Peace by Peace is by design a quick read.
Ian Brennan spent over thirty years teaching violence prevention, crisis resolution, and anger management to social work, healthcare, law enforcement, and educational staff. This slim volume collects the core, consistent lessons that those years provided. The curriculum was born out of working for fifteen years in locked, emergency psychiatric settings, mostly in Oakland, California. In those environments, utility was vital for survival. Mere theory would get your ass kicked. These techniques had to work or else immediate physical consequences would result.
Ending violence and creating peace begins with ourselves and our interpersonal encounters in our daily lives.
With impeccable wisdom and graceful simplicity, Peace by Peace offers 99 points to provoke thought and discussion and transform our relationships and lives, addressing questions such as:
- What are some common pitfalls that lead us to make a crisis situation worse?
- How do trauma, fear, and despair factor into escalation of conflict?
- If anger is not something that we can get “out of our system” by giving it free rein, then what can we do about it instead?
- How does binary black-and-white thinking impede our mental well-being?
- Is it possible to find common ground with someone even if we believe they are factually wrong?
- When is it better to walk away rather than stand one’s ground?
- How can we resolve common types of confusion that most often lead to conflict?
Ian Brennan’s insights draw from his decades of experience successfully providing violence prevention and crisis resolution training to hundreds of thousands of people in schools, hospitals, and acute-psychiatric settings, and beyond, as well as those facing criminal charges for violent conduct
