Our Inner Civil Wars

On parts we disown and why change is sometimes more complex than we thing

There’s a reason skilled psychotherapists pay attention to every voice a client brings into the room and make sure they’re not favouring one over the other. It’s not enough to focus only on the hopeful, forward-looking part—the side that wants to change and move on—while ignoring the parts that feel stuck, ashamed, hesitant, or afraid. And the reverse is just as unhelpful. Both voices matter. Both have something important to say, and it’s our job to help the client acknowledge and make sense of what each part is trying to communicate.

Take, for example, someone living with social anxiety. They may find themselves identifying strongly with the part that says, “I want to overcome this and be able to connect with others,” while distancing and even rejecting themselves from the part that says, “I just want to hide from people, from the world.” It's understandable that they may feel more aligned with the first voice, which seems to promise growth and a better life. And at first glance, it might appear sensible to encourage that “positive” voice and disregard the other. But in clinical practice, it quickly becomes clear that real, lasting change doesn’t tend to work that way.

This doesn’t mean that every voice or part of the self has to be liked or wanted. The idea is recognising that each voice, each inner position holds meaning—and that meaning can be important to understand for change to happen. When we push one aside, we risk overlooking what’s happening beneath the surface; what might actually be shaping the behaviour we’re trying to change.

This has implications for behaviour change in daily life because a lot of self-help narratives assume we’re internally unified, coherent beings marching in a straight line toward a single, admirable goal. They tell us to fully commit to the version of ourselves we want to become and discard anything that doesn’t fit that image. But what about the parts of us that hesitate, resist, or fear? That kind of narrow—and frankly, naive—approach rarely asks what those parts might be trying to protect, or what they might need. There’s little curiosity about why they exist in the first place.

The idea that we contain different, sometimes conflicting parts of ourselves is just one example of how change tends to be more complicated than it first appears. It challenges the assumption that we’re consistent people making clear decisions about how to improve our lives. In reality, we’re full of competing motives, emotions, and beliefs. Understanding and working with that internal complexity is central to how lasting change actually happens, at least in the therapeutic space.

Just to be clear, when I talk about “parts,” I’m not referring to clinical dissociation or personality splits. This isn’t a neat split between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. What I mean is that many well-established therapeutic approaches—from Person-centred therapy and Gestalt, to Transactional Analysis and contemporary psychoanalytic thinking—recognise that while we experience ourselves as one person, we’re also made up of different inner positions, perspectives, moods, and voices. The question isn’t whether those parts exist; it’s how in touch we are with them, and how we relate to them.

Psychologist Mick Cooper, a key figure in person-centred and existential therapies, describes two primary modes of relating to ourselves: I–I and I–Me. In I–I mode, we relate to our own impulses and emotions with an attempt to understand them, recognising them as legitimate—even the ones that feel uncomfortable or contradictory. In I–Me mode, we distance ourselves from, and even reject, aspects we dislike: “That wasn’t me. I don’t know what came over me.” In this mode, unwelcome parts are treated as strangers.

To illustrate this, imagine a moment when you snap at a colleague in frustration. In I–I mode, you might pause to ask yourself, “What part of me reacted just then? What was it trying to express? What need wasn’t being met?” You’re not excusing the behaviour, but you’re treating it as something worth paying attention to. You’re listening to it, rather than brushing it aside. In I–Me mode, by contrast, you might simply say, “That wasn’t like me,” and move on without looking deeper. The part of you that reacted gets dismissed, along with the chance to learn from it or address the conditions that triggered it.

This distinction isn’t just a matter of wording. It reflects a core principle in therapeutic work: the aim isn’t to banish or suppress the parts of ourselves we find uncomfortable, but to get to know them. When we treat those parts as dangerous or shameful, we might feel some short-term relief by pushing them aside but they rarely disappear. Instead, they tend to go underground, gather strength, and eventually resurface. The more we ignore them, the louder they tend to knock.

We readily accept, and even admire, this kind of internal tension in fiction. In books, films, and television, we’re drawn to characters who are full of contradictions. It’s not their polish or consistency that makes them compelling; it’s their conflict and complexity. They might act in self-defeating ways yet remain sympathetic. They wrestle with guilt or anger but still show moments of clarity and warmth. They long for closeness while keeping others at a distance. These characters feel real because they hold opposing forces within them, just like we do.

In everyday life, though, we’re often encouraged to do the opposite. We absorb tidy, socially acceptable labels: I’m patient. I’m ambitious. I don’t care what people think. Traits that don’t fit that narrative, like impatience, envy, or resentment, are treated as flaws to apologise for, hide, or deny. But pushing them away doesn’t make them disappear. As Gestalt therapy founder Fritz Perls pointed out, this sets up an “inner civil war.” One part of us works overtime to keep the other parts contained and in check. That effort might hold for a while, but under stress, pressure, or emotional strain, the parts we’ve tried to suppress often break through—sometimes in ways that feel chaotic or completely out of character.

One sign of how vital this kind of inner work is comes from a therapeutic technique called Chairwork. It’s especially common in Gestalt therapy but has been adapted across many other approaches too. Chairwork invites clients to give voice to different internal parts by literally moving between chairs to inhabit different perspectives. In this process, conflicting or long-silenced parts are expressed, heard, and sometimes challenged. Some voices may need to be spoken out loud for the first time. Others might need to be questioned or challenged. And sometimes, new perspectives begin to show up in the process.

Fritz Perls saw Chairwork as a way to cut through the usual intellectual defences and access something more raw and honest. Later, emotion-focused therapy expanded on this technique, emphasising that change isn’t just about insight; it’s also about emotional engagement and being willing to have real conversations with the parts of yourself you tend to avoid.

Chairwork makes it easier to notice what happens when we ignore, reject, or sideline certain parts of ourselves. The feelings and voices we push away don’t disappear. They stick around beneath the surface and influence how we act, often without us realising it. By bringing them into the open, Chairwork helps reveal the internal tension that builds when we try to shut down certain parts of who we are.

The fact that this technique works, and is backed by research, is a useful reminder that it matters to make space for different sides of ourselves. It shows why it’s important to build a relationship with the parts we might prefer to avoid, no matter how uncomfortable, awkward, or difficult they feel.

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So, returning to the point I raised earlier about how psychological change is often portrayed in popular narratives, therapeutic practice reveals a more complicated picture. Many behavioural models present change as a matter of discipline, habit, or mindset, offering neat formulas and tidy action plans. But these approaches tend to overlook the layered, often contradictory nature of human experience. Longstanding behavioural patterns are not necessarily merely habits to be unlearned; they’re shaped by caregivers, culture, biology, and our relationships with others. To reduce something that intricate to a checklist isn’t just ineffective; at times, it can feel dismissive or even absurd.

Recognising that we are conflicted beings, containing parts of ourselves we embrace and others we disown, offers a clearer, more nuanced account of why change is rarely straightforward. It reminds us that meaningful, lasting change depends on engaging with the full range of our internal experience — including the voices we’d prefer not to hear. Of course, this is no easy task. Real life isn’t a novel, and not everyone sits down in a therapy room. But acknowledging this internal complexity invites us to view ourselves with a little more acceptance.

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