A True & Effective Healer Respects Your Personal Power

A practitioner, who genuinely wants you to succeed, will help you to embrace the truth of your power and not diminish it under theirs.

Mar 02, 2024

An installment from Eyes Wide Open: Avoiding Re-Traumatization, tools to recognize and prevent getting burnt or re-traumatized in therapy and self-help. Installments are standalone pieces and can be read in any order. Depending on my healing cadence, published weekly or biweekly, as I am able.

All installments can be found here.

silhouette of personr — Photo by Miguel Bruna on Unsplash

Essential Trait #7, Respects Your Power

Personal power is an integral part of healing. It’s the synergy of resources and choices that you make and follow through. Healing isn’t something that just happens to you. It’s worked for and allowed. Decisions are made. Actions are taken.

The presence of your personal power, or lack thereof, can also serve as a measure to ascertain the health or efficacy of your relationships.

There’s an ebb and flow to walking the healing journey. Being empowered doesn’t always look like moving forward. Sometimes, it looks like stepping back. It can be a breather or deferring to another person’s knowledge or expertise. When deferring is temporary and situation specific, it’s a normal part of the healing process.

Deference is not a habit or a lifestyle, nor should it ever be a defining characteristic in your relationship with anyone, let alone with your facilitator of healing.

Someone who genuinely wants healing for you will not permit it. If you try to relinquish your power to them, they will delicately and gracefully, or straightforwardly and firmly, hand it back to you.

And certainly, someone who genuinely wants healing for you will never demand it.

Warning Signs to Loss of Power

There are a number of signs that you may be giving up your power or indicators that it’s being siphoned off.

Losing your power can look like:

Valuing another person’s belief or perception over yours.
Questioning things less and less frequently.
Habitually second guessing yourself.
Being hesitant or unable to make decisions without checking in or receiving approval.
Changing your mind based on someone else’s position without personally discerning the accuracy or rightness of it for yourself.
Waiting for another person to make a decision before making yours, and then making the same one.
Giving them the right to make or influence personal decisions on financial matters, business, education, or money.
Giving them the right to make or influence personal decisions on personal matters, friends, family, or love.
Having to account for every moment of your time.
Losing self-agency over your own body and daily routine, including when and where you sleep, for how long, when and what you eat, even when you can or can’t relieve yourself.
Putting distance, or being asked to put distance, between yourself and others who may threaten your growing dependency on another.
Being asked or pressured to completely cut off all contact from friends and family, or anyone who may present you with different perspectives or concerns.

These dynamics occur in group settings and one-on-one relationships.

These are NOT spiritual disciplines for your growth, or healing, or faith, or exercises in creating humility, or humbleness of spirit, or proof of your willingness to learn, or commitment to do therapeutic work, or how much or whether you love, or the price anyone should pay to become part of a community or to belong.

A Cautionary Tale

Many years ago, I had a dear friend, “Jenny”, who lived in a small intentional community. “Mia” was a guest of the community. Jenny said Mia was an amazing woman who had created a women’s healing group, and that Mia helped her so much in her healing. She was excited for me to meet her.

Evidently, Mia was without ego. How did that happen? I asked. The story (Mia’s story) was that Mia had entered into a very deep meditation, and when she returned, she returned without her ego, transcended.

Well, I was more than a little skeptical, but the community was holding an event, and I always enjoyed visiting. Mia would be there, so I was like, sure, I’ll be there.

I couldn’t find Mia, at first, but I did see a woman, somewhat close by, fitting Jenny’s description of her, looking in my direction. She wouldn’t make eye contact, so I thought, okay, maybe not, and continued to walk down the path I was on. I then became aware that this woman was behind me. When I turned to look at her, she sped up and passed me.

I was not impressed, and I didn’t see her again.

Turns out it was Mia. She wrote me a letter afterward, which Jenny had dutifully delivered with instructions that I should read it in private and give it mindful consideration. I told Jenny I would.

The gist of the letter was that I had come to Mia in a dream and expressed to her my great desire to go beyond the limitations of my current reality. She saw that I was ready, and that this letter was an invitation to join her in her group so that I could truly heal from my sexual abuse and grow spiritually.

I didn’t respond. If there was Facebook back then, I would have blocked her.

Yes, I was anxious to heal from my sexual abuse—evidently, Jenny had shared this information with Mia, which I didn’t appreciate—but mostly I felt violated by Mia who used that knowledge to manipulate me and claim a connection by creating a scenario where my spirit had already sought her out for help.

