I’m Just Protecting My Peace

You said it in the group chat and three people liked it.

You are not going to the thing. You muted the thread. You are not doing the school committee this year and you are not explaining why. You are protecting your peace.

And sometimes that is exactly the right call, and you should keep doing it. There is a version of this where you are a woman with too much on her and not enough hours, who has finally learned to say no, and every one of those nos is load-bearing. If that is you, nothing in this article is an argument against it.

But there is another version, and I want to describe it carefully, because it looks identical from the outside and it does not feel the same on the inside.

The thing with the clinical name

In anxiety treatment there is a term for the small moves we make to get through something frightening: safety behaviors.

A safety behavior is anything you do to make the anxiety survivable. Leaving the party by nine because you always have a reason to leave by nine. Reading the email a ninth time before you send it. Arriving twenty minutes early so you are never the one walking in. Rehearsing the conversation in the shower until you have the wording right. Asking a friend one more time whether it sounded okay. Sitting where you can see the door.

And, most invisibly, not going at all.

Why they are so hard to spot in yourself

Most of yours look like being good at your life.

Nobody has ever pulled you aside to say you prepare too thoroughly. You get praised for it. You are the one who is never caught out, never unready, never the person who said the wrong thing in the meeting. The behavior and the competence are the same behavior.

Which means the thing most likely to be maintaining your anxiety is the thing you are proudest of.

“Protecting my peace” is the strongest version of all of them, because the culture handed you the words. It is the only safety behavior that comes with applause.

The mechanism, which is the part worth knowing

Here is why this matters more than it sounds like it should.

Anxiety is a prediction. Something bad will happen, and you will not be able to handle it. The only thing that ever updates that prediction is evidence. You go, the bad thing does not happen, and some part of your nervous system quietly files that away.

A safety behavior stops the evidence from arriving.

You go to the party and you leave at nine, and the evening is fine. Now, what did your brain learn? Not that you can handle a party. It learned that you can handle a party if you leave at nine. You send the email after the ninth read and nobody is upset, so the ninth read stays. The credit goes to the behavior, every single time.

And when you skip the thing entirely, there is no evidence at all. Just a quiet, relieved certainty that you made the right call, which is the feeling anxiety produces when it has won.

So the anxiety does not shrink. It narrows the world instead, one reasonable decision at a time, and every one of those decisions was defensible on the day you made it.

Telling a boundary from avoidance

This is the part I get asked about, and I want to give you something usable rather than a judgment.

A boundary protects something you are moving toward. Avoidance protects you from something you are afraid of. Both produce a no. They do not feel the same afterwards.

A boundary tends to leave you settled. You said no to the committee because your Tuesdays belong to your kid, and that is still true an hour later.

Avoidance tends to leave you relieved first, and slightly smaller after. There is often a little argument running in your head about it later in the evening. You notice yourself building the case for it to someone who has not challenged you.

One more test, and it is the cleanest one. Would you still be saying no to this if you were not anxious about it? If the honest answer is that you would love to go and you are not going, that is worth looking at. If the honest answer is that you would not go either way, you are fine, and you can stop reading this paragraph.

What to do with one of them this week

Not all of them. One, and a small one.

Pick the lowest-stakes safety behavior you have, and drop it once on purpose. Send the email after two reads instead of nine. Stay until nine twenty. Go without the friend you always bring. Do not send the text asking whether it was okay.

Then pay attention to what happens, because that is the whole point. You are not testing your willpower. You are collecting the one piece of evidence your brain has never been allowed to have, which is that it was fine and you did not do the thing that usually makes it fine.

It will feel worse while you do it. That is not a sign it is going badly, it is the feeling of your nervous system noticing the handrail is gone. It passes, and the second time is easier, because nothing happened the first time.

That handles the small ones. The bigger question, why being unprepared feels genuinely dangerous to you, usually has a history attached, and that part is where a therapist comes in.

If you want to look at it with someone

At Marra, the first step is a free consultation, and this is ordinary work for us. Anxiety treatment with real evidence behind it spends a lot less time talking you out of your worries than people expect, and a lot more time helping you find out, carefully and on purpose, what you can actually handle. If we are not the right fit, we will tell you and point you somewhere better.

And if you read all this and decide your no was a real no, good. That is the correct outcome for a lot of women reading this.

I was not protecting my peace. I was protecting myself from finding out I would have been fine.