The Nature Of Power

Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anaemic.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

The five developmental forces, along with their corresponding emotions, give potency to life. Fear thrusts you forward, and taming it gives you the confidence to face the unknown and seize opportunities. Love creates transcendental experiences and unlocks your creativity while evolving your relationships. Hate gives shape to your boundaries and assertiveness to your actions and lets others trust that you have a backbone. Pride lights up your potential and gives you legitimacy in the world so you can shape it in your vision. Shame slows you down enough to absorb the necessary knowledge for self-reflection and practical living. When all five are skilfully combined, you have the core elements of power.

Like the ingredients for a cake, it is difficult to differentiate between each one when you only have a final product. While we live within the realm of power at all times, we generally have little awareness of how it comes together, let alone how we can influence it. As long as we remain wrapped up in the ego and the stories it tells us, we will eat whatever cake the world gives us. When power structures solidify in our minds, we forget that they can be changed. Yet change them we can, starting with understanding how power is formed and organised.

The archetypes of power

Due to our helpless nature early in life, actualisation relies on an outside figure. As already discussed, this higher power is structured into the following fundamental archetypes:

1. The great mother: A loving figure who provides acceptance, mirroring, nurture and warmth.

2. The great father: A benevolent figure who provides guidance, wisdom, protection and support.

3. The family: A home base or tribe which provides identity, belonging, meaning and security.

Even when we leave home, we join clubs, friendship groups, workplaces, sports teams, political organisations, and so on. All of these stem from the family archetype, which remains integral throughout our lives.

In childhood, we experienced the five forces through these archetypes. At the time we were relating not to the human beings who were our parents, but to the divine figure we expected them to embody. We never considered that we could express these energies for ourselves.

The most powerful gain hegemony by successfully projecting the great parent archetype in the context of the current zeitgeist. Demagogues do this in times of crisis. Narcissists do it to gain narcissistic supply.

In relation to the great parent, power comes in two forms; personal and social. Personal power arises when we stop channelling the great mother and father archetypes through our parents and undertake the path to individuation, which entails embodying those figures in ourselves. Social power comes when we channel the great father or mother archetype for others; in parenthood, leadership or otherwise. Personal power is having influence over your own feelings, thoughts, decisions and actions, whereas social power is influencing how others feel, think, decide and act. In the case of personal power, a person breaks their dependence on an outside figure and consciously connects with the True Self. They free their vitality from the control of others, which gives them the capacity to act in their own interest.

When it comes to relationships and social structures, we often underestimate the part that love plays in enabling power. Although influence over others can be obtained through fear and money, in most cases it is voluntarily granted to those who can persuade others to forfeit it. That is, power is given to those transcendental people who can win the worship of others by promising them a higher state of being. These figures gain support not only by embodying the great parent archetype, but also through the myths they create which detail why we should submit to them in the first place.

The mythology of power

Power is a story, a thread which weaves the five forces together and tells the tale of how our desires will be fulfilled — or not. It is a story we tell ourselves, and if we lose trust in our personal power, becomes a fiction others feed us instead. This narrative is supposed to pave the way for us to get what we want. It is, in our mind, the ideal path toward actualisation.

Most of the time, we are held back from personal power by the stories of those who tell us we are incapable. Narcissists aim to crush our self-esteem by turning our shame against us. If that fails, they wall off our True Self within a house of fear and confusion. Imagine living within the confines of an isolated town and being convinced that there is nothing worthwhile outside those walls. Now take those walls and imagine them assembled in your mind.

Narcissists are master storytellers. They start by fishing for your desires, and then weave together a story of how the two of you will fulfil those wishes. Perhaps the purest and most fundamental yearning we have is for a special someone who will make our life better. This hope is rooted in our early experiences of the great mother and father. The narcissist awakens this core desire and convinces us that they are the only one who can make it come true. The reality is naturally different. The narcissist’s empty words aim only to convince. Once the cracks appear, the storyline changes from desires fulfilled to tales of the incompetent, hopeless fool the narcissist is forced to tolerate. Shame, fear and doubt become the weapons of tyranny. A glare, a snide or ridiculing remark, a judgemental comment; these reinforce a story which aims to create an imbalance between you and the narcissist while hampering your personal power.

Self-development uses the five forces to restore personal power, and we achieve this by unravelling the forces from our internalised stories. Most importantly, we free the five forces when we disentangle them from the archetypes of the family, the great mother and the great father. We do so by becoming aware of the stories tied to those archetypes, and then observing how the underlying emotions keep the stories in place. From a young age, our life narrative becomes psychologically solidified, and we lose awareness of it. Our conscious reality remains stuck at this level, and we never look closer at the emotions and patterns which drive our beliefs. Worst of all, we lose awareness of the stories themselves and take them as gospel.

It takes courage, and a willingness to tolerate states of chaos before we can face the fiction which keeps us stuck in dysfunction. Creating a new reality is an alchemical process, forged by experience and emotion. In our relationships, it is easy to get caught up in the ideas of others, especially when we are attached to them.

