Family of Origin Roles Series: The Peacemaker (From Referee to Realist)
This article is based on the Reimagining Love podcast episode “Family of Origin Roles Series: The Peacemaker (From Referee to Realist).” To listen to this episode, click here.
This article is a continuation of our series that we’ve been sharing this winter, which delves into Family of Origin Roles.
Welcome back to the blog and Happy New Year! I hope your year is off to a great start. In the last article, we talked about the Struggling One role. I hope that was helpful to all of the Struggling One readers out there, as well as for folks who are partnered with– or in any kind of relationship with– a Struggling One. If you’re just joining us now, the introductory episode of the related podcast series is linked here. I recommend listening to that first, as it will orient you and give you important background about the concept of Family of Origin roles. If you’ve been with us in the series, then you’re all ready to dive in with me today as we explore the next role. This article is all about the Peacemaker role. Remember that this work is about getting to know yourself, but it’s also going to help you get to know the people around you. So even if you suspect that you’re not a Peacemaker, I hope you’ll still read this article. It could help you better understand someone close to you and lead to deeper connection with them. Later in the article, we’re going to talk about how to support your partner or friend if they are a Peacemaker. So there is something for everyone!
Our plan for this article we will look at the origin story for the Peacemaker, the cultural factors that might create and reinforce that Peacemaker role, the impact of being a Peacemaker on friendships, work relationships, and intimate partnership, and then interventions– not to fix you because you are broken, but to free you from patterns of refereeing and mediating in your relationships.
Quick reminder that at the end of this series, we’ll be sharing a set of worksheets with tailored journaling prompts and practices for all of the roles, so if you’d like to receive that offering later this winter, make sure you’re signed up for my newsletter, which you can find a link for in the show notes. Or, visit dralexandrasolomon.com/subscribe to get added to the list.
Telltale Signs
You often wound up mediating or diffusing tension, especially between parents or a parent and a sibling.
When you were a kid, and maybe still today, you engaged in “shuttle diplomacy” (helping each parent see the other one’s perspective).
Rather than retreating or hiding away when there was tension, you found yourself stuck in the middle, or you provided “comic relief” in a desperate attempt to make it all go away.
You were the “family mascot.” What do I mean by that? You were the heart of the family, rallying them as needed and sort of carrying the torch for why we are a good family, how our hearts are in the right place, how we know who we really are.
If your Family of Origin was a company, you would have been the director of the human resources department.
If your Family of Origin was a university, you would have been the ombudsman.
As an adult, you identify as an “empath”—you are sensitive to others’ emotions and dynamics between people you love. You’re REAL good at “reading the room,” and you do it almost compulsively. In fact, it’s hard for you to stay in your lane and block out the energy of the room.
You’re a diplomat figure within your family or friend group.
You feel the weight of other people’s emotions and relational issues, so it’s hard for you to detach from conflict, even when you’re not directly involved.
If you’ve already taken my Family of Origin Roles quiz, which you can here, and identified yourself as a Peacemaker, you probably already have a sense of why that role suits you and reflects the experience you had as a young person in your family of origin. But here are some check-ins for you, some telltale signs that this may have been your role:
And, for each of the 6 roles, I am assigning a sort of BUMPER STICKER or catch phrase. For the Peacemaker the motto or core belief is this: I am loved to the degree I am diffusing tension.
I wanted to share some examples of the Peacemaker in pop culture. My team and I are having fun brainstorming the fictional representations that we think capture each of these roles. So for the Peacemaker, think of Jess from New Girl, and the way she puts herself between her roommates and tries to get them to work through their conflicts. Think of Meg from Little Women, and the way she expects her family to get along and live in harmony. Think of Jane from Pride & Prejudice—amidst family chaos, she’s always trying to smooth things over and ensure a good future for her sisters. Think Siobhan Roy from Succession and how she was expected to mediate family drama.
By the end of this article, I bet you’ll be able to think of some examples of your own. Send me an email or a DM and let me know who you come up with!
