted the fact that I may never see this friendship reconciled, my old-and-now-new friend contacted me, with apologies accepted and apologies of his own to offer. That is not a prescription for forcing God to act, just the reverse. In my case, though, I think God wanted me to crucify my need for a life of “plotline consistency” before I would experience the grace of resolution.

There can also be a particular problem with couples in a group. Sometimes a couple will form a faction splinter group. Then if they are upset about something going on in the group, they will collapse into collusion and gossip with each other, instead of airing their concerns with the whole group. Other times the factions are created along political lines or gender lines. With gender lines frequently the men think the women are “too sensitive” and controlling. The women think the men are “too insensitive” and domineering. When these judgments are shared by people without Nonviolent Communication skills, they most often create painful unresolved conflict. When they are thought and not shared it creates a tense depressed feeling in the group. 7. Remember that after you have shared something of yourself in front of a group you almost always need some kind of honest feedback in response. If you don’t ask for this feedback your mind will often project, onto the blank screen, nightmarish self-judgments which will serve to shut you down in the future. Example: You have just shared with the Committee to Create an Alternative School that you are afraid that the school will not be created in time for your five year old to attend and you will have to enroll her in public schools. You find yourself crying as you explain how important it is for you to protect her from the many kinds of violence found in public schools. Having cried, you feel vulnerable. You might ask: “I feel a bit vulnerable, having cried in public. I would like to know how people are feeling about what I have shared.” Then be prepared to empathize with the worst. Take a moment now to write down the three things that would be the most scary to hear after you have made yourself vulnerable and then asked for feedback. Here is what I came up with when I asked myself what would be scary feedback to receive and some possible empathic responses. So I have cried in front of the Committee to Create an Alternative School and asked for feedback and heard back:

Second marriages with children are up against tough statistics: 60% to 75% end in divorce. Conflict and unresolved relationship issues can plague the new couple to the point of exhaustion.

Had believed once that life must head to something, all the unresolved conflicts and questions leading towards some great culmination. Curiously underexamined beliefs like that, underpinning his life, his personality. Irrational attachment to meaning.

The junior Bush’s administration was full of unresolved conflicts of interest, but the officials didn’t need quid pro quo corruption to make sure their buddies prospered—that was an unavoidable consequence of their declared policy agenda. Hell, that was an unavoidable consequence of the Democrats’ declared policy agenda, too.

Freud’s innovation was to explain why hysterics swooned and seized. He coined the term ‘conversion’ to describe the mechanism by which unresolved, unconscious conflict might be transformed into symbolic physical symptoms. His fundamental insight—that the body might be playing out the dramas of the mind.

Had believed once that life must lead to something, all the unresolved conflicts and questions leading on towards some great culmination. Curiously underexamined beliefs like that, underpinning his life, his personality. Irrational attachment to meaning.