These inner tensions are the tiger within.
Within our fast-paced and pressured lives, we seldom give time for reflection on what’s going on inside us. We go on, presuming we’re fine, till ‘the wheels come off’. Instead of ongoing attentiveness, we often simply ignore issues and race on until we desperately need a therapist. But this ‘ambulance model’ of interacting with our pain and inner conflict doesn’t really help us to change. We so need to learn to use appropriate tools for our transformation, before a crisis happens.
As humans we all carry an inner drama, full of longing and disappointment, joy and pain. This conflictual inner landscape developed in us through our growing years as we experienced conflict’s messiness, its’ hurt, abuse and diminishment to differing degrees. This negative association has left many with a desire to avoid it at all costs, to keep the tiger caged within us. It’s true that people are not always trustworthy, but that mustn’t stop us from living our lives as fully as possible.
Being human means we all see and do things differently, and conflict will always be part of our condition. Is there a way, then, to make conflict into something creative, a positive force for transformation? The relationships we’re in are either growing or dying. Either we take risks in honesty and trust, revealing our motives and expectations or we play it safe and shut down, not being real or trustworthy, and are defended and opinionated.
In every conflictual situation, we will need to choose new behaviour patterns and go beyond the feelings of broken trust we’ve learnt from being hurt many times before. This takes practice as initially our feelings protest with, “Hey, I don’t do it this way!” Slowly we can make the shift and this can happen as we learn again, like we did as children, to trust ourselves, others and God once more. In each relationship lies the invitation – either we can choose to remain stuck and flooded in our known securities and emotions or we can refuse to let our past feelings define and control us. We can push against the entrenched attitudes and assumptions and allow our new feelings to upgrade our experience of life and to change it – to reform what we weren’t given as children.
God wants to help us transform the parts of ourselves which are deformed. This will mean that step by step we can move from living at a subsistence level emotionally, to realizing that we can become life-giving, both to ourselves and to the broader world. The conflict which was once locked up within us can be released in a positive way. In an appropriate context, the tiger within is a powerful force for good.