Origin Story: FOO
So, before we dive into talking about the Peacemaker, I want to flag that in the next article of this series, we’ll be talking about a role I call the Parentified Child, and there is some overlap between that role and the Peacemaker. With both of these roles, the theme is that a young person who is supposed to be in the “child cohort” gets emotionally brought up into the “adult cohort.” That young person is what we therapists like to call “triangulated” into grown up stuff in an effort to create stability or homeostasis. For example, parents may have consciously or unconsciously brought their child into their conflict dynamic as a kind of pawn or distraction, creating a triangular dynamic. So in both of these roles, the Peacemaker and the Parentified Child, the child was attempting to create emotional safety by exiting their role as a child and trying to do grown-up work long before they were ready to be doing so. They were brought into a space that they really shouldn't have had to be in.
But here’s the distinction between these two roles: the Peacemaker seeks emotional safety via doing (intervening, distracting, humoring), and the Parentified Child seeks emotional safety via being (supporting, validating, comforting, and nurturing). Can you sense that difference? The Peacemaker is doing something to create change, and the parentified child being a safe, listening ear or a substitute partner for a parent.
Now that I’ve mentioned that distinction, let’s look at the two different types of Peacemakers. The first one is what I’ll call the “family mascot,” and the second is what I’ll call the “referee.” The family mascot is a Peacemaker who uses their personality or humor to bring people together. The “referee” is a Peacemaker who is getting in between family members and diffusing conflict. These are two ways of diffusing tension, so if you suspect you were a Peacemaker, think about which of these lands more deeply for you—the family mascot or the referee.
Let’s look more closely about the price that our Peacemaker paid for mediating, whether through refereeing or humor. With any of the Family of Origin roles, when we look at the behavior that arises from the role, that behavior is an attempt to cope with this really yucky feeling: “I don’t feel emotionally safe.” Our Peacemaker was hyper-aware of the tension or the conflict or the unhappiness of the big people around them. When we are little, we have little to no psychological boundary, and we soak in and take on everything around us. Let’s face it, even as adults, all of us, to varying degrees, are affected by the emotions of the people around us. Maybe today we have tools for creating appropriate distance and we more deeply understand what’s ours and what’s not ours, but when we are small, we are so dependent on the people around us being OK so that we can be OK.
The Peacemaker’s desperate attempts to create peace was truly a survival strategy– attempting to make the problems better, attempting to make the big people happy, attempting to make the big people feel connected to each other. As a Peacemaker, this was a dreadful place for you as a child, feeling triangulated in between two people you loved very much, who were struggling in their relationship with each other. It could have been two parents, a parent and a grandparent, two siblings, or even a parent and a sibling.
This was a terrible place for you to be, especially as a kid, because kids need to be able to feel and express their loyalty to everyone they love. And kids want all of the people they love to get along. So feeling caught between two people you love is immensely scary and painful. Further, when we are kids, we are wonderfully and developmentally appropriately egocentric, which puts us at risk of taking everything so incredibly personally. So there’s also this element of shame or guilt, “What did I do to make them mad?” And by the way, when you were little, you were of course not a trained mediator, so you were doing a job for which you had received no training. As you know now, conflict between adults is deep-rooted, multi-faceted, and often entrenched. In that way you were truly set up to fail, likely amplifying feelings of shame. They are mad because of something I did and they are staying mad because nothing I am doing is working. How deeply unfair this was to you.
One of the hallmarks of a thriving family is you don't have to pick sides. Rather, everyone is on the same side, which is “team family.” In a healthy family system, whenever there's a “versus,” that acts as a blinking indicator light that the system is off track. So for the Peacemaker, the fact that you had to figure out where to put yourself, and how to get this sides to get along, is, in and of itself, symptomatic of a system that was struggling, a system that couldn’t figure out how to anchor itself in a higher value of, “How do we find a path forward that honors our individual and relational needs?” If that's how you grew up feeling all the time (that there was always a side to choose), it might feel normal to you. But it’s not normal to feel like you have to take sides between people you love very much. One of the lingering effects today is that you might be at risk therefore of perceiving and amplifying differences between people and minimizing common ground. One of your liberatory practices is to get in the habit of noticing and landing moments of connection and collaboration because those might just, very understandably, stand out to you less.
