How Inner Peace Can Lead to World Peace
How can it be possible that having inner peace can lead to world peace? Well, when we break it down, here is what that looks like.
Trauma Causes Shame and Kick Starts the Inner Critic’s Reign
Within each of us are parts that have been hurt by life. When we are traumatized or simply just live on this earth from a young age (which we all do), we are bound to take on shame and wounding. We somehow get the message (from hearing it or by osmosis) from the outside world—from our parents, our teachers, our pastors, and our society at large—about how we are not “doing it right.” We learn that we must do better, be better, be perfect even. We need to be polite and cater to others’ needs. We need to take on the abuse without fighting back. In addition to this, we need to also somehow not be spineless, to have boundaries, and to get straight A’s. We need to excel in sports and to have perfect-looking bodies. And when we miss the mark on any of those things, our inner critic steps in, often with the same voice as those outer folks, and reminds us that we are “not good enough.”
The inner critic is a black-and-white thinker and does not think outside the box, is not very forgiving, and works at making sure you are seen as a “valuable” person to the outside world. It will make sure to load you up with a lot of shame and self-loathing in order to get you to do “the right things.” It seems like it tries to sabotage you, but in truth, it thinks it is helping you. It has a positive intention anyway, even if its methods are out of date or faulty. Your inner critic is also a pretty young part of you that was put on the job (by you!) when you were very young in order to help you survive your surroundings and not be hurt more by those around you who expected perfection.
The inner critic is loud. It is working very hard at protecting you and it has an agenda. The parts of you that are sad, feel shame, are angry, or resentful about how you have been treated by the outside world are exiled into the darkness of your subconscious because, to the inner critic, they are nuisances that need to be hidden and to never come out and create “drama” or “chaos.” Perhaps you understand this. Maybe you identify with your inner critic and understand its methods and desires to keep the parts of you that feel hidden way. That is quite common. We are often taught that feelings make us “victims” and even if we actually were victims and might need a good, solid cry, a rage session with a pillow, or to have a difficult and confrontational conversation with someone who once abused us, the outside world doesn’t validate that simply because most of us were not taught to validate ourselves. Many might think that you feeling sad about being harmed as a child is “weak.” We learn this from our parents and family first, and from the world at large after. No one “gets” to cry the tears of a child when they are grown-ups and this is exactly what you need to do to create inner peace. You have the right to feel those feelings and to honor yourself. And you should!
So, here we are with our little inner Napoleons running the show all day every day from the womb on more or less. This short little dictator sure is loud and bossy. He makes sure that you follow his rules to the letter. Doesn’t this seem really exhausting? Infuriating even? Well, to our internal systems, it IS very taxing and tiresome. It creates resentment in and outside of ourselves. It makes us irritable and angry because no matter how hard we try to get it all done, all correct, and to make sure we matter in some way to someone or to everyone, we can’t get it all right all of the time and little Napoleon no likey that. Little Napoleon is an evil dictator. He likes to whip a tired horse to make it “move faster.” There’s no time for sleeping or crying or feeling on his watch.
Unfortunately, having to wear this mask of perfection in order to “get it right” (whatever THAT is!) all the time leaves no room for authenticity. There is no such thing as self-love, and there sure as heck isn’t space for inner peace when our entire inner system is literally at war. The inner critic makes other parts of our internal world upset. (I am sure by now you can clearly see why.) Yes, there are other parts in our internal family system that cannot deal well with the stress the inner critic places on us and the anxiety we perceive that is coming at us from those outside others—our boss, our kids, our spouse, our personal god, our friends, and the world. So, again, and believe it or not, in an effort to protect us, there are parts that fight with the inner critic and actively shut us down by numbing us from the constant stress it inundates us with. They make us want to escape the craziness in our bodies and minds through sleep, having risky sex or just a lot of sex, eating comfort foods, drinking alcohol excessively, spending money irresponsibly, doing drugs, gambling away our retirement money, or even to shutting us down all together with suicide. And these parts have no moral compass. Zip. Zero. Nada. They, too, are usually very young in age, and perhaps they came on the job when you were a teen. They helped you get rebellious and to buck the dysfunctional system you were living in—both internally and externally. When our internal system is in disharmony, our outer world will show up that way too.
