The Art of Quiet Wars and Gentle Victories (Expanded and Revised)

By Aubrey Olsen Earle

(Published by SLCC CWC and Ghandi Alliance - Celebration for published work of mine and others will be held May 8th 2025, 6pm to 7:30pm at the Creative Writing Center at the Salt Lake Public Library)

The house was a war zone… though no battles were ever declared outright. The air always seemed to carry the thick tension of impending conflict. Words turned to knives. Silence became barbed wire. Ours was a world of survival, where my three siblings and I relied on the sharpened instincts of anticipation, analysis, and adaptation. While some children learned to swim in their wealthy relatives’ pools or ride bicycles through sun-drenched neighborhoods… we learned to read the dangerous currents of human nature… balancing on the narrow ledge between chaos and calm.

Violence in our home was not always a strike with fists. Sometimes it arrived quietly like a shadow slipping under a locked door… through the sharpness of insults, the cold withdrawal of warmth or the unpredictable rages that stormed through the walls without warning. But beneath every burst of anger lay a deep-rooted hunger… an insatiable cycle of projecting pain outward. My siblings and I became unwilling witnesses to that cycle, standing on the precipice of becoming its next carriers.

And yet, we resisted… not with rebellion or retaliation, but with something it would take me years to name… quiet diplomacy. We listened. We studied. We traced the patterns of unpredictability like maps etched into our nerves, brain cells, bones. And slowly, as adults, we grew into peacekeepers. We chose silence when rage beckoned. We tried to soothe instead of escalate. We addressed pain not as an enemy to be eradicated but as a wounded force in need of acknowledgment. These were the first seeds of peace I ever planted… small, invisible victories that laid the groundwork for a future I would one day call my own.

Those early survival skills… empathy, emotional analysis and preemptive compassion… they were forged in our fire of childhood trauma. But somewhere along the way I realized they could be repurposed for something greater than endurance. They could become tools of transformation. I became a woman shaped not just by pain, but by the deliberate and stubbornly disciplined choice to interrupt it.

As Gandhi taught: "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." His was not a passive path but a courageous, active resistance rooted in emotional intelligence. He understood that rage, unchecked, becomes a cycle that feeds itself. Like him, I do not glorify suffering… but I believe in its alchemical potential. I believe in the transformation that can take place when pain is met with understanding rather than vengeance.

Referring to my marriage. Conflict doesn’t vanish when you marry the love of your life. It simply changes form. My husband and I have faced moments that felt like overly emotional earthquakes… misunderstandings, unmet needs, the invisible strain of chronic illness, and the weight of trauma neither of us asked for.

One night, not long ago, we stood in the kitchen of our first apartment together, after a disagreement that had snowballed from me wanting to run, shouting and quickly into silence as it often does… The air was heavy. I could feel his frustration simmering, mine quietly cracking under the surface. My instinct… still laced with the survival tactics of childhood, was to shut down… to build a wall before I could be wounded. But instead, I waited and then we talked about some of what was aching deep within us instead of fearing the vulnerability that often has been a benefit to talk about and let loose from our hearts, together, talking… a benefit that was better than to hold it all back, keeping it caged in our ribs, bruising our hearts.

What followed when listening and talking, wasn’t easy. It was raw. But it was honest. In that moment, we weren’t enemies… we were both children of conflict trying to build a home where peace could live. I learned that night… and often many other times before and after, with him… that love isn’t just found in grand gestures or poetic words… it’s forged in the pauses we make for one another, in the patience to see behind the anger and into the wound.

In parenting… raising children… especially ones I was not blessed to birth but blessed to raise… raising children, while healing yourself, is like trying to build a house during a thunderstorm. There are days I fail. Days I raise my voice before I raise my awareness. But there are also days I win quiet victories.

Like one night a few years ago, my stepdaughter slammed her door in frustration and refused to come out for dinner. My old self… the reactive self… would have seen it as disrespect, as rebellion. And I did. That fiercely changed years later looking back on it… I visualize that day along with many others sometimes. I look back on her then and I recognized the look in her eyes…the look of a child who wants to be heard but doesn’t yet have the tools to speak her pain. And the journey of my motherhood is different for each of my step-kids.