My response was to invite Jenny to tea. She had been my friend for a number of years, and quite frankly, I was becoming concerned for her safety, alarmed, as a matter of fact.

When we met up, Jenny appeared distant since I last saw her. She told me she was rather put off that I hadn’t responded to Mia’s letter yet, after she had taken the time to write me. She said Mia didn’t appreciate it, either.

I didn’t address the letter directly because I didn’t want to get distracted talking about me. I wanted to talk about Mia. As gently as I could, and with a tone of curiosity, I asked how Mia could be offended by my lack of response if she had no ego. (I didn’t ask why she didn’t just invite me back into her dreams to inquire why I hadn’t responded, since we were already well acquainted there.)

Jenny looked at me. I thought, for a moment, she might be weighing my words. I saw a hesitation in her eyes, that momentary unease of cognitive dissonance that something didn’t line up. But then she spoke. She said that Mia had been wary about her coming to see me. She advised Jenny that if she felt a tightness in her stomach while talking to me that meant her energy was being drained.

Her cup of tea barely touched, Jenny said she had to go.

And that’s when I knew I had lost her. I never saw her, nor did she speak to me, again.

A Price to Pay

Truth is, the loss had begun the moment my friend and the women in her group made Mia more than she actually was, and more significantly, more than they were.

I later learned, Mia created such conflict in this small community, she was asked to leave. She took most of the women that were in the group with her, including at least one woman who had a toddler (the baby did not go with her) and maybe another mother, whose children were, also, left behind. I don’t remember their ages.

The rationalization was that the spirit of each child was okay with it, because they would still be nurtured by their mother’s love even if they weren’t physically together. You know, reality was an illusion, mother and child were bonded beyond time and space.

The community was devastated, and no doubt, the children who were left behind.

These women would definitely say they were stepping into their power, spiritually, emotionally, and physically. But the power in that group was centered around the teacher.

When each member of the group accepted the belief in Mia’s “advanced enlightenment”, they collectively stopped questioning her and, by extension, what she taught.

Asking questions is an integral part of discernment, and discernment is foundational to your power. Without the freedom to question, whether self- or other-imposed, you give up your power or have it taken from you.

And reframing the deference of power to another, or its theft by another, as a positive doesn’t make it true.

Reframing

Reframing is changing your view on how something is considered.

Reframing, in and of itself, is neither a good nor a bad thing. It’s how you use it and for what purpose.

When you reframe an event, when you shift your relationship to a negative situation from suffering to empowerment, that’s a good thing. The event isn’t sugarcoated or denied. You see it for what it is. You give it new meaning. It’s goes to healing.

But you can also reframe an event, words and ideas for nefarious reasons. For example, when you are assessing what’s important to you (a good thing) it can be reframed to imply you’re being self-centered (a bad thing). The person who does this to you doesn’t want you to have the self-awareness assessment would bring you.

Kindness, compassion, justice, equity, speaking one’s truth, even love, can be reframed and spoken with contempt as if they were a weakness, or offensive, or vile.

Standing up for yourself becomes you’re abusive.
Drawing boundaries means you’re mean or exclusionary.
Demanding respect, you’re entitled.
Being considerate, you’re a doormat.
Feeling good about yourself, you’re conceited.
Being responsible, you’re oppressed.
Standing up for another, you’re bullying the abuser.
Thinking and feeling, you’re “in ego”.
Holding a dream, you’re delusional.
Saying no, you’re antagonistic.

And so on.

Letting someone else reframe reality for you in this way allows them to redefine or recreate reality. You get pushed into a corner where being used or taken advantage of, or becoming a collaborator to inflict harm, is a good thing.

It’s not.

The Truth About Your Power

Your power, which is the power “within” and not “over”, gives your choices and decisions wings. It’s yours. It belongs to you. It’s the authority behind your desires and dreams, mundane and grand, the mobility in your life to move forward, to grow, to reach and explore.

You can’t fly as you are meant to when someone is clipping your wings.

Every true healer, every good practitioner who genuinely wants you to succeed, in whatever way it means to you, wants you to grow in empowerment. They want to see you tap into the power you have to craft a life you want.

Oh, I don’t have any power. Try siphoning anything out of this gas tank, and you’ll wind up with air!

You sure of that?

The truth is, you’re more powerful than you think. Much of the healing journey, believe it or not, is coming to realize and accept that truth.

This is end goal of a good practitioner or facilitator of healing—to help you realize and embrace the power you have… and are.

What about you? Your empowerment, your self-agency, is it increasing or decreasing for the time you spend or have spent on your healing journey and/or with the person or people you work with?

Silent No More

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