So we explored the function of the Peacemaker (to keep things from going too far off the rails). The wounds that come with having played this role include having difficulty understanding your own feelings because you are so used to focusing on everyone else’s. Feeling hypervigilant because how can you relax and surrender when you never know if you’re going to be called into action. Struggling with guilt, shame, and responsibility for the wellbeing of the people around you. Having difficulty noticing ease and connection because you attempted to create emotional safety and predictability by noticing and solving for the tension. As we know, our wounds and our gifts are next door neighbors. The Peacemakers’ gifts include being intuitive and empathic. You were practiced at reading the room and scanning for subtle dynamics between your family members and that gift remains with you. The challenge, as is always the case, is discernment. Yes, you can see multiple perspectives and hold space for lots of emotions, but at what cost. The cost is often struggling to recognize and tend to your own perspective and your own emotions… or even knowing what those might be!
When it comes to survival strategies, Peacemakers go straight to being helpful, unlike some other roles that might default to retreating or causing a scene. When there’s a conflict, the Peacemaker is going to engage because what is harder than engaging is feeling helpless, guilty or ashamed at having done nothing to diffuse it.
Origin Story: Culture
Now let’s talk about how cultural conditioning impacts the Peacemaker role, starting with some notes on gender. When I think about a male Peacemaker, a son, I think about the way that a son in a tense family system might feel the need to physically get in between folks that are fighting, to put his body in the fray- that referee type of Peacekeeper. This positionality reinforces the boy as a bodyguard or traffic copy figure. Particularly if he was the only brother among his siblings, he may have felt the charge to get involved, even as a young child. Now, today, as a man, you may be a “fixer” in relationships, always looking for solutions to conflict (even when that might not be what your partner’s looking for!). It’s like a double whammy. Our culture at large teaches boys and men to solve rather than empathize and that tendency was reinforced and amplified in your family of origin. If you were that family mascot type of Peacekeeper, your go to is to provide “comic relief” in a moment of tension. This is a total double-edged sword especially if you are a man partnered with a woman. I have known so many couples over the years where he has this comic relief tendency that is part of her attraction to him and also a source of pain when he’s making jokes during serious moments. I think this pattern can feel really confusing– like sometimes my humor is helpful and sometimes my humor is hurtful. We’ll come back to this in a bit.
If your “family mascot” tendencies went with you to school, you may have been stuck with a class clown label, especially if you were a boy. And/or if you occupied one or more marginalized identities, your class clown may have been especially misunderstood.
And as a girl Peacemaker, you may have been praised for your sensitivity and helpful qualities that helped you read the room so well, but the downside was that that emotional maturity you displayed was something you shouldn’t have had to put to use to mediate between family members at such a young age. That taught you that other people’s emotions are your responsibility, and you likely carried that into adulthood.
Interpersonal
Now let's talk about the Peacemaker at work, in friendship, and in intimate relationships. In a work setting, the Peacemaker has a lot of great assets. You may self-appoint to manage complex issues on a team or go to management with something that needs addressing. When there’s an issue between coworkers, you may be the diplomat between them, trying to justify each of their perspectives to the other one, and you get some degree of satisfaction from being in the middle like this. The challenge of course is… are you getting paid for all of this emotional labor? It’s tricky when the system is asking something of you, something you can readily and competently give. But at what cost? One cost of course is that you get roped in, you try to be helpful, then when shit blows up cuz that’s what shit does, you may get stuck holding the bag, blamed for your interference or meddling.
In your friendships, you likely play the “rescuer” role. Do you know about Karpman’s Drama Triangle? This is a model of social interaction created by Stephen Karpman that describes the dynamic of conflict in a group. In the triangle, there are three positions: the victim, the persecutor, and the rescuer. I love this as a little heuristic, the idea in any dysfunctional or chaotic three person dynamic, folks tend to fall into those roles. Think about how you’ve maybe played that rescuer role within your friend groups at times, maybe when there’s a disagreement or hurt feelings for whatever reason. That position is hella familiar for you. Btw, Karpman’s Drama Triangle with the victim, the persecutor, and the rescuer, captures the dynamics in dysfunctional relationships. He also created the Empowerment Triangle to capture the dynamics in thriving relationships. Here, the victim becomes the creator (moving from helpless to agentic, “I can do it!”). The persecutor becomes the challenger (moving from blaming and criticizing to creating the conditions for growth and learning). The rescuer becomes the coach (moving from pity and overinvolvement to assisting and asking questions like “How do you want to handle this?”).
