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Think Others are Stealing Your Power?
These days the world seems awash with people feeling powerless. Especially around politics, finances and family. We’re prone to looking outside ourselves for a sense of control, for our power. We’re on a quest to conquer our feelings of powerlessness by slaying encountered dragons; an endless cycle of us vs them cos-play.
Feeling powerless (and powerful) have absolutely nothing to do with anything outside ourselves. Feeling powerless happens when we don’t own our own personal power. We want someone else — be it an individual or institution — to fill the voids we’ve created within. We seek to anchor ourselves in distraction rather than in fulfillment of our own personal decisions.
We can play the “shame, blame and disdain” game and write off others we see as threatening our beliefs. But that only serves to embed our sense of powerlessness. Someone else will always appear to confirm the bias we have against our own power. We can’t do anything about what anyone else thinks or does. When we truly believe we are powerful, when we truly believe we are worthy, no one else can make us feel less than that.
Case in point: I’m a gay woman. When I stopped being uncomfortable with my sexuality — when I stopped having internalized homophobia — suddenly I no longer encountered “homophobic people” out there.