Instead of demanding respect that day, I should've sat outside her door. Not speak… and simply waited.

After some time, the door would have cracked open. She may not have apologized, I wouldn't expect her to. Instead, I could've said something along the lines of, “I can tell something hurts. You don’t have to talk now. But I’m here when you’re ready.”

and even if she didn’t say anything that night and even if it was the next day, I'm sure she would've agreed to a walk… and that walk would have become the foundation of a new layer in our relationship. Not built on control or compliance… but on empathy.

I’ve learned that parenting isn’t about shaping children into our mold. It’s about showing them that they’re safe to be whole even when they’re struggling. It’s about choosing presence over punishment. Connection over correction.

In my community I’ve become a quiet place for people to land. Not because I have all the answers… and I don't… but because I’ve lived inside the questions. I question everything. I’ve sat with women navigating the wreckage of trauma, grief, chronic illness, and spiritual estrangement. I’ve been that woman, too… trying to hold a shattered faith in one hand and my aching story in the other. So when people come to me raw and unraveling, I don’t try to fix them. I sit beside them, and we breathe through the ache together.

Sometimes healing shows up in circles. Sometimes it’s a one-on-one conversation on a back porch, at a game table, dinner table, on the phone or a vulnerable comment someone writes after I share one of my poems. I've helped create spaces where people don’t have to perform strength to be respected. Where they don’t have to hide their doubts, their anger at God, or their disillusionment with the stories they were told.

I remember one moment, years ago, when a conversation about leaving the church turned heavy. One woman was sobbing, torn between missing the faith she once clung to and resenting how it broke her spirit. Another woman, still active in the church, flinched at her words, feeling attacked and unseen.

I didn’t correct either of them. I didn't mediate with platitudes or redirect the topic. I leaned in.

I asked the grieving one, “What do you wish someone would’ve said to you back then?”

And I asked the other, softly, “What are you afraid this conversation is taking from you?”

The room shifted. Not into agreement, but into tenderness. We didn’t find peace by erasing differences… we found it by naming pain. And in that rawness, something sacred cracked open… mutual humanity.

It’s not my job to force healing. But I can create the conditions where it’s safe to begin. I don't lead with any religious doctrine… I lead with dignity. Something instilled in many. Naturally and sometimes overflowing within them. I hold space for contradiction, for mess, and for silence. Because I know firsthand how powerful it is to be truly witnessed, and how life-changing it can be to finally feel seen… not for what you've survived, but for how you're still choosing to love.

I have found peace despite many hardships. One evening I remember, I was folding laundry while music played softly in the background. My children were laughing in the next room, and my husband was reading on the couch. A golden sunset poured through the windows, casting everything in a soft, forgiving glow.

I paused for a moment, just to take it in.

I used to crave dramatic moments of healing… big cathartic breakthroughs, sweeping declarations of closure, both being more constant... But healing, I’ve learned, lives in the mundane. In choosing not to argue when I’m tired. In offering grace when it’s easier to blame. In returning, again and again, in realizing that life is up and down and never constant, and in returning to the question… What would peace choose here?

That evening wasn’t perfect. The kids would argue later, and the dishes would pile up. But I felt something unshakable in my chest… a kind of settledness. A knowing. That the war zone I came from does not define the home I’m building. That love… real, raw, enduring love, is a series of small and often beautifully powerful choices.

The war zone of my childhood, as I have stated, could have severely shaped me into another bearer of inherited violence. But I chose to become a translator of pain, a builder of bridges, and a sort of alchemist turning generational suffering into empathy.

I am no longer surviving. I am living. And in doing so, I am teaching my children, my community, and continually myself that peace is not a myth. It is not passive. It is not weak.

It is a revolution.

One that begins in kitchens and classrooms and quiet walks. One that grows in every moment we choose compassion over control, patience over pride and truth over triumph. One that ripples gently but powerfully into the next generation.

That is the art of my quiet war. That is the triumph of my gentle victory.