Peacemakers, in both work settings and in friendships, but especially in their intimate relationships, may struggle with high functioning codependency, and if you’re curious about that concept, my dear friend Terri Cole has great resources that you should check out, including her books. One of the symptoms of high functioning codependency is what Terri calls “auto advice-giving.” When someone's sharing something with you, rather than asking a question or offering empathy, you immediately go to solutions, or possibly even more hands-on, as in “let me do this for you, just let me call somebody. I've got a guy.” That’s the Peacemaker’s jam!
Speaking of codependency and boundaries, the Peacemaker has decided or feels like everything is their business. In my book, Loving Bravely, I talk about the two types of diffuse boundaries: the “absorbing boundary” is when you kind of are at the mercy of everyone's opinion of you. You let everyone's perceptions of you determine who you think you are. Then there's what I call the “intrusive boundary,” where you exit your lane and you get in everybody else's business. So, it's a diffuse boundary where you're the one who is mucking around in stuff that really isn't yours. Our Peacemaker probably has a tendency towards that intrusive boundary, where they're taking on things that really don't belong to them, because that was how they survived childhood.
The Peacemaker’s story is, “they need me.” But the part that's so easy to miss is that the Peacemakers need them too. The Peacemaker needs someone to try to make peace for. As a Peacemaker, I am trying to create emotional safety inside of me by managing you. As a Peacemaker, I am regulating my self-esteem by needing to be needed by you. Because we’re talking about helpfulness, what’s so easy to miss is that this helpfulness is a wound-driven behavior. Dare I say there’s a kind of selfishness hiding inside of what seems to be selflessness.
Pacemakers created some feeling of emotional safety back then—by trying to manage the people around them. So now as an adult, they don't know how to create emotional safety inside of themself. Peacemakers often have a pattern of seeking out people who are struggling, because they crave that feeling of safety that comes with fixing or intervening. The Peacemaker may feel, at the early stages of their journey, that “I don't know who I am if I'm not helpful. I identify myself by being helpful to people. Otherwise I'm left with my own feelings. If I'm not in somebody else's feelings, then I'm in my own feelings.” And that can be scary! You may see this in a moment of family crises– the Peacemaker may be especially prone to ignoring their own sadness or grief and instead jump in as a helper with everyone else’s big feelings.
If you were a Peacemaker, we can have so much compassion for why you feel like you have to be in everybody else's business because when you were little, it really did feel do or die. You had to be. But now as an adult there is almost an arrogance to think that people really need you in their business all the time, and that’s something I’d love all the Peacemakers out there to seriously think about. Are you really needed as a mediator by all the people in your life, or are you just terrified of taking off that cape?
The Peacemaker child grows up into an adult who always has their finger on the pulse, like a seismograph that measures earthquakes. They’re always tracking, and in a way, always waiting for something to go awry. So the Peacemaker may struggle to relax, because they're just so attuned, hypervigilant, trying to anticipate the next thing that’s going to happen. They may believe, as a result, that relationships exist from crisis to crisis. And even though this is a stressful way to think about relationships, there’s some safety or familiarity for Peacemakers in addressing the current crisis and then thinking ahead to the next one. They may even identify or create crises to replicate this pattern. Those can be really difficult patterns that may come from having been so enmeshed in your parents conflict or the family conflict.
We’ve talked a bit already about how Peacemakers may set aside their own emotions so they can be of assistance to the folks in conflict, and how they may use humor to smooth over rough spots in social interactions. As you can imagine, these qualities can be major assets in relationships and group dynamics. It can be so helpful to have a person in the room at work who can crack a joke in a moment of tension, for example. But for Peacemakers, they need to ask themselves why they feel that it’s their job to do this diffusing, in every setting. It’s a lot of emotional labor, and it’s a burden they ultimately have assigned to themselves.
