Playing small feels safe when you’ve spent most of your life being told you don’t matter. If you grew up in a home where someone else held all the power and used it against you, the idea of personal power probably sounds like something other people have. People who weren’t hurt the way you were.
I know that feeling well.
Growing up with a narcissistic and abusive father, the only thing I understood about power was that he had all of it and I had none. That was what I was taught to believe. It took me a long time to discover that was never actually true.
What personal empowerment actually is
Empowerment is the process of becoming stronger and more confident, especially in taking control of your own life. Not controlling everything around you. Your own life.
I love that definition for a few reasons. The first is that word... process. This is not a one-and-done moment. It is not all-or-nothing, which is important for those of us whose nervous systems love to think in extremes. We are not stepping into our power as a single dramatic act. We are stepping into it... one small moment at a time.
The second thing that stands out is that it says becoming stronger and more confident. Not that we aren’t strong or confident, but that we are becoming more so. That distinction matters. Personal power is not something you acquire from scratch. It already lives inside you. It is your inner knowing, your ability to trust yourself, your capacity to be the author of your own life. Trauma covered it over. Healing uncovers it.
Dr. Judith Herman, one of the leading voices in CPTSD research, wrote that the core experiences of psychological trauma are disempowerment and disconnection from others, and that the first principle of recovery is the empowerment of the survivor. If that is where healing begins, it is worth paying attention to.
