Moving from power struggle to empowerment

The Self Salutation Newsletter

Greetings and Salutations!

Before I get into today’s topic, I want to share a recent video interview I did on a Podcast called The Empath And the Narcissist: You can find it here.

If you’ve experienced the challenge of a narcissist in your life, that’s a great podcast to check out!

As I share in the interview, I grew up under the thumb of a highly narcissistic stepmother.

That childhood experience established a personality trait that took me years to change. You see, the primary tactic I embraced in order to survive that relationship as a child was what I would call submission.

I watched my three older sisters all battle it out with my stepmother and decided that I didn’t want to go down that path. My childhood was filled with fighting and I wanted an end to it.

So I settled on placating my stepmother when she got angry and drilled into me, on not fighting back. It cut the time of a negative exchange down dramatically.

When we’re not in an integrated state, we gravitate to one of two extremes in relationship to power: aggression and submission. In the integrated state, these become acceptance and assertion.

Unfortunately, whichever approach we embrace as a child, we identify with that approach strongly and it becomes hard to break free from.

Regardless of your dominant strategy, finding the place of integrated empowerment is no easy thing.

Are the two approaches to power so different?

On the surface it looks as if the two approaches to power are polar opposites but they’re far more similar than they appear.

For one thing, regardless of one’s approach, everyone builds up a similar resentment—a feeling of being taken advantage of.

People who tend towards submission feel like others are walking all over them, using them and not giving them credit.

But people who tend towards aggression feel taken advantage of in another way: they feel like they’re constantly having to carry the people around them.

Those who tend towards submission resent always being the ones to sacrifice to keep the peace.

Those who tend towards assertion resent always being the ones to shoulder extra responsibility.

The root of the problem

At the root of this challenge is a struggle with self-worth, self-esteem. Here too, the opposites have much more in common than they first seem.

It’s easy to see that people who struggle with being submissive have low self-esteem.

And it’s well known that those who tend towards aggression have the same a low self-esteem issue underneath it all-- they just overcompensate for those feelings.

What’s less understood is that both kinds of people also have the opposite problem of an inflated self-esteem.

We generally think of those who are aggressive as the ones with the big egos. But those who are submissive generally have the same problem.

Deep in their heart, they harbor the feeling of being morally superior to the aggressive type because they’re sacrificing to keep the peace.

Those who tend towards aggression think of submissive types as inferior because they are weak—while those who tend towards submission look at the aggressors as lacking moral virtue.

In the end, therefore, we all have a kind of dual-struggle with self-esteem. Regardless of where we fall on the the aggression/submission spectrum, our self-worth is both inflated and deflated—just in different ways.

And it’s even more complicated!

If all of that wasn’t enough, we also have the opposite tendency hidden in different areas of life.

It’s kind of like a friend of mine who’s right-handed but shoots basketball left-handed because he learned from a lefty. We tend toward one strategy overall but we have an area of life where we go the opposite way.

You might tend towards submission in the work environment, for example, but in your intimate relationships you can be aggressive. Or visa versa.

I learned this about myself when I was thrust into a leadership position as a young monk.

At the time I thought I only had a struggle with submission—until one meeting with the rest of the monks in the ashram.

I had kindly and humbly allowed everyone to say their peace, and then I began my response with the word “Anyway…”

That was enough for another ashram member jumped in to say, “Just stop right there because I want you to recognize that with that one word you’ve just dismissed everything that was said without addressing any of our concerns.”

Oof. Yeah. Mr “servant leader” had a lot to think about after that meeting.

Because capacity for aggression was so well camouflaged and I was so conscious of the challenges of my low self-esteem, I was oblivious to my other ways of being.

Wielding clean power

The good news here is that it’s possible to disengage from whatever patterns you may have.

It takes sustained work over time, but you can pull yourself out of whichever conditioning you currently have and bring yourself into a place where you own and wield your power in a clean, healthy way.

Part of this is healing the wounds that caused you to the pseudo solution of submission or aggression. The Self Salutation is a process for that, of course.

When you’ve healed old wounds, you will find that you can access the state of acceptance or assertion that is right for you and the moment.

In the meantime, it also helps to focus on reinforcing your sense of your own inherent worth.

Establishing your inherent worth

At the heart of it, the real problem in any power struggle is that we have been seeking power outside of ourselves.

That’s a flimsy sort of power.

Even if you are successful at that game for some time it will never bring real satisfaction because it is external.

That’s why you can be an incredibly powerful person in this world and still have a completely fragile ego.

Regardless of which side of the power struggle you find yourself on, the solution is to relinquish seeking power and validation in the eyes others.

If your locus of worth is in the people around you, you will always be in anxiety. In the back of your mind, you’ll be calibrating how to present yourself in order to maintain your position.

Genuine power is not a power over others—it arises from a sense of worth and dignity that isn’t derived from anything external.

Your inherent, limitless worth was gifted to you at birth.

The Elephant Meditation

Because re-wiring your psyche takes daily practice, one of meditations in the Self Salutation is a meditation on coming in touch with your own divine worth.

The elephant is the animal teacher for this meditation because, of course the elephant is symbol of immense power.

But unlike most animals that are powerful—like sharks or the lions—the elephant is not a predator. It lives off of grass and leaves. It doesn’t use it’s power to prey on others.

That makes the elephant a great symbol for standing in your power in a healthy way.

The more you can situate yourself in a sense of your own inherent worth and dignity, the less you have to make a show of that power to the world—or cave to others with power.

May you find that truth within your heart.

Peace,
Simon

P.S. Don’t forget to catch the recent video interview I did on The Empath And the Narcissist Podcast: You can find it here.