Peace doesn’t require everything around you—or everything inside you—to feel settled.
You have worked hard to create stability.
You think ahead. You prepare. You solve problems before they become bigger problems. You take care of the people you love. When something feels uncertain, your instinct is often to figure out what can be done.
That ability has served you well.
And when you’ve spent enough of your life anticipating what might happen next, it makes sense that peace can start to look a lot like nothing being wrong.
Everyone you love is okay.
The relationship is okay.
Your body feels okay.
Work is manageable.
There isn’t a difficult conversation hanging over you or a decision you can’t quite make.
You know what is coming next.
Then you can exhale.
Then you can rest.
Then you can have peace.
The problem is that life rarely gives us all of those things at the same time.
Sometimes what we call peace is actually relief
Relief is wonderful.
The test comes back normal. The conflict gets resolved. The person calls. The decision gets made. The thing you were worried about works out.
Your shoulders drop.
Your breathing changes.
Okay. Everything is okay.
There is nothing wrong with that. Our bodies are supposed to respond when something difficult resolves.
But relief and peace aren’t quite the same thing.
Relief says, The thing I was afraid of didn’t happen.
Or, The hard thing is over.
Peace has to be able to exist in a world where sometimes the hard thing does happen.
That distinction has become increasingly important to me.
Because if peace depends on everything turning out the way we hope, then peace will always be fragile.
You can’t prepare your way out of uncertainty
You are probably very good at reducing uncertainty.
You gather information. You consider possibilities. You make a plan and then a backup plan. You think through what you would do if this happens, and what you would do if that happens.
Sometimes that is wisdom.
Sometimes preparation is exactly what a situation requires.
But eventually we reach the edge of what preparation can give us.
There are things you cannot know yet.
There are outcomes you cannot guarantee.
There are people you cannot control.
There are losses you cannot prevent.
There are questions that do not have answers yet—and some that may never have the kind of answer you want.
For someone who has built a life around being capable, that edge can be deeply uncomfortable.
You know how to do something.
It is much harder to be in a place where there is nothing left to do except live inside what you do not know.
And perhaps that is one of the places where we begin to discover the difference between control and peace.
Peace doesn’t mean your body never reacts
I think we sometimes imagine a regulated nervous system as one that remains calm.
That isn’t how I understand it.
Your body is supposed to respond to your life.
You may feel your heart race before a difficult conversation. You may be restless while waiting for news. You may cry when something hurts. You may feel anger when something matters. You may have moments when uncertainty wakes up old patterns and you notice yourself wanting to manage, anticipate, fix, or prepare.
None of those things automatically mean you have lost your peace.
And they certainly don’t mean you have failed at healing.
Peace is not the absence of activation.
Sometimes peace looks like being able to notice what is happening inside you without immediately needing to make it stop.
I am anxious, and I am here.
I am sad, and I can stay.
I don’t know what is going to happen, and I don’t have to solve that tonight.
There is something different about being able to experience discomfort without interpreting the discomfort itself as evidence that something is wrong.
Faith has changed the way I think about peace
My faith is part of how I understand this.
There is a kind of peace in Scripture that has always seemed much more substantial to me than the idea of simply feeling calm.
Biblical peace—shalom—is bigger than an absence of conflict. It carries a sense of wholeness, well-being, things being held together as they should be.
And yet the Christian story certainly does not promise a life in which nothing painful happens.
Jesus speaks about peace in the same breath that he acknowledges trouble.
That matters to me.
Peace and trouble can apparently occupy the same sentence.
And perhaps the same life.
For me, faith does not mean I always feel peaceful. It doesn’t eliminate uncertainty, grief, fear, or the desire for things to turn out differently than they sometimes do.
It gives me somewhere to stand when I cannot make the uncertainty go away.
There are moments when peace looks less like I know everything will turn out the way I want and more like:
I do not know what happens next, and I am not alone here.
That is a very different kind of peace.
Sometimes peace is uncomfortable
This may be the part we don’t talk about as much.
Peace can actually require us to tolerate discomfort.
You may choose not to fix someone else’s feelings, which means you have to feel the discomfort of knowing they are disappointed.
You may tell the truth in a relationship and have to tolerate not knowing exactly how it will be received.
You may stop overfunctioning and discover that other people don’t immediately step in to do things the way you would have done them.
You may set a boundary and still feel guilty.
You may rest and still feel the urge to get up and accomplish something.
You may make the right decision and still feel sad about it.
None of that necessarily means you made the wrong choice.
Sometimes the more peaceful choice is not the one that makes you feel comfortable the fastest.
That can be especially disorienting when you are used to reading internal discomfort as information that something needs your attention.
Sometimes it does.
And sometimes discomfort is simply what it feels like to stop doing something your system has been accustomed to doing for a very long time.
That is where curiosity matters.
Not How do I make this feeling go away?
But What is this feeling asking me to know? Does something actually need my attention here—or am I learning that I can remain present even when something feels uncomfortable?
You don’t have to manufacture peace
There is another way women like you can turn this into work.
Once you decide you should be peaceful, you can become remarkably efficient at monitoring whether you are.
Am I regulated?
Why am I still anxious?
Shouldn’t I trust God more than this?
I thought I had worked through this.
Why is this still bothering me?
Now peace has become another standard you’re failing to meet.
I don’t think that is peace at all.
And I don’t think faith asks us to pretend.
You can trust God and be scared.
You can have peace and grieve.
You can know you are safe and still feel your body react.
You can make a wise decision and wish it didn’t hurt.
You can believe deeply and still have questions.
Wholeness has room for the truth.
Maybe that is part of what makes peace different from comfort. Comfort wants the difficult thing to go away.
Peace can make room for what is true without requiring us to be overtaken by it.
A peace sturdy enough for real life
I am less interested these days in a peace that only works when life cooperates.
I want something sturdier than that.
A peace that can sit beside a hospital bed.
A peace that can survive an unanswered question.
A peace that can remain when someone I love is struggling and I cannot fix it.
A peace that allows me to tell the truth, make a difficult choice, grieve what has been lost, and still notice something beautiful on the way home.
Not perfectly.
Not without emotion.
Not without moments when I forget everything I know and start trying to control the uncontrollable again.
But with a growing capacity to return.
Perhaps that is part of healing too.
Not arranging our lives so carefully that nothing disturbs us.
Not becoming so regulated that nothing hurts.
Not becoming so spiritual that nothing scares us.
Becoming increasingly able to remain present to our lives—even when our lives contain things we would never have chosen.
Comfort is a gift when it comes.
Relief is a gift too.
But peace has to be able to live somewhere deeper.
Deep enough to hold both what is good and what is hard.
Deep enough for uncertainty.
Deep enough for grief.
Deep enough for joy.
Deep enough for the life that is actually ours.
Therapy can be a place to explore what happens inside you when life feels uncertain, when old responses get activated, or when you are learning to tolerate the discomfort of doing something differently. It doesn’t require becoming a person who is never anxious or unsettled. The work can help create more capacity to stay present, discern what needs your attention, and respond with greater freedom.
I work with women in Florida, Georgia, and Colorado using EMDR, Brainspotting, and somatic, body-based approaches to trauma therapy. You can learn more about how I work or schedule a consultation.