Why is this? According to both physical and metaphysical law, like attracts like and whatever we believe on a deep level about ourselves inside of our subconscious mind and stemming also from the trauma trapped in our bodies (which some say is where the subconscious mind lives) is reflected back to us in the world outside of us. It’s like the world is a huge projector screen or a gigantic bathroom mirror. So, what do we naturally do? We BLAME the mirror! Just like the evil queen in Snow White blamed her mirror when it told her she looked old and hideous, we too blame people who are simply mirroring back to us our internal pain, low self-esteem, and unworthiness. We point fingers at people who are not saying hello to us, who are full-out ghosting us, or who we believe are abandoning and rejecting us. While it does seem like they are doing these behaviors TO US (and, yes, they likely are actually doing the insensitive or cruel acts due to their own wounding), the real issue is that we are taught to self-abandon from a very early age to impress the outside others. We are taught to fawn and to people please, to be codependent, to compete in order to be “the best” without any regard for the stress it is taking on our inner worlds. We are taught to compare our bodies and intelligence levels with our peers in some kind of made-up social survival of the fittest contest and this creates jealousy and deep fears of rejection and abandonment. We believe that unless we are the best, we are completely unacceptable. Here is that all-or-nothing thinking again from Monsieur Bonaparte. Can you feel the resentment in all of this? Can you feel the anger welling up within you as you reflect on times when you had to compete and compare and were found to be lacking in some way according to the outside world? How infuriating!!!
When we are taught at a young age to abandon ourselves in order to please others, we usually attract people who will also abandon us. There’s that like attracts like thing again. And it hurts a lot! It TRIGGERS us, right? This is right. It triggers us and this is such a brilliant design. It is a pure way to SEE our issues in order to heal them. But, since we are not taught how to heal this from a young age, we think it’s the outside others’ fault instead.
Inner War Leads to Outer War
That loud inner critic has all kinds of stories. It has made up so many lies and untruths about us and the outside world from the dawn of time that it is a wonder the earth isn’t completely blown up by now. And unless we stop our inner tirades, this is exactly where we are heading. For many, the madness grows and grows. In each situation, many of us take things so personally that it ends up becoming something that leads to eventual mass destruction. Maybe there isn’t a direct line from being “rejected” to blowing up another country, but there are definitely gradations of this on the pathway that many of us get to. Taking things personally leads to increased intolerance toward others as we take to heart their lack of kindness in a moment of their distress or preoccupation with their own inner bullies. We might not take a moment to consider things like this: Perhaps this “rude” person is being systematically abused at home or that perhaps they are about to lose their job and they are very worried about it. Maybe you are invisible to them in that moment or all the time because they are really, really drowning in fear. Or, it could be that their inner Napoleon is loud and bullies them. Unless they tell us, how can we truly know? Due to the deep shame that many of us are buried under, most people cannot share these kinds of things and might come across as cruel or rude instead. They might even ghost us because they are intimidated by us or feel unworthy of being good enough. There are many, many possible reasons for why a single person acts a certain way toward us and most of the reasons are simply NOT personal. I do understand how it might appear that way, but it is generally not the case at all.
