Intrapersonal communication and CR

Intrapersonal communication is, in my mind, critical to determining how people arrive at decisions. I did some of my undergraduate research on this topic and found that there isn't much about it in the communications field. The majority of what's there falls under the heading of self persuasion or self talk.


There's probably a great deal more information in the psychology circles but I'm interested in what we say to ourselves - how we talk ourselves into and out of making certain decisions. Here is what seems to be a reasonable definition of psychology.

I'll have to take some time later to think about how psychological definitions of intrapersonal would differ from communications defintions but here's a quick thought: Communications theory would be more interested in the actual messages than in how those messages were sent and received. I would also *assume* that comm theory would look at the meaning of those messages and (perhaps) the content. To me, it looks like a high probability that the two fields would overlap in this area - since the sender and receiver are the same and the message content is internal.

This is where some of the spiritual work would come in - learning to determine why we respond the way we do and what is motivating those responses from a spiritual/emotional perspective instead of a ego/mental perspective. In my personal experience, we often don't know or understand our motivations for certain actions, we just know that our knee jerk reaction in 'x' situation is to do 'y'. For many people, that seems a good enough answer. For me, it's not. I want to understand why certain people seem to push buttons or elicit specific responses. If it's a response I'm not happy with, what are my choices? Avoid the person, force a different response or keep responding the same way? None of those are good choices for me.

In any case, the areas of interest that are emerging for me are these: How we interact energectically, how this energetic communication affects us during conflict and how can we take a more spiritual and loving approach to conflict?

Additional references:

Self persuasion and conformity
Communicating Social Change (workshop)
Balance theory
Cognitive response theory
Indiana State - info on self talk
Interesting tidbit on stepfamily formation and self talk
SelfGrowth.com
Some class lecture notes in powerpoint format - click the Personal Communication link.