Intimate Relationships: Two Peacemakers
Let’s explore what happens for Peacemakers in intimate relationships, beginning with the scenario of two Peacemakers matched together. We have two people who are expert at reading other people’s emotions, but who struggle to read their own. The image that comes up for me is that we used to have this highly reactive Schnoodle named Sawyer and when she would meet another dog, I could never tell if she was scared of the other dog or she perceived that the other dog was scared of her. And I’d wonder, is that other dog actually scared of Sawyer or is she perceiving Sawyer’s fear of her? I think it’s like that with two Peacemakers. I think there’s a lot of sussing out in silence. Partners wonder if the other one is angry and try to use their perceptive powers to solve that, rather than bringing up the issue and addressing it. Additionally, if you are always on the lookout for problems, you may project or create false ideas about your partner’s emotions. When you have two folks doing this at the same time to each other, you can imagine the chaos that ensues!
You both have this gift of being really attuned and the ability to stay vigilant, so you’re able to sense when something is off. But it may be hard to discern who’s “stuff” it is—yours or your partner’s. And so, conflict may escalate and end up feeling really confusing because neither of you is really clear on your own perspective, plus your own experience is so wrapped up in what you are picking up from your partner.
If you are a Peacemaker who is partnered with a non-Peacemaker, you’re going to be especially prone to that knight-in-shining-armor dynamic. Your partner is drawn to your ability to advocate for and protect the people you love. And you are drawn to a relationship in which your helpfulness is valued and appreciated. The risk of course is that when the Peacemaker does things for their partner, even when the partner could have handled it on their own, it does a disservice to both parties and sows the seeds of resentment– in both directions! I really dug into this in an article and podcast episode I did a while back about the overfunctioning-underfunctioning dynamic.
TREATMENT: Partner of the Peacemaker
So we’ve outlined a lot here and I want to hone in on treatment. Where do we go from here? I’m going to talk to the partner who loves a Peacemaker. How lucky you are to have a partner who will do battle for you. It’s such an amazing feeling to feel like your partner has your back. I want to invite you to keep a few things in mind though:
Are you sometimes asking your Peacemaker partner to advocate for you in a moment when you could actually advocate for yourself? The two of you may have seamlessly slipped into this pattern. Your partner may get themselves involved in your troubles almost before you even know you have troubles, but I want to ask you to see if you can get into the habit of checking in with yourself: Could I fight this battle for myself? Is this something that I ought to be doing instead of having my partner do it? My partner will do it, because they're a Peacemaker. My partner will step in, BUT what am I missing out on when I hand over the reins? You might be forfeiting the chance to learn, the chance to feel empowered, the chance to remind your partner, “I’ve got this, you can rest easy over there.” Your work is to see if you can feel your way into that line between support that reflects interdependence and mutual care and support that is wound-driven.
Are you sometimes asking your Peacemaker partner to back you up on a perspective that your Peacemaker partner actually does not share? If your Peacemaker partner sees the situation differently than you do, they are caught. They are loyal to you, and you are asking for support. But if they see it differently than you, are you inadvertently asking them to do something they have done 1,000,000 times in the family of origin- suppress their own perspective and feelings for someone else’s peace. I am inviting you to just tread lightly here. See how you might be able to feel your partner’s support and love without getting their agreement.
If your Peacemaker partner is that “class clown/family mascot” variety, are you inadvertently shaming their use of humor? As I talked about earlier in the article, you may have a complex relationship with your family mascot Peacemaker partner’s use of humor– appreciating it in some contexts and being exasperated by it in other contexts. When things are tense between the two of you and they make a joke, I can completely imagine a scenario in which you get salty- “Can you ever just be serious?” “How can you make a joke at a time like this?” “Why are you so inappropriate?” And I am not justifying your partner’s behavior but I am inviting you to contextualize it. That moment of humor is a coping strategy that likely began long before your partner met you, albeit a misguided one. What might be different if instead of fussing at them, you could almost see your partner’s inner child in your mind’s eye, imagine that they feel threatened, and get curious with a question like, “I suspect that something is feeling uncomfortable right now. Can you talk about what’s going on for you?” I know that is asking you to do some emotional labor. And it's certainly not your job to help them retire this old coping mechanism, and you cannot do it alone, but in an intimate partnership we are all challenged to be our partners’ ally in healing. At the very least, if you can keep their use of humor tied to their Family of Origin role, it will help you be less personally offended.
