Breaking free from power struggles and ego battles

Greetings and Salutations!

This week I’d like to look at a challenge we’ve all struggled with at some point: the power struggle.

As I often do, I'll kick off this message with a personal example from an period of my life that I lovingly refer to as the café fiasco. In my last year as a monk, I opened a café in the first floor of our building in New York’s East Village—and it torched my monastic life.

One of the problems was that as the café hobbled along, everyone on our community’s leadership team had a different idea about what should happen. Of course, I had my own ideas too—and that put me in conflict with everyone else.

At one point, I was going over the disagreements with my business coach and she boiled the conflict down to its essence in a way I will never forget: So, it sounds like you’re all fighting over money and power.

Ouch. Yeah. My business coach truth-bombed the ashram.

It was devastating. Here we were, a group of mostly monks, supposedly aloof and above it all. But it was irrefutable.

The Will to Power

The truth is that we exist in a network of relationships with other people and within these relationships there are all kinds of subtle power dynamics going on under the surface.

The existentialists, and many postmodern thinkers, were highly attuned to this and many of them concluded that all relationships boil down to a power struggle, what Nietzsche called a will to power.

Nietzsche clearly never meditated (or prayed). If he had, he would have experienced another side to life—the field of harmony.

While we all have an aspect of our persona that I call the Little Emperor—a part of us who battles for power and control—this isn’t the final story of who we are or what life is about.

Who do you struggle with?

Even though most of us know there’s more to life, it’s amazingly easy to find yourself in a power struggle. I think that’s especially true in today’s world, where we all feel pushed to the limit so much of the time.

The struggle can be with a boss who drills down on you in a way that feels unfair or overbearing. Or with your peers who are vying to get ahead and prove themselves.

It can happen with your children—who can assert their wills in powerful ways even before they can speak.

Perhaps the most devastating is when it manifests with your spouse. Painful as that conflict is, it’s the relationship with the most fertile ground for conflict since you share the most intimate decisions, like how to spend (or not spend) your money, where to live, or how to raise your children.

I once had a conversation with a friend who struggled with his girlfriend and I encouraged him to open up to her about what he was going through. You don’t understand, he said, that will never work. She’s like a master chess player. She’ll use any vulnerability against me.

When all you can see is the power struggle there’s not much to build on. They soon separated.

Power Outage Syndrome

While a few rare people are able to fight for power with zero self-awareness, the rest of us struggle with a dynamic I call Power Outage Syndrome.

I’ve categorized the ways we have of getting snowed under by negativity into the Syndromes of the Lost Self. The hallmark of a syndrome is feeling stuck between two unacceptable alternatives.

In Power Outage Syndrome, the impossible bind is to either bulldoze someone with your will, or shut down and submit to theirs; let them walk all over you, or take some drastic action that could mean the end of the relationship.

Often, this feeling is fueled by the conviction that you’ve tried “everything,” and nothing seems to work—though on closer examination you will likely find that your “solutions” were attempted through clenched teeth—so the subtext of seething anger likely overshadowed any olive-branch.

Of course, the sense that of being stuck in a bind with a choice between complete submission or drastic aggression is an illusion. There’s always a third way.

There’s a path to move forward that will maintain your dignity while respecting the dignity of others—but it’s hard to see that third way without a journey within.

A journey through the Labyrinth

In An Introduction to the Self Salutation I chart the path to resolving Power Outage Syndrome—and all the other syndromes—with a journey through the Labyrinth of Repressed Emotions.

The Self Salutation is a meditation process that facilitates that journey.

Today, I’ll summarize much of the process by saying that underneath each of the Syndromes you will find buried feelings that need to be excavated and tended to. Once you get to the bottom of what’s really going on, the way out of the impossible bind becomes clear.

But I want to discuss one final point about the Labyrinth since it plays such a prominent role in the top of the power struggle.

The deepest layer of the Labyrinth is a place I call the Chamber of your greatest pain and potential. When you pass through all the layers of emotions to this chamber, you will encounter an unhealed wound from your childhood.

This is especially true with the power struggle.

The most important power struggle to consider

In many ways, every other power struggle you have later in your life can be traced back to the challenges you had or have with your parental figures.

No matter how hard your parents tried to love you unconditionally, they were still human beings with their own shortcomings. When you lived under their roof, under their rules, under their authority, for years on end, you were bound to suffer in some way due to their shortcomings, due to their own dysfunctions in their relationship to power.

Now, all these years later, whenever we confront a shadow of that behavior in other relationships, it echoes back to that original wound. It puts us back in the childlike state when we lived under our parent’s authority.

We call this getting triggered.

But this is not a bad thing. When you encounter this shadow of your original wound you have an opportunity. You have a chance to win out. Not by overpowering the other person by your will, of course.

You win out by tending to that wounded child, by giving her or him the comfort they needed but didn’t have as a child. In this way, you heal the wound and learn to encounter this previously vexing dynamic with all the strength, power and intelligence of your adult self.

May you find that strength within your heart and know it for yourself.

Peace,
Simon

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