Early on in the game of life when we haven’t built up decades of resentment toward all kinds of people who “do the wrong things,” we start this process of taking things really personally when people do not include us, say hello to us, or when we belong to the “right” church and they belong to the “wrong” one. They are sinners because their personal god does not like what they believe in. We judge them and decide they are going to Hell when Hell itself is more likely in that system of ours where Napoleon reigns supreme than in any fire and brimstone underworld we can create in our minds. When we have had people reject us with break ups, or they laugh at us when we are vulnerable, or when someone at work gets the promotion we feel we deserve, or when our neighbor’s tree encroaches on our property, we feel self-righteous and justified in attacking since they are doing something “wrong” to us and we need to “correct” their behavior by lashing out in some way—giving them a good talking to; screaming at them; calling them bad names; or even punching them right out. We lose our cool as the wounded and traumatized younger parts within us rise up in revolt as we recall all the other times when we felt “ignored, rejected, and mistreated.” Yet again, we are having our boundaries crossed in some way, and it takes us back to when that happened to us as children in toxic family systems. When we haven’t healed all of this, we act from those young, wounded parts instead of from our mature, level-headed adult selves. It might start at a young age with competing and comparing ourselves to other, “better” people and then it leads to feeling jealous, unacceptable, rejected, or left out. We might start to spread gossip and rumors about people who we want to be seen or known as “lesser” than us. This can show up in bullying and then can become physical, emotional, sexual, or verbal abuse of “weaker” people we want to control.
Later on, due to our political or our personal cultural or religious beliefs and after years of personal pain and many situations where we took things very personally, we might even start to attack on a larger scale. Peace “riots,” burning down cities, looting, and wars are ways that our wounded inner parts come out and “get back at” the people who are not “doing it right” and who are “hurting my feelings (ego or that inner critic) by not following my personal Napoleon’s agenda!” As layers of pain from the inner critic’s lies and the outer world’s “rejections” mount, we start to explode on a larger scale. We blame others for their “wrong” beliefs about their religions, their political positions, their sexuality, who they choose to love, the color of their skin, or their land ownership status and we end up enslaving or killing innocent people. We kill people simply because we choose not to take care of our inner wounding that we got handed to us by generations of others who were also traumatized. We allow that crazy dictator inside of us to have his way with us and we end up harming sentient beings. Why? Why do we allow this when we can actually heal? There are many, many roads to healing our trauma and, yet, we decide to believe the lies and stories we tell ourselves instead.
Inner Peace Leads to World Peace?
This might seem like a lofty thought or some idealistic hippie stuff. But, why not? Is what is happening now working? I am not suggesting that we quit our jobs and go out and protest for peace all day long. I don’t think that works either. In fact, while I definitely believe that helping out children, abuse victims, the environment, and animals are very worthy causes, I also think that we need to stop and take care of our inner selves first and foremost. We can still aid those others while we heal. But if we use those causes as distractions from our personal inner healing, we are quite often doing it from an unbalanced place and from wounded inner children who want to be seen and heard by the outside world instead of by our inner parents who can help us heal once and for all. When we protest and riot for “peace,” aren’t we simply acting like those bullies and abusive people who hit and hurt when they feel “mistreated” by people who “reject” them? How is rioting and looting and burning down cities in the name of “peace” any better than blowing up countries over them believing in the wrong god or for having differing political beliefs? Peace starts from within.
My belief (and you can think I am wrong for it, which is just fine with me) is that healing ourselves first leads to inner peace which can lead to world peace. How? Well, I don’t know about you, but I don’t know anyone who is peaceful on the inside who wants to bully, beat up, or blow up innocent children and animals or who wants to destroy people’s property and livelihoods. Do you?
We can stop generational trauma and stop world intolerance and wars just by healing our inner pain. Period. This is not easy work, but it is a simple recipe for success. Start this process by simply noticing the ways in which you feel offended or triggered into anger or rage when someone does not do what you believe they “should” do. When you are activated in this way, this is your signal to turn inside and heal it—right then and there if possible. Luckily, you can ask for help from people just like me who will gladly help you overcome this inner turmoil and heal it once and for all.
The world has a long way to go. There are people in this world who are too far gone to turn around and do their inner work. I realize this and that is really scary to think about sometimes. However, that does not mean that you can’t do your own. It takes one person becoming peaceful inside to affect others. It’s like a domino effect and when you are radiating inner peace, you spark the desire for others to have it too. Try it! You will see!
If you want to try and do your part in helping the world be a more peaceful place, let me help you do that. I applaud you for your willingness to help the world heal at a grassroots level—one person at a time!
