The Power Dynamics of Fear - Emotion Series #7

We all get scared sometimes, and so we all get into power dynamics sometimes. It's the way it is. It doesn't matter how old you are almost, and it definitely doesn't matter how much you've meditated. You know, there's— if there wasn't some of this tension, we wouldn't be alive.

Welcome to The Art of Accomplishment, where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease. I'm Brett Kistler, here today with my co-host, Joe Hudson. Okay, welcome back, Joe. We are continuing into our emotions series.

Yeah.

We've been kind of having a pretty good run at fear lately. Uh, just finished up the fear and anxiety episode, and we still have a little bit more to talk about with regards to fear.

Right. Fear and anxiety. We left it at We did the fear general, we did the anxiety, but I think there's the power dynamics that we haven't really touched yet. Yes.

Yeah. Power dynamics, fear triangle, how fear influences the way that we see power and get into games around it, you know?

Yeah. I remember there was a— I have this story and, and it doesn't relate to power so much, but it kind of does. So I, I want to share it. I remember I was really into non-duality. I think I was like around 30 years old or something, and I was really into non-duality, and I was like collecting different teachers who had different ways to see it. And one of the teachers, he said— his name was Stephen Harrison— and he said, um, he said, uh, power is the ultimate expression of fear. And so I was like Cool, that resonated, it made so much sense to me. And then I came across a book that somebody recommended called "The Power of Now" by a guy named Eckhart Tolle.

And I was like, "Ultimate expression of fear." Was that just from seeing the title or was that from actually reading it?

Just from seeing the title. Just from seeing the title, like, "Oh, he needs to have power? Ah, ultimate expression of fear." Teaching other people to have power, ultimate expression of fear. And then I was in this hot springs and they had this video thing happening and it was Eckhart Tolle and I listened, I was like, "Oh my God, that guy's saying the same thing as this Stephen Harrison." Very different way, but same thing. And then I found out he was the author of "The Power of Now," right? And I was like, "Hmm?" And so I'll start off on that, which is that even that, Even that, that whole thing of me saying power, like that power, that means an expression of fear. That was me trying to have power over my reality. That was my—

That was your allergy to that word.

That was my expression of fear, right? Oh, I can't just be in the unknown of life evolving in the way that it does. I need to be able to have some sort of like control mechanism and that created the ignorance. And that in itself was all fear. Like I needed something to hold onto, which is, Even more hilarious when you think about the way that Stephen Harrison teaches, which is he destroys everything you think you're— everything that you try to hold on to. So yes, power dynamics as an expression of fear. Yeah, let's talk about it. Yeah.

All right. So how fear creates power dynamics. We've talked a lot about something called the fear triangle before.

Yeah.

And we've kind of touched on it a number of different times in several different episodes, but we really haven't dropped into like a comprehensive description of the fear triangle, what it is, and then sort of the underlying power dynamics, and then some of the peripheral stuff that happens around it. So let's go into that.

Let me pull up just a second before we do. So on the general power dynamics, basically all power dynamics are is a two people who are scared. I'm not talking about play power dynamics, not like agreed upon like, oh yeah, let's have a game of power dynamics, or sexual power dynamics. I'm talking about a boss and their peer getting into a fight, or a wife and a husband getting into a fight, or two friends. I'm talking about when somebody wants to get their way and the other person wants to get their way around something. So that's what I'm talking about when I say power dynamics. And It's always based in a fear. It's always based in fear. And, and the most simple way to look at it, even more simple than the drama triangle, is to see that it's two people who think they're defending themselves and think the other person is attacking them. So one person feels like they're defending and the other person feels like they're being attacked. And so both people walk around thinking what they just said was a defense and what, and like, no, that you don't understand. And the other person is hearing that as an attack. And I'm not saying which is true or not true, but that is the basic structure of all of it. And you can, whether you think of that in a political system, right, where one group thinks they're defending themselves or the other group feels like they're being attacked, or a marriage And if you can see it that way, if you can see all of these conflicts where someone's trying to have power over the other person, it immediately, the whole thing dissolves. You're just like, oh, wait a second. Okay, that person's not trying to attack me. That person thinks they're defending themselves right now.

It seems like this comes from that characteristic of fear where we go into binary thinking. Yes. And then we start to think that it's a win or lose thing. You can win the argument or lose the arguments. You can have somebody see your position or they just don't because they're stupid.

Right.

And yeah, yeah.

