Hello everyone, welcome to the Said in Therapy Podcast. Have you ever considered going to therapy and you ended up not going? My question is why? In my humble opinion, I believe everyone can benefit from therapy. In fact, I believe everybody should go at least once in their life. My name is Iman Tohami and I'm a psychologist. This podcast tells you all about everyday cases with everyday people who have everyday problems and difficulties, and sometimes they carry around really deep wounds. These are their stories. Regardless, um, let's just quickly talk about what's happening in the world. I hope all of you are okay. I don't want to go too much into politics. We all know that there is now war in Ukraine and um between Ukraine and Russia, and it might be surprising to many people, it might not be so surprising for many people. We just started to seemingly leave the pandemic, and now we actually end up confronting war. I just want you to understand that many people feel a certain way about this, and yeah, wherever you are, no matter how you feel about it, I wish for all of us that we finally get a rake from all the bad news and that we are finally able to catch a breath. Okay, but anyway, how to address conflicts and how to deal with them. I find that this is a very important topic, and this is why I decided to record this episode for you to give you some insight on how to deal with conflicts. I get this answer, sorry, I get this question all the time, especially when I do my Q&As. It is always about how do I deal with so-and-so? What do I tell so-and-so? What do I do when? And I think it's very, very crucial to understand what conflict actually is and how we best can address it. All right, let's start okay. Uh, this is amazing. I actually like this. I wanted to do this for a very long time. I don't know why I haven't, but here we are now, and I'm actually very happy to talk about this topic because I think it's one of the most important things I want people to understand. How do we deal with conflict? It is simple, really, but difficult to implement. Start having conflicts with yourself instead of suppressing major negative emotions. Yes, you will tell me now, but how do we do that? And what do you mean by that? So let me explain this. The biggest difference between addressing who you are today and who you are, let's say, or who you were a few years ago, is that you can easily now work on being at ease with who you are today, where you stand in life, no matter what you do in life. So I want to explain to you the concept of internal inner conflicts. Often we are dealing with so much trauma, we develop all those insecurities, and sometimes we put uh this immense pressure on ourselves to be perfect, to perform, you know, to be someone people expect us to be. We build this image and we are conditioned to build this image, and then we are somehow pressured, almost forced, to live up to this image. So we try so hard to cover up all our all of our insecurities. We try to be so many different people, to so many different people, almost like we are putting all putting on all those masks just to people please everyone around us. And then we look at people, you know, mostly people we look up to in one way or another without having a full grasp of who they are, and then we think we want to be like this so-and-so person. When we slowly start understanding that the pressure that we feel is just in our hats, and when we start letting go of this pressure, and when we understand or get the tools to manage our feelings, for example, when we start having feelings like jealousy. Oh, by the way, jealousy is a totally normal feeling to have. Maybe I will make a full episode on um jealousy because I feel like it's almost demonized. But jealousy is a very, very, very powerful emotion. Yes, it's darker, maybe a little bit negative, but it tells you so much about you. We all felt it at times. Whoever tells you that they are never jealous, I am telling you, I can promise you, they're lying. So, anyway, so when we start having feelings like jealousy, or when we start feeling insecure, or when we start projecting onto other people, we actually can start catching ourselves earlier when we allow ourselves to have conflicts with ourselves. When we suddenly start being able to ask ourselves, why did we do that? Why do I feel this way? We are actually allowing ourselves to have a healthy conflict with ourselves to figure things out. When we think everything needs to be perfect, let's say friendships, relationships, everything needs to be perfect, everything needs to be like this picture, Instagram picture that tells you this is a perfect life. Once the first conflict arises, we might feel like this what we had here is now broken. We had a conflict, it's no no longer good enough. This is also why many people ghost, by the way, because we cannot handle the fact that things are flawed. And when we are bad at dealing with conflict externally, there is probably a huge chance, and I'm almost certain about this, that we are also bad at dealing with our internal conflicts. Basically, we need to learn to confront ourselves. So, why is this so hard? When we start