Keeping Peace Vs. Making Peace

Keeping the peace means staying silent, shrinking, agreeing, and disappearing so that no one around you is uncomfortable even at the cost of your own truth. Making peace means something entirely different: it means coming into honest, grounded alignment with yourself first, and letting that be the foundation of how you show up in every relationship. One is self-abandonment dressed as harmony. The other is self-loyalty in action. In this live, we explore the difference in the body, what each one feels like, what each one costs, and how to begin choosing the kind of peace that doesn't require you to disappear.

Transcript

There's a difference between keeping the peace and actually being at peace. And for a long time, I didn't know the difference. I thought peace meant making sure everyone around me was okay, That no one was upset, That relationships stayed intact, That tension was resolved. But what I didn't realize was how often I was creating that peace outside of myself by creating conflict within myself. This conversation originally came from one of my live sessions, And I want to share this portion of it with you because I think the distinction changes the way we understand boundaries, Guilt, And what it actually means to choose yourself. Because keeping the piece and making piece can look very similar on the outside. But inside your body, They are two very different experiences. Let's get into it. Today we're gonna be talking about the difference between keeping peace and making peace. So if you are new to me, My name again is Kelly. I am a doctor of physical therapy. I'm a transformation coach and I host the podcast, Rewiring Health. And I help high achievers transition from self-abandonment to self-loyalty. And so just to share what self-abandonment is, It's when you prioritize others' wants, Needs, And desires over your own, To the point where you are sacrificing yourself, You're sacrificing what your own needs are, Your own desires are, In the name of keeping the peace, Which is exactly what we're gonna talk about today. So I want you to think for a moment, Have you ever felt like you could not fully be truthful with someone? Like you were in a conversation, You're feeling out the conversation, You're seeing how it's going, And you start kind of stuffing down your own truth just so that you don't cause a riff in the connection or you don't offend anybody? Or have you ever felt like you didn't set a boundary because you didn't want the connection with that person to be disturbed or you didn't want to offend somebody? Have you ever felt like you didn't wanna speak up for yourself? Like you knew that you need to protect yourself or you knew you needed to say something and then you get into the position and then you just silence yourself and you don't say what you actually wanna say. So these, If this is resonating with you and I know some of you have shared that it is, These are all signs that you are keeping the peace. And so what keeping the peace is, Is when you try to maintain the connection with other people so much so that you start to diminish the connection with yourself. And we can think of this as keeping the peace. Everything seems harmonious outside of ourselves. People like us, We're usually the dependable one. We're usually the ones who hold it all together, The kind one, The friendly one, The one who everyone gets along with. That's what we see on the outside. But what we don't realize is what it's costing us. And keeping the peace really is self-abandonment disguised as harmony. I'm gonna say it again because I think this is something that we really need to hear, That keeping the peace is self-abandonment disguised as harmony. And that can feel like harmony on the outside when you have these connections maintained with other people, You're getting along with people, And then what's happening internally is that you know the truth that is being shoved down in order to do that. You know how much you're silencing yourself. You know the resentment of what you feel after that conversation of like, Why didn't I just speak up for myself? Why didn't I just say what was true for me? Why do I keep putting myself in this position? Those are the internal struggles. Those are the costs that we feel. And beyond just some of the mental and thought processes that we experience, We also feel in our body. We feel the tension in our body. We feel like the heaviness after that conversation. We feel like we can't sleep at night. We're waking up thinking about the conversation over and over and over again. I'm like, I should have said that. I should have done that. This is the cost of keeping the peace. So if you are seeing yourself in this, I first just want to normalize that, Because we can see this in ourselves. And some of our immediate reaction can be to shame ourselves. Like, What is wrong with me? Why do I keep doing this? Why can't I just speak up for myself? Why can't I just protect myself? Why don't I just set boundaries? Why do I keep finding myself in the same situation with different people? Like, What is going on? And so that can be our immediate reaction. I there's something wrong with me that I keep finding myself in this situation. And so I want to reframe that for you. So if you find yourself saying that to yourself, I want you to reframe this because it is not something that's wrong with you. It's actually something that your body, Your system, Your mind has very, Very creatively created to adapt to your situation. It is a survival mechanism. So you have maybe learned early on that when you spoke up, It threatened the connection with people. Maybe you spoke up for yourself as a child and you were quickly quieted or you're saying, No, Don't say that. Or you had needs and desires as a child and they were maybe squashed or not honored. And so you learn very quickly when I speak up for myself, That is a threat to connection with my caregiver. So I'm going to learn to be quiet. Or maybe you learn to play a certain role as the good girl, The good boy, The one who gets along with everybody. Because again, It maintained that connection and connection for us is survival. Because when we have caregivers, We have to rely on them, Especially as children. So we learn that we