Still Waters Lie: Peace Needs More Than Silence

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes not from conflict itself, but from watching conflict dressed up as something else — dressed up as neutrality, as diplomacy, as peace. I have seen it in my clinic. A couple sits across from me, both of them perfectly polite, perfectly measured, and I can feel the war underneath the table. Nobody is shouting. Nobody needs to. The aggression has simply found a more sophisticated costume.

I thought about that dynamic when I read about the Dutch broadcaster walking out of Eurovision, and about the Kremlin calling Britain an obstacle to peace for sharing missile intelligence with Ukraine, and about a tanker burning off Saudi Arabia after being struck by what the Houthis are calling a justified act of maritime blockade. Three separate news items. One single psychological pattern.

We have a term for it in therapeutic work — *reactive devaluation*, the mechanism by which any position taken by an adversary is automatically judged as hostile, regardless of its actual content. A ceasefire proposed by your enemy feels like a trap. Aid offered by a rival power feels like infiltration. A singing contest insisting on staying out of politics feels, to the Dutch, like complicity. None of these reactions are irrational. That is the unsettling part. When trust has been systematically destroyed — by invasions, by strikes, by years of broken agreements — the nervous system stops distinguishing between genuine olive branches and poisoned ones. It cannot afford to. The cost of being wrong is too high.

What we know from conflict resolution research is that peace is not the absence of aggression. Peace is the presence of enough safety for both parties to risk vulnerability. Without that safety — structural, institutional, felt — every gesture toward negotiation is read through the lens of the last betrayal. Putin warns of escalation. The Houthis declare a blockade. The Dutch pack their Eurovision delegation and leave. All of them are doing the same thing: withdrawing trust before it can be weaponised against them.

The psychological literature on this is both precise and grim. John Gottman's work on relationship dissolution identified contempt as the single most reliable predictor of a relationship ending — not anger, not disagreement, but contempt, the internal verdict that the other party is beneath negotiation. What we are watching in several of these situations is not a peace process interrupted. It is a peace process that never had the foundational conditions to begin. You cannot negotiate across contempt. You can only manage damage.

Here is what I find most interesting, and most human, about all of it: the moment any party declares the arena itself corrupted — not just the opponent, but the *space* where they were supposed to meet — they have effectively announced that they no longer believe repair is possible. The Dutch are not just withdrawing from a song contest. They are announcing that they have stopped believing in the fiction of the neutral space. That fiction was already thin. But fictions, even thin ones, perform essential work. They give parties somewhere to stand while the real negotiations happen underneath.

When the fiction collapses, everyone has to reckon with what was always true: there is no neutral ground. There is only managed tension, temporarily stabilised by agreements that hold until they don't.

I say this not to counsel despair. I say it because the first honest move in any conflict — personal or geopolitical — is to stop pretending the ground is neutral when it isn't. Name the power imbalance. Name the contempt. Name the fear underneath the aggression. Only then can you begin the actual work, which is not reaching agreement, but rebuilding the conditions under which agreement becomes thinkable.

Peace is not a destination you arrive at. It is a tolerance you build — slowly, expensively, and never once for free.

The hardest part of that work is that it requires you to extend the first fragment of trust to someone who may not deserve it yet. Which means the first move always belongs to whoever is slightly less afraid — not whoever is most righteous.

That is the part nobody wants to hear. Which is exactly why it needs saying.

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*Elena Vella is a licensed relationship and family therapist and Love, Life & Relationships Editor at News Beast by FreeMalta.com.*