We Need to Talk About Power

In trauma healing circles, shame is the villain. The narrative paints it almost as if healing all of our shame, developing this unshakable sense of self-acceptance, compassion, and love, will singlehandedly heal all of our trauma. 

I used to believe it is this simple. I no longer believe it is this simple.

Healing shame is huge and worthwhile work. If shame clouds your life and relationships, healing those wounds are necessary. If it’s showing up in the social and relational domain the most (but you feel fine when by yourself), I’d even encourage you to check out literature on “humiliation”, shame’s favorite cousin.

Work as much of that as you can out of your system until you feel like you have reasonable (functional) access to shame and humiliation.

This is all important and good, but something I’ve noticed is that when the only thing people have to focus on in healing is shame, they often get stuck. I’ve noticed this with myself, my clients, my friends and family. We get stuck wondering how much self-acceptance and compassion will be enough. 

Stuck in our lives, in burnout, in the cocoon phase. Many people exist in a specific spot in “healing shame” where they’re just kind of sitting there, dosing up on their prescribed self-compassion and affection for their inner child, wondering how much it will actually take to get moving again. 

I’ve been there. It’s frustrating. So I got curious about it a while ago.

Something I've realized is that while shame sticks to you, it doesn’t necessarily keep you stuck. Shame alone doesn’t have the power to take away your ability to make a choice, so much as it has a lot of power to drive the choices you make.

We can live, move, and take action to improve our lives and outcomes, even when we feel shame.

Usually, shame warps your story about other people’s choices toward you, clouding your vision in a way that alters how you exercise your own choices in those same situations. But even when the shame spiral is thick, we can still make choices. And someone who can make a choice isn’t a stuck person so much as perhaps a blinded one.

To be stuck is something different. To be stuck is to feel you don’t have choices at all, even if they’re staring you in the face. My clients tell me “I know I could, I know I should, I’m clear on what I need to do and I know I deserve better, I just….can’t.”

Shame may be in the room with us as they say this. But what I hear actually speaking isn't shame. It's a lack of agency. And this tells me there’s a good chance their agency needs healing, too. Because all a sense of agency is, is our belief that we can make our own choices and do so in a satisfactory way.

This is important.

Because the thing that trauma—all trauma—has in common, is that it takes away our choices. 

The physical assault we didn’t choose and couldn’t save ourselves from. Being seen as “lazy” our entire childhood, with no adult curious or compassionate enough to let us have a say in the narrative. As children, many of us didn’t get a say in who we were or what happened to us.

And, of course, trauma isn’t just a moment in history that passes. It haunts us.

In this context: when trauma takes away our choices, it also takes away our sense of choice moving forward. We get stuck in that lack of agency. This is what I mean when I say we don’t have a sense of agency. They’re the same thing.

When it comes to our sense of self and self-concept, unchecked shame reigns supreme as the source of that struggle. But when it comes to what impacts your life as a whole, the most debilitating thing about trauma, I’m coming to believe, is the loss of our agency. The loss of our ability to look in the mirror and say to ourselves: 

“I have choices, my choices make a difference in every aspect of my life, including my relationship with myself and others. I can trust myself, over the long term, to exercise my choices in a way that positively shapes my life outcomes.”

The more grounded people are in their sense of agency, the more they get to choose how they see a situation, the stories and beliefs they subscribe to, how they navigate their feelings, the risks they take, the company they keep, and the choices they make in general.

They say, “I might not have a reasonable choice to fly a plane right now, but what’s to stop me from taking a class and learning to fly a plane? Money? What’s to stop me from figuring out how to make enough to afford the class?"

They have choices. 

This is what a solid sense of agency sounds like: a belief in our ability to choose and choose well. So I want to have a conversation with you about that. About agency. But to do that, we have to talk about a word that can feel a little intimidating to some people. 

We need to talk about power. 

Power used to be a scary word, for me. I think this is true for a lot of people. Mainly people who are most familiar with abuse of power, and don’t have much else to associate with it. 

There’s a lot more to the word, and how we experience power, than just that, though. 

And it turns out, power plays a huge role in the restoration of agency.

I’m going to show you why.

What is Power?

First off, power isn’t just a structural system or something people hold within that system.

It’s also a feeling.