Finally I just want to acknowledge to you, partner of a Peacemaker, that there’s a certain loneliness that you may live with because your Peacemaker partner is forever inserting themselves into every family drama that’s going on within their Family of Origin… and maybe even your Family of Origin! You may even feel resentment about how much energy they’re putting into these conflicts, which never seem to resolve. I want to invite you to hold compassion for your partner, remembering that it’s an enduring vulnerability of theirs to impulsively to jump into the pond. That’s their go-to move, and with their Family of origin it’s especially engrained. Your work is twofold. One, see if you can offer empathy rather than criticism, gently inviting them to check in with themselves about the price they are paying for their involvement and the price your relationship is paying for their involvement. Two, soothe yourself and maybe even entertain yourself while they are immersed in this round of drama to mitigate that loneliness and resentment. Take care of yourself so you don’t feel like you’re just waiting around for them to come back and pay attention to you.
TREATMENT: The Peacemaker
Now, I want to offer some action steps for the Peacemakers out there. Your gifts have served you well, but there are ways you can liberate yourself from always needing to help or diffuse. When somebody in your world is sharing a struggle that they're having, that's the moment when your Peacemaker tendencies are most likely to kick in. Giving advice, offering solutions, offering to do something for them (make a call, give them money, whatever)-- those are your knee-jerk, wound-driven responses, that’s what’s easiest for you to do. That’s what is most comfortable for you to do. Instead of kicking into action mode, your work is to do less. Stick with empathy and coaching from the sidelines. Here’s some language:
This sounds really hard.
How are you feeling about it?
What do you think you’ll do?
What do you think your next best move is?
What do you think you need to do next?
What would you want me to do if our roles were reversed?
Nobody knows better than you do what is needed here.
I believe in you.
I’m cheering for you.
I trust your process.
It’s that shift from the Rescuer to the Coach from Karpman’s work.
If it feels hard to make this shift for your own sake, here’s a mindset shift that can help you trust that it’s actually better for the other person too! When a butterfly is in its chrysalis, if you try to break open the chrysalis and pull the butterfly out, it will literally die. Their struggle is part of their growth, and it can’t be rushed. Your most uncomfortable thing is watching people you care about struggle. But remind yourself that it's in the struggle that people are also able to learn. Sometimes, the most supportive thing you can do, contrary to your instincts, is to let them sit in uncertainty, discomfort, and sadness, and just be a supportive presence and listening ear for them. Be patient with yourself as you work on this skill, because it’s hard to push back against that knee jerk impulse you developed in childhood to fix, smooth over, or offer solutions. This is a skill you need to, and get to, practice and develop over time. The people in your life will thank you for doing so!
I’d also like to invite you to interrupt your fixer process through journaling. The next time you find yourself in a tense moment where your fixer tendencies kick in, pause and step away. Take 10 minutes and journal about what you are feeling. Or you can do voice journaling which Alex Elle talked about during her Reimagining Love episode. Make a voice memo on your phone. Talking it out or writing it out will help you return to your lane and focus on what’s within your control, rather than what you can “do” about the situation or the other person. Creating that separation between your feelings and perspectives and the other person’s feelings will be an important practice for you as you heal.
I’d now like to offer up some mantras for all my Peacemakers out there. Keep these in your back pocket as you develop more Relational Self-Awareness and interrogate your peacemaking tendencies:
Not my circus, not my monkeys.
I give people the gift of learning their own lessons, even sometimes the hard way.
Tension is part of any relationship, and it’s not all on me to resolve it.
I am a human BEING not a human DOING.
My worth is not contingent upon my helpfulness.
Less is more.
Trust the process.
I only have control over my side of the street (and thank goodness for that!).
Wrap Up
Peacemakers, I see you out there, your empathy is part of what makes you special, your fierce ability to put yourself on the line is so commendable. I never want you to love your sensitivity and your courage. And at the very same time, I hope this article has helped you take a closer look at some of those tendencies you picked up in childhood and how they may need to be adapted for your wellbeing and for the health of your present-day relationships.
As a note, we’ll be back soon with an exploration of the last two roles: the Parentified Child and the Rebel. And at the end of this series, we’ll be sharing a resource with tailored journaling prompts and practices for all of the roles, so if you’d like to receive that later this winter, make sure you’re signed up for my newsletter, which you can find a link for in the show notes. Or, visit dralexandrasolomon.com/subscribe to get added to the list. Thanks for joining me, and until next time, be well.