When Keeping the Peace Hurts

Maybe it’s the role you’ve played in your family for as long as you can remember.

Maybe your friend group (or the bullies) in school taught you how important it is.

Maybe a romantic relationship or your workplace pushed you to take it on.

However it’s found its way to you, being the Peacekeeper in your life can meet a lot of needs and desires…

…and it can also hurt.

But there are reasons we fall into these ways of moving through the world.

Keeping the peace—making sure everyone else is happy, cared for, calm, placated—can help reduce the tension, conflict, anxiety that can be so hard to sit with and work through.

And if you’ve learned through your experiences that relational conflict is painful, unresolvable, or just plain intolerable, it makes so much sense why you’d be working so hard to keep the peace.

And also…usually that means so much of the focus is on everyone else’s happiness that our own just gets…lost somewhere in the shuffle.

But because being the peacekeeper does meet some of your needs, this can often be hard to recognize at first.

“When everyone’s happy, I’m happy!”

“I feel so much better when there’s no conflict or tension in the room.”

“Saying ‘yes’ to everyone makes them happy, and that makes it easier for me too!”

These things aren’t untrue…they just don’t tell the whole story.

Not feeling able to set boundaries or share your real feelings can be painful. It can build resentment, which then we continue to push down because uh-oh what will happen if I acknowledge my big feelings that other people might be upset by??

It can feel scary. It can feel dysregulating in the body. And it can be so fucking hard to make changes that will shift the social roles everyone expects from you, and you expect from yourself.

So as social media is abuzz with talks of boundary-setting, people-pleasing, and saying ‘no,’ please know that it’s ok if it doesn’t feel as easy as a simplified post or reel might make it seem.

Especially because, again, the roles we take on usually have some sort of purpose—even if it doesn’t meet all of our needs, it probably meets some, otherwise we likely wouldn’t invest so much time and energy into it.

And, if you’ve been noticing more and more the hurt that can often come with being the peacekeeper in the group, you don’t have to figure out what to do next all on your own.

Therapy is one of many places of support that can help you get a better understanding of how these themes show up in your life and how you might want to work with them now.

It’s not always easy, but it is possible.

I’d love to see how I can support you in that work. Reach out to schedule a free consult and let’s get started!