'Protect your peace' culture has failed us all.

"The most selfish person you know is in therapy right now being told it's OK to be selfish sometimes."

It's a tweet that rapidly made its way across the internet, being posted and reposted because of the sheer relatability of the point it made.

In the Year of Our Lord 2025, the rabid validation of every passing feeling by both pop-psychology and a deeply individualistic therapy culture has birthed a society filled with people deeply afraid to have an honest conversation.

We've wrapped ourselves so completely in the cloying comfort of therapy-speak that we avoid having to encounter any discomfort whatsoever.

It's been dubbed 'protect your peace' culture, and it describes the trend towards avoiding people, situations or conversations that cause us pain, wrapped in the justification that 'protecting our peace' is the pinnacle of self-care and well-being.

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"True kindness doesn't require you to abandon your peace," sermonises a popular TikTok creator, who sells 'script packages' for having boundary-setting conversations for the bargain price of $47 a pop.

This person helpfully includes colourful quote tiles of what 'allowing your boundaries to be violated' looks like, including: 'sitting and listening for hours on the phone when you're already exhausted and would prefer to be asleep'.

"Cut toxic people out of your life and watch the positive energy start to flow," advises a popular influencer with a six-figure follower count, whose life coach credentials were achieved, I discovered, at what must have been a truly taxing two-day online workshop.

"He's clearly a narcissist," I overhear a young woman at the farmer's markets tell her friend as they peruse glossy avocados, "I mean it's textbook."

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And look, call me unfair, but I'm willing to bet my just-purchased bag of bananas that the 'textbook' she's referring to is not in fact an actual textbook.

The democratisation of psychology has done many wonderful things for society, including giving us the language we need to speak about mental health. There are so many wonderful psychologists doing excellent public health work online and through social media.

And yet, there's a dark side emerging that threatens to undermine even the most well-meaning of therapeutic interventions.

"The over-simplification and often-individualistic framing of psychological concepts like boundaries and self-care diverge from their true therapeutic purpose, because they lack nuance," says Gold Coast psychologist Anoushka Dowling.

"At best, they lack nuance in that they don't allow us to consider the value that the person or people once brought to our lives, the context in which they might be operating or the perspective you might be missing. At worst, they're oversimplified in that it can make people who are trapped in violent or abusive relationships within their families or with an intimate partner seem like they are choosing the situation and dismissing the dynamics that are at play."

More than that, Dowling says that presenting the idea of 'cutting off' from people or situations as an easy solution that will bring nothing but peace is underplaying the very real human consequences of a decision like this.

"I see this type of disenfranchised grief in my practice," she says. 

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"People wonder why they feel this sense of grief when others (or the world around them) have told them it's an easy decision to make — if someone's no longer serving you, cut them from your life. Simple, right? While I absolutely believe that there are times that removing people from your life is the most appropriate decision to be made for your mental health, we can't then expect that these decisions are as easy as pop psychology promotes them to be, and that they don't come along with extremely complex associated feelings."

As Dowling says, there are situations in which 'no-contact' is the healthiest choice. But it feels like more and more people default to this option before exploring healthy conflict, hard conversations and, more importantly, deep self-reflection when it comes to their own behaviour.

"We can find a way to communicate how we feel and the impact of other people's behaviour on us or others, if we value the relationship," says Dowling.

"This also means giving the other person the opportunity to change—we're offering the gift of growth and perspective. We're also learning a way to have challenging conversations for ourselves and our own growth."

In a world where we increasingly feel isolated, lonely and lacking in community, it's worth taking another look at how completely many of us have swallowed simplistic understandings of concepts like 'boundaries' and 'toxic people'.

Because protecting our peace is all well and good, but we need to be sure that what we understand to be 'peace' isn't in fact just the absence of any dissenting opinions in our orbit.

Feature Image: Getty.

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