During these times of political, economic, and climate turbulence, anger and alarm surge and tensions run high. In responding to our poly-crisis situation, we quickly assign blame. However, pointing the finger at Washington, D.C. and shouting “Tyranny!” is ideally balanced with uprooting the tyranny we may unknowingly carry within ourselves.

The Alcoholic’s Anonymous axiom reminds us, “Do your own inventory — when you point one finger out in blame, you have three fingers pointed back at you.” We too may be unconsciously doing harm and on some level, engaging in the very behavior we are accusing “the other” of.

When we’re unable to look in the mirror and bear witness to our own inner wounding — the ways we were bullied, belittled, shamed — we tell ourselves “you’re fine, move on, it wasn’t so bad.” Denial protects our broken heart and the pain is buried underground, only to inevitably surface down the road in harmful issues of power, control, perfectionism, or addiction.

Good people, well-intended and consciously doing good things, can be tyrannical and unconsciously inflict harm on themselves or others. This is the case with the following situations I’ve personally witnessed:

■An avid cyclist who helped create the first bicycle lanes and paths in a busy city in New York, but couldn’t see how their alcoholism was hurting their family

■An activist who passionately protested violence against women, but couldn’t acknowledge the violence of hitting their own children

■A human rights commissioner asked to step down because of their toxic vitriol

■A co-housing community, domestic violence shelter, and community non-profit plagued with pernicious and destabilizing ego clashes

Most would agree with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inspiring quote, “Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.”

Do we apply this truism to our own ordinary lives, do we extend kindness to our employees, co-workers, family — to ourselves?

In a Sun magazine interview, life-long activist and writer Deena Metzger said, “I’m really interested in what I call personal disarmament — learning to disarm in the inner world, so that the inner can become a model for the outer world.”

Breast cancer and a double mastectomy brought Metzger face-to-face with her own “inner tyrant,” which revealed itself in the form of merciless self-criticism and self-loathing. In her book “Tree,” she shares her healing journey of transforming the perfectionistic, shaming, controlling “inner dictator” into self-compassion and liberating freedom.

Elizabeth Lesser, author of “Cassandra Speaks” and co-founder of the Omega Institute, writes of balancing opposition to abuse of power “out there,” and healing from within:

“All my life I’ve toggled between being an activist — someone interested in healing and changing the world around me — and an innervist, a word I made up to describe the part of me that seeks inner change, inner healing. I’ve never regarded activism and innervism as mutually exclusive. In fact, one keeps the other in check.”

If we focus only on fighting what we perceive to be wrong “out there,” we miss out on the very real work waiting to be done within our own hearts and minds and lives. If we don’t look at our own blind spots, our projections, our hypocrisies, we can end up doing what Frederick Nietzsche warned against: “Whoever fights monsters, should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.”

Is it any wonder that an authoritarian administration could be elected in the U.S.? Many of us were raised in “nice” homes with “nice” parents where we lived in chronic anxiety under “normalized” authoritarian control: “It’s my way or the highway,” “If you disobey me there will be hell to pay,” and “This house is a dictatorship and I’m the dictator!”

In a memoir writing workshop I attended last summer, a man stood up, eyes brimming with tears, and poignantly revealed, “When I hear these stories of how people were harmed by their parent’s tyranny, they’re describing how I raised my own children. I thought that’s just what you do. I didn’t know how much I was hurting them.”

It’s easy to get angry, to drop the F-bomb, to pull a punch or a trigger. But the bravest people I have ever met are the wounded warriors — perhaps your neighbor, friend, co-worker, spouse, veterinarian, carpenter, teacher, waiter, doctor, student, or mechanic — who show up in my psychotherapy office week after week and do the liberating, life-saving work of inner healing.

They do this heroic work for us all.

I remind them to “never underestimate the beauty, power and value of your commitment to your own healing journey — your transformation is a gift, it helps end the legacy of multi-generational trauma, ripples out into the world, and uplifts every living being around you.”

In Mahatma Ghandi’s words, “We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.”

Marilyn Marks, LICSW, is a Northampton-based integrative psychotherapist who specializes in trauma recovery, grief, and loss. More information about her can be found at marilynmarkstherap y.com.