Attachment: The highway of power

As vitality flows between two people, a bond gradually forms through which the relationship evolves. Much like a highway between two cities, attachment permits the sharing of energy and allows the people involved to influence and nurture each other. As the connection deepens, the other person becomes indispensable, and the idea of separation becomes progressively more painful. An example is the post-breakup pain we experience for weeks or even months on end. It is the consequence of a rupture in attachment.

Before they can develop, a child must establish a safe base within the mother. They cling to her at all times, and cry and scream when left alone. These protest behaviours are caused by threats to the attachment, and are fuelled by the terror of abandonment. The tiniest disruption causes immense pain for the child. Like an emotional umbilical cord, the attachment between mother and child sustains the True Self. Ideally, the mother is attuned and loving enough for the child to trust that she will always be there. This culminates in a secure attachment style, wherein the child can connect and separate from loved ones with minimal fuss or anxiety. A secure attachment involves a continuous, attuned connection between mother and baby through the use of touch, proximity, eye contact, sound making, facial expressions and the mirroring of emotional states. The child’s alignment with their True Self relies entirely on this relationship, and any extended break in the connection can cripple their development.

Nobody can be flawless in their mothering. Breaks will occur when the mother is distracted, fatigued or stressed. Yet the attachment bond is durable, and can sustain temporary disruptions. As long as the mother is attuned and available most of the time, the child can maintain trust in the relationship. The child will then develop object constancy and a strong sense of Self, remaining in touch with their emotional world and having confidence in their ability to connect with and influence others. In short, a secure attachment with the mother acts as a blueprint for future relationships.

While we think of food and shelter as indispensable, we often forget how much emotional connection plays a part in our well-being. Without intimacy in our life, that is, without being truly seen and understood, we would quickly suffer at a core level. Therefore, developing and maintaining a secure attachment in our relationships becomes crucial, even though being attached to another person also makes us vulnerable to pain and abuse. This conundrum is solved by regulating the strength of the attachment using activating and deactivating strategies, wherein activating reinforces the bond, and deactivating weakens it.

Examples of activating strategies which aim to strengthen attachment are:

• Physical closeness and touch.

• Divulging your feelings and inner state.

• Thinking positively of the other person and focussing on their good qualities.

• Refusing to see the other person’s flaws.

• Remaining in constant contact, including calling and texting often as well as spending lots of time together.

• Putting someone on a pedestal while seeing yourself as beneath them.

• Giving the person preferential treatment over others.

Examples of deactivating strategies which aim to weaken attachment are:

• Physically isolating yourself or withholding touch.

• Sharing less than the other person about your feelings and inner state.

• Cutting off your emotions and communicating superficially.

• Reducing contact by calling or texting less, or by going missing.

• Setting harsh boundaries.

• Blaming the other person when things go wrong.

• Judging the other person as inferior, flawed or unworthy in some way.

• Letting down or mistreating the other person to create emotional hurt in them.

Activating strategies are typically used to increase well-being and create a sense of security by helping a person feel closer to their loved one. However, fear and trauma can also arise in relationships when a person is abused, neglected or hurt by an attachment figure. To help combat feelings of vulnerability and fear, a person may utilise deactivating strategies, often acting manipulatively or hurtfully in the process.

Maintaining attachment while ensuring safety, integrity and space is where the power struggle in relationships is fought, where imbalances and dysfunctional patterns can emerge in endless ways. Who we attach to holds enormous sway over us. It is therefore crucial to understand how attachment can corrupt power in our relationships and derail our development.

The connection/actualisation continuum

We can think of power in relationships as a vehicle which runs on vitality. This ship is supposed to take the people who fuel it where they want to go. Power can also be a source of security, protecting those who surrender to it. Consider the child who snuggles into their parent, the person who looks to their partner for support, or the people who trust in their leader. Think of the times someone has believed in you, cooperated with you or paid you their undivided attention. That wind behind your sail, that exhilarating rush you felt, was power.

Relationships, above all, are about empowerment. Through mutuality and mirroring, people can enable and awaken each other’s life instinct. It is like two artists co-writing a screenplay where they are both protagonists. This story can go anywhere if it is told in the context of the five forces. When security is established in a relationship, vitality flows between each person, and a democratic structure is tenaciously enforced through boundary setting. Both people have value and legitimacy in the relationship, and they explore and learn together as they grow in stature and wisdom.

For the narcissist, however, there is only one protagonist. Fear keeps everyone in check. Love is one-directional and only serves the narcissist’s need for supply. Resistance and boundary setting are discouraged and attacked. Pride is reserved for the narcissist, and shame is used primarily as a tool to cut people down and remind them of their ‘place.’ This leads to a dysfunctional balance of power which stunts the development of a person’s True Self. To challenge this hegemony, one needs to understand how the dysfunction first set in and what keeps it in place.

The scale for balancing power in a relationship can be illustrated on a continuum as follows: