Why We Give It Away, and How We Learn to Shine Without Being Dimmed
A Healing Reflections Essay by Martyn Blacklock
(10–12 minutes)
1. The Moment You Feel Yourself Shrink
There is often a bodily moment that arrives before conscious thought. A subtle contraction in the chest, a tightening in the stomach, an internal instruction to be careful.
It can happen when you assert a boundary, ask for what is reasonable, or put something you care deeply about into the world and notice the atmosphere shift around you. Nothing overt has occurred, yet your body braces.
This is often where the question begins:
Where did my power go?
Not taken dramatically or stolen outright, but given gradually. Given through accommodation, over-explaining, under-asking, and learning to dim oneself so that others do not have to confront what they avoid in themselves.
2. What We Mean By Power
Power is frequently misunderstood as dominance: control, authority, or the ability to win. However, many social and psychological frameworks differentiate between types of power.
Starhawk distinguishes power-over, which relies on coercion and control, from power-with and power-from-within, which emerge from collaboration, integrity, and inner authority. This distinction matters, because much relational pain is not caused by conflict but by power imbalance.
Often, one person reaches for power-over because they do not trust their own inner power, while another relinquishes power because their nervous system associates self-assertion with risk.
The result is not harmony, but quiet erosion.
3. Why We Give Power Away: Survival, Not Failure
It is tempting to interpret the loss of power as a personal flaw: weak boundaries, low confidence, excessive sensitivity. Trauma-informed perspectives offer a different understanding.
We give power away because it once kept us safe.
Trauma is not stored primarily in explicit memory, but in pattern. The nervous system learns how to preserve connection and minimise threat. For many people who grew up with emotional unpredictability, financial insecurity, or premature responsibility, appeasement becomes adaptive.
Pete Walker describes this as the fawn response: a survival strategy organised around pleasing, smoothing, anticipating others’ needs, and minimising oneself in order to remain safe.
From a Polyvagal perspective, this reflects neuroception: the nervous system’s unconscious scanning for cues of safety or danger, shaping behaviour before conscious choice is available.
Seen this way, giving power away is not weakness. It is survival intelligence shaped by context.
4. Vulnerability, Control and the Brené Brown Turning-Point:
Brené Brown’s work provides an important bridge between research and lived experience. Originally trained as a social work researcher, Brown approached her work with rigour, control, and an emphasis on measurement and objectivity.
Her research into shame, belonging, and connection repeatedly revealed an uncomfortable truth: people who experienced deep connection were willing to be vulnerable.
This challenged her own reliance on control. After what she later described as a breakdown or spiritual awakening, Brown recognised that she could not research courage while living in fear, nor study authenticity while hiding behind perfectionism.
Against academic advice, she placed herself inside the work. Her 2010 TED talk on vulnerability resonated not because it was polished, but because it was human. Her subsequent books, including Daring Greatly, Rising Strong, Braving the Wilderness, and Dare to Lead, consistently emphasise that vulnerability is not weakness, but exposure. Exposure is where creativity, connection, and courage emerge.
Shining requires vulnerability. Vulnerability requires safety, both internal and relational.
5. When Other People Cannot Tolerate Their Own Power
One of the most painful, and ultimately liberating, realisations is this:
Sometimes people attempt to take power not because you are wrong, but because your clarity exposes their avoidance.
Boundaries highlight what others bypass. Visibility reflects what others suppress. Joy confronts what others have abandoned in themselves.
Rather than turning inward, some attempt to manage the external environment through guilt, minimisation, withdrawal of support, or subtle control. For those with trauma histories, this dynamic is especially destabilising, as belonging may once have depended on self-suppression.
Here, power begins to return not through confrontation, but through discernment.
Power is not permission.
Power is authorship.
6. Shine: Visibility as Practice, Not Performance
Shine is a movement-based, community-focused offering centred on joy, embodiment, play, and connection. It was created to offer something light, alive, and inclusive, rather than to compete or prove worth.
Putting Shine into the world activated familiar survival responses for me: vigilance, self-doubt, and the urge to soften or justify its existence when I dare to step into my own power in creating it, and trust in its power to heal participants. For participants, joyful visibility can feel threatening when one’s nervous system learned early that being seen carried risk.
Additionally, Shine has also required asking for support rather than earning it: through Social Media pleas for support to battle the silencing of 'The Algorithm' and requiring people to attend sessions in order for them to exist. It has required noticing where this energy is reciprocated and where it quietly drains, in choosing where to offer the power this offering holds, and to learn where that power will not be received. It has asked for tolerance of being misunderstood in our intention and purpose, without retreating into self-erasure.
In this way, Shine has become a form of nervous system repair. It is not about performance or validation, but about allowing aliveness and safety to coexist - for those participating, and for us in offering it to the world.
7. Financial Exploitation and the Cost of Leaking Power
There is another context in which power dynamics have become unavoidable: money.
Over many years, Amram and I have experienced repeated financial exploitation. Our work has been copied. Our generosity has been mistaken for availability. Our capacity has been assumed rather than respected. Agreements have been ignored, and responsibility has quietly been shifted onto us.
We are currently involved in legal action regarding witheld payment of invoices and unlawful retention of our equipment as one visible example, but it reflects a much longer pattern. A pattern in which kindness and flexibility were interpreted as weakness, and where our reluctance to assert power came at real financial and emotional cost.
At a certain point, clarity arrives:
Protecting power is not aggression.
Boundaries are not punishment.
Self-respect is not unkindness.
Approaching things differently now is not about hardness. It is about sustainability.
8. The Cultural Context: Why This is Not Just Personal
British and Western cultures place heavy emphasis on independence, self-reliance, and quiet endurance. Needing help in any form is framed as failure. Talking about money is impolite. Boundaries are often interpreted as rudeness rather than mutual care.
Simultaneously, we are encouraged to regulate ourselves, heal our trauma, and take responsibility for our wellbeing, often without sufficient attention to the systems that perpetuate dysregulation.
This is where thinkers challenging and developing ideas about individual responsibility for regulation, such as those brilliantly positioned by Bessel van der Kolk, offer an important corrective. While trauma is embodied and individual, it is ALSO relational and systemic. Trauma occurs in context, and healing requires safety, community, and structural support.
An exclusively individualised model of healing risks turning recovery into another form of self-blame. Ignoring personal agency risks helplessness.
The reality is both.
9. Both/And: Personal Work and Collective Responsibility
Self-work matters. Nervous system awareness, trauma processing, boundary development, and reflective practice are essential.
They are not sufficient on their own.
Healing is both individual and collective. Power is shaped by internal capacity and by the environments we are asked to survive within. Boundaries are not walls, but the structures that allow people to meet one another with respect, including oneself.
When we place all responsibility on individuals, we ignore context. When we deny individual agency, we remain stuck.
Power returns when both are held.
10. Practising Power in Ordinary Ways
Power rarely returns through dramatic gestures. It returns through repetition:
Pausing before responding.
Noticing the urge to appease.
Asking without over-explaining.
Letting disappointment become information rather than self-judgement.
Choosing reciprocal spaces.
Building structures that protect generosity.
Over time, the nervous system learns a new rule:
I do not have to shrink to belong.
11. Conclusion: Shining Without Permission
Shining is not arrogance. It is not domination. It is not reserved for the confident.
Shining occurs when we stop giving our power to those who cannot hold it responsibly.
Some people will attempt to dim others, not because they are wrong, but because light exposes avoidance.
The work, then, is this: to keep shining. To place energy where it is met. To protect power without losing softness. To belong to oneself, even when belonging elsewhere feels uncertain.
True power is not control.
It is authorship.
Authorship is the quiet reclaiming of narrative authority over your own life. It is recognising the scripts you inherited, the adaptations you developed, the systems you were shaped within, and choosing consciously how you will now respond.
It is the shift from reacting to shaping. From appeasing to discerning. From asking for permission to choosing alignment.
Further Reading
Brown, B. (2012). Daring Greatly. New York: Gotham Books.
Brown, B. (2015). Rising Strong. New York: Spiegel & Grau.
Brown, B. (2017). Braving the Wilderness. New York: Random House.
Brown, B. (2018). Dare to Lead. New York: Random House.
van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. New York: Viking.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Walker, P. (2013). Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Lafayette, CA: Azure Coyote.
Starhawk (1987). Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority, and Mystery. San Francisco: Harper & Row.