confronting ourselves, we also start acknowledging the darker sides of us that we don't want to acknowledge. Sides we may not be so proud of. A lot of the things we did in the past, you know, maybe are hard to acknowledge, but it's crucial to our development that we do. We then can take full accountability, you know. In the media, so many people talk about accountability. So, what does it mean? It doesn't mean that you are um, you know, in depth with yourself and now you have to pay yourself back, but in a way it is. But try not to think in such tangible terms. It basically means to understand what we did wrong and how we can maybe correct it. And if it's too late to correct it, maybe we can correct our behavior for the future. So it's very crucial that we do have this reflection of ourselves to understand what we do in our lives, where are the patterns that we keep repeating because we fail to look at it and understand that there is something that we need to work on. And then ultimately, we also need to forgive ourselves for not knowing better or not dealing with situations in a in a in a good way. What happens when we start acknowledging our darker sides? I already mentioned this. We start understanding our pattern, which behavior we repeat, when we are scared, when we are tired, when we are insecure. You know, when you start confronting those patterns, you can also change them and develop them from there. We often do really crazy things when we are scared. We do really crazy things when we are insecure. Sometimes we even put betray ourselves just because we don't know how to handle situations better, healthier. So let me go back to perfection for a second. We have this weird timeline in our heads sometimes. Like graduation, getting married, buying a house, having babies. It's like this blueprint, this guideline, but is that really what you want? Or are you maybe tricked into believing that this is what you want? Especially when we are younger, let's say like mid-twenties or just graduating, we don't really fully understand who we are. So when people tell us, and in this case, I mean society, tells us that this is what you're supposed to do, this is what you're supposed to want, we trick ourselves into believing into believing that this is really what you want. But is it really? Do you want to get married that quickly? Do you want to be married at 25, for example, or do you want to travel? This is what I mean with conflict. You have to sit down and see what you are working for. Why are you so why are you working so hard for something? Is it really something that you want? I have to say at this point, we are not meant to live the same exact life as everybody else or people that we see. But when we don't address what we really want, we end up building so many unresolved conflicts, and maybe we end up living a life that we really don't want. And when we are not able to have these inner conflicts with ourselves, I can guarantee you almost promise you that you will not be able to have healthy conflicts with anyone else. Having a conflict with people or with yourself is actually not a bad thing because, as I said, it's an opportunity to grow, it's an opportunity to understand yourself better and actually get closer to what you want or get closer with the person you are in conflict with. Look at it that way. When we have a hard time looking at ourselves and our darkness, how will we tolerate someone else's? You really need to sit down, reflect, and ask yourself, who are you? By the way, I'm not meaning like literally sitting down, but taking a moment and asking yourself, who are you? Who are you really? Those introspective questions, as cheesy and cliche as they sound, are so important because they're not just, you know, we are not just here to work to be productive and reach achievements. We are also here to live and do good and understand people and influence people in a good way, influence ourselves and impact, having good impact with our lives and living a life of meaning. If you don't understand yourself, you will never live a life of meaning. You need to understand what you like and what you dislike, who you are and who you want to be. But self-awareness is what will bring you clarity about your own conflict within yourself, and then you will also be able to address conflict with other people around you. Basically, my message to you is be at ease with conflict, be at ease with confrontation. It's really not a bad thing. It will teach you so much about yourself, who you are, who you want to be, and how to deal with others. So I really hope that helped. And see you next time. Or actually, talk to you next time. Hello everyone, welcome to the Said in Therapy Podcast. Have you ever considered going to therapy and you ended up not going? My question is why? In my humble opinion, I believe everyone can benefit from therapy. In fact, I believe everybody should go at least once in their life. My name is Iman Tohami, and I'm a psychologist. This podcast tells you all about everyday cases with everyday people who have everyday problems and difficulties, and sometimes they carry around really deep wounds. These are their stories.