Conflict Content

The "conflict" in "conflict content" is the biological conflict to which the special biological program is a response.

As long as that biological conflict remains active in the psyche, we stay obsessed with the conflict content. This content includes:

• feelings we are trying not to feel,
• the image of reality we are resisting (by not accepting it into consciousness), and
• the "problem" we are obsessing about.

Two individuals who live the same event or circumstance can form completely different conflict content — or none at all — because the meaning of a DHS and biological conflict is subjective and internal, not situational. It is created by an individual within his or her psyche.

When we experience a literal (physical) conflict (such as a morsel which we literally can't digest, or an actual physical puncture of our body), we handle it with an ordinary biological program.

It is the experience of a reality we don't like — and the meaning made of that experience (that it means we are existentially isolated) — that initiate and form the conflict content, which, in turn, determines a special biological program. The conflict content lives entirely within that meaning, which is why it, not the event, governs which SBS comes into effect:

1. If the conflict content concerns getting, or getting rid of, the experience of a "morsel," the SBS is endodermal.
2. If it concerns protecting the body from the experience of "attack" or loss of integrity, the SBS is old-mesodermal.
3. If it concerns the experience of "self-devaluation," the SBS involves new-mesoderm tissue.
4. If it concerns the experience of sensing and responding to the environment (including "territory"), the SBS involves ectodermal tissue.

A biological conflict is not an external event or circumstance. It is consciousness' interpretation of the meaning of an experience, and its resistance to that made meaning.

Once we form the meaning (at the moment of the DHS), we enact a precise adaptive pattern through psyche, brain, and the relevant body tissues. This adaptive pattern is the active phase of the special biological program, and it continues until the biological conflict is resolved.