Torn Between Truths: How Inner Conflict Reveals What We Need

There are certain emotions that sneak in without fanfare—unassuming but persistent. For me, that emotion was frustration.

I would feel so much—that I felt stuck. And when I couldn’t move the emotions in my body or the thoughts in my mind—I often would just start crying. It appeared that I was “crying for no reason,” but actually I was crying from feeling it all but not able to process it.

Frustration lived in my body like static. It hummed under the surface of my skin, just loud enough to agitate, just subtle enough to be dismissed. It showed up when I overcommitted. It was wild energy that vibrated almost violently but wouldn’t move. I constantly felt between two extremes—an unstoppable force and an immovable object. For most of my life, I mistook that frustration as a personal flaw—my inability to “just pick a lane.”

But now I understand: frustration was often a sign that I was feeling contradictory truths that were in battle with each other and I felt I had to choose between them—was inner conflict—a split between truths I didn’t know how to carry at once.

What Inner Conflict Really Is

We often treat inner conflict as a failure of willpower—“deer in the headlights,” “emotionally sensitive,” etc. while it isn’t always an overstimulating experience as feeling all things, sometimes it is as simple as being torn between two “big “ and important things that have you stopped in your tracks.

That is what makes inner conflict a competition between two values—not right vs. wrong, but real vs. also real.

It’s the desire to speak your truth—and the longing to stay connected.

It’s the pull toward peace—and the fire to make change.

It’s the need for structure—and the ache for freedom.

Sometimes it’s:

• Belonging vs. authenticity

• Ambition vs. well-being

• Stability vs. freedom

Inner conflict rarely enters the room and announces itself, but there are a few ways it shows up:

• Frustration: when your actions clash with your deeper truth.

• Procrastination: when two internal parts are locked in indecision.

• Over-functioning: when you overcompensate for the part you’re not listening to.

• Numbness: when the conflict feels too big to hold, and your system shuts down.

We get stuck not because we don’t know what matters, but because two things matter deeply—and we haven’t found a way to honor both.

Why We Get Stuck

We’re taught to choose when we are confronted with options, we aren’t taught to think beyond that. We don’t realize that often the solution to conflicting information isn’t that one is better and the other is wrong, but that there is truth on all sides. Often the solution and choice contains bits from both.

Often what we end up choosing is the voice that’s most palatable to others or the one that’s most productive, most familiar, or the one that is easy to explain.

But what is need to do is sit with the options, weigh them out, hear them out, and choose an entirely different choice that contains the wisdom of the competing forces.

This is key to self-integration—it isn’t about choosing one option—it’s about creating from the wisdom of all your contradictions, conflict, and ideas.

From Conflict to Clarity

The goal isn’t to eliminate the conflict through bypassing it or training ourselves to avoid discomfort by choosing the same thing over and over again. The goal is sit and listen to where we find ourselves at these critical impasses.

This is where curiosity is key. We begin to ask better questions:

• What are the needs beneath these two truths?

• Which voice is louder—and which one is being ignored?

• What fear is protecting me? What wisdom is waiting for me?

• What would it look like to honor both—not with compromise, but with care?

Sometimes clarity isn’t just an answer—it shows up as creativity— a commitment to self that says, “Yes. This honors all of me.”

Listening As Liberation

Frustration was never just an annoyance—it was the door that me to the deeper understanding of myself and my choices. It showed me options beyond the choices I thought were the only ones.

And now, I wonder—what’s speaking inside of you?

Where do you feel the pull between truths?

Where are you trying to choose when you’re meant to integrate?

Where have you mistaken discomfort for failure, instead of a signal that it’s time to listen more closely?

The goal is not to live in constant certainty or constant pull between opposite forces. It’s about creating something new with all the information you can gather.

We don’t need to feel stuck or limited to the choices we see at first glance. Because when we learn to excavate these thoughts and pull a part our choices—we see that inner conflict is actually a call for more creativity.