have to be, Say, And do whatever we need to do in order to keep that connection going. Unless we see anything different or learn any other way of being, This then translates into adulthood. So we see these patterns continued at work, We see them with partners, We see them with. . . Our families, Our friends, You can see these patterns continue because it's the way you've learned to be. And it may be all that you've known. And so you may not see that there's any other way to be until you can step outside of that and see it for what it is. So if you see these patterns in yourself, I definitely don't want you to shame yourself for them. I want you to recognize that you have adapted in a very, Very smart way. But now that you see it, This is where you get to choose differently. And this is where you get to show your system that it's safe to adapt. Hold that peace within yourself without the pressure of keeping the peace outside yourself. So I'm gonna transition here. So we were talking about keeping the peace. Now I wanna go into making peace. So this is truly where we maintain the connection with ourselves, Even if it creates some kind of disconnection outside ourselves. So that is the distinguishing factor between keeping the peace and making peace, That we keep the peace in order to maintain the connection outside ourselves at the cost of the connection within ourselves, Versus making peace is that we maintain the connection with ourselves at the potential cost that it may cause some disconnection outside ourselves. And that's why making peace and honoring our own peace can feel so destabilizing because the threat of potentially disconnecting from people can feel so overwhelming that we can't really sit in that discomfort. We don't feel safe enough to sit in that discomfort. And so making peace with yourself is honoring your own values. It's honoring your own needs, Your wants, Your desires, And saying that even if people disagree, This is how I'm choosing to live my life. This is how I'm choosing to honor myself, That I am no longer willing to spare the connection with myself in order to keep the peace with everyone else. And this is one of those big transitions, And this is where we go from self-abandonment to self-loyalty, Where you are saying that no matter what it is, I am staying with me. I am staying loyal to myself. I am honoring my peace. I am going to be connected with myself, Even if it starts to change things in my life. And that takes a tremendous amount of courage to do that. A tremendous amount of knowing yourself and being grounded in yourself. So I know how destabilizing this is, And when you finally choose making peace versus keeping the peace, That is a huge transition point, Part one. Where you have to work through a lot to go in that. And it really is creating that safety within yourself to realize that even if these dynamics change outside myself, I'm going to be OK, That I am no longer willing to lose myself, Even if it means losing some of these relationships. And so this is why I share this, Because we can often hear you hear so much just set a boundary and it feels so, So easy. And, Oh, Just just do that. And it's downplayed to the to the extent that when you actually do that and you're sitting in that, You start thinking, What is wrong with me? Like, Why is it so hard to uphold these boundaries? It's because I find boundaries are often downplayed of how complex they can be, Because choosing yourself is not necessarily just as simple as choosing yourself. It's choosing a whole new identity for yourself that changes the whole dynamic of everything you've ever known. And then we sit there and wonder why we feel so destabilized. We sit there and wonder, Why am I struggling with this? Why am I spiraling after one text message from this person? And that is why this is so challenging to actually make peace with ourselves, Even though it's completely desirable, Even though it transforms our whole life. And so when we are loyal to ourselves and we choose making peace within ourselves, That's when your whole life changes because you no longer rely on harmony outside yourself because you have it within yourself. And that is the transition point. Where you don't have to rely on people making the right decisions. You don't have to rely on people changing. You no longer rely on people saying the right thing because inevitably they're going to say something that may disrupt you, But you're not completely taken off course by something that's happening outside yourself. And this is where I think so many women get stuck. Because you may already know what you need, You may know the boundary you need to set, You may know the conversation you need to have, You may know that something no longer feels right for you, And you may even have already chosen yourself. But knowing what you need and actually being able to stay with yourself when choosing it creates discomfort, Guilt, Fear, Or disappointment around you are two very different things. And that is the gap. It's the gap I know very well, Not only through the work I do, But because I lived it. There was a time when I thought choosing myself was the finish line. What I learned was that sometimes choosing yourself is only the beginning. The deeper work is learning how to stay with yourself afterwards. When someone is disappointed, When the guilt comes in, When you're second guessing yourself. When your body is telling you to go back, Explain it, Fix it, Or make everything okay. That's the work of self-loyalty. This isn't about giving you another set of boundaries to follow or telling you what decisions you should make. It's about helping you build the internal safety and capacity to hear yourself, Trust what you know, And stay connected to yourself through the discomfort that can come when you stop abandoning yourself to maintain the peace around you. And what I want to leave you with is this. Keeping the Peace asks, What do I need to do so everyone else around me is okay? Making peace begins with a very different question. What would it look like to stay with myself here? Because peace that requires you to abandon yourself isn't really peace. And you don't have to keep leaving yourself in order to keep it. Thanks for joining me, And I'll see you in the next one.