Whether you know it or not, you are a victim of war.
War is never only “over there”.
It reaches into ordinary life through fear, economics, energy, displacement, nervous systems, families, and the behaviour of wounded people.
I often find that the suffering in front of me did not begin with the person sitting in the room.
Sometimes it began with a frightened parent.
Sometimes with a brutal father.
Sometimes with a family shaped by silence, hardness, terror, or emotional absence.
And sometimes, if you follow the family line back, with war.
I have worked for many years with clients referred through military charities after trauma in war zones.
What happens then is not mysterious.
A traumatised person comes home jumpy, watchful, easily overwhelmed, unable to settle.
The whole family begins to organise itself around that nervous system.
Fear rises in the house.
But often it cannot be named.
The nightmares are not spoken about.
The terror is not processed.
The shame about feeling frightened is buried under some version of “man up”.
And so the child does not learn:
this is fear
this is grief
this is how we soothe
this is how feelings move through
this is how you stay worthwhile when you are upset
Instead, the child may learn:
don’t feel
don’t show it
don’t need
don’t be weak
shut down
harden up
or disappear into distraction
That child may grow into an adult who cannot regulate fear, process shame, or bear vulnerability without defence.
And when that adult becomes a parent, they cannot teach those skills well, because they do not know how, and may not even realise they are skills.
So what gets passed down is not only trauma.
Defences get passed down too.
Not always.
But often enough that the pattern is hard to ignore.
Which raises a larger question:
what would human beings have to become for war to stop working on us?
Because war is not only a geopolitical event.
It is also a mass psychological event.
It depends on human beings being recruitable by fear, humiliation, grievance, obedience, hardness, and the promise that pain can be relieved by turning other people into the enemy.
So perhaps the deepest anti-war work is not only diplomatic or military.
Perhaps it is developmental.
A mature peace would not mean being naive about danger.
It would mean raising people and cultures strong enough to recognise threat, organise against it, defend what matters, and still resist becoming organised by hatred, panic, or dehumanisation.
Not easier to invade.
Harder to break.
Harder to dominate or subjugate.
Perhaps peace depends on raising more human beings who can:
regulate fear without needing an enemy,
process shame without turning it into revenge,
bear grief without converting it into hatred,
think clearly under pressure,
hold boundaries without cruelty,
and remain human even when threatened.
That is not softness.
That is maturity.
And I suspect it is one of the great psychological questions of our time.