In this, both people are scared that they're gonna lose something that they love. Both people are scared that they're gonna be controlled or whatever they're scared of. They're, they're both scared maybe of different things, but they're both scared. And the fear either presents itself in fight, flight, or freeze. And The flight is, uh, the most complicated, so we'll start with the other ones. The fight is like the bully behavior of the fear triangle, and the freeze is the victim behavior of the fear triangle, and the flight is the savior. And savior means— and the flight means that you've left yourself and you're going outside of the world to other people to control them so that they will make you feel safe. So all the complication, the way that people can't see each other, the way that they feel like they're being attacked when the other person's actually defending themselves, is all because of the way in which the fear works inside of the person. And they call this the drama triangle. And like, if you go to kind of the psychological theory, they call it the drama triangle. I call it the fear triangle because All of the behaviors are driven out of this fear and they're driven out of the flight, fright, or freeze situation. And they all have an emotional signature with them, which is also usually not explained. And the emotional signature of the savior is a sense of obligation, responsibility. And the victim is stuck. I feel stuck. And the bully feels like they're all alone in it. No one is helping them. They have to be self-reliant. And that, those are the emotional signatures of those, of those particular places. And so I've been in like rooms and companies with like, you know, whatever, 100, 120 men. And at this time it was men. It was like they had, this company was doing something to help men with EQ. And so whole bunch of engineers and I kind of put them out into corners. Are you the fight? Are you the flight? Are you the freeze? And then I put them into corners and then I had them like, hey, fighters, you know, bullies. Like, I didn't call them bullies 'cause nobody wants, first of all, the first thing is they all had shame. They all had shame around what they were. The fighters were ashamed of being fighters. The freezers were ashamed of being freezers. And the flight was ashamed of being flight. But the other thing that happened is that they got to see, hey, fighters, like when you fight and somebody doesn't fight back, when they walk away from you, how does that feel in your system? That feels like an attack. Feels like they've disengaged. It feels like they're punishing me by leaving.

Yeah, aggression, some form of withdrawal. Yeah.

Hey, freezers, what does it sound— feel like when someone's fighting with you and you're trying to leave? It feels like they're trying to control me even more. So, and so this is where that lack of understanding makes it hard for people to resolve their own issues with one another.

And it sounds like a lot of the behavior that comes out in, in that drama triangle pattern and the fear triangle pattern is actually coming from the avoidance of those underlying feelings, those underlying fears. To avoid feeling stuck, you buy the story more deeply that you are stuck, and then you might find yourself using guilt or some form of power under manipulation to get what you want and get get somebody to stop having power over you or abusing power over you in your story. And the same can be true for the Savior and for the bully.

That's right. Yeah. So the, the way I think about that, and we've talked about this in other podcasts, is that the, the thing that they're trying to avoid is the thing that they're inviting through the way that they're trying to avoid it. So if someone's more in the victim, where they're more in the the freeze, then they're more likely to be passive or covertly aggressive. If they're passive and covertly aggressive, and they do that so that they feel like some semblance of empowerment, so they feel some semblance of not being stuck, not the actual not being stuck, but they're trying to avoid that feeling. And that passive aggression immediately makes people feel agitated around them, and then they feel more stuck. Because it's the agitation of other people that's creating that feeling of stuckness. And so it's like that with the bully as well. So the bully doesn't want to feel alone. And so when that feeling of like, I'm all alone in this, they puff out their chest. They, they're like, well then, fuck you all. I'm not, you know, like they don't want to feel that experience. And that immediately drives people away from them and then immediately make, creates that reality of loneliness. So it's The same with the Savior. We'll go into the Savior too. The Savior feels that feeling of obligation, so they caretake people. This all happens in many ways, but I'm just giving you one of the ways. If you caretake somebody, then they feel like you're telling them that they're not capable. Like, oh, make sure that you do blah blah blah. It's like, oh fuck, like, you think I'm not an adult? Well, you know, like, you think that I can't handle my own anger or whatever it is? And then resentment builds. And so they don't feel safe. They don't feel safe, and then they feel more obligated. And so these are the cycles that we get into. And it's why when you're in those kind of power dynamics, everybody feels so helpless and frustrated. It's because it's like, fuck, I don't know how to get out of this because we're driving the thing that we don't want to us through our actions that we use to try to avoid it.

I think it's interesting that we can also have all three of these different forms of fear show up in our system. Kind of like flashing between one and another. The savior might have the flight to go try to fix the world around them, to try to fix the fight that mommy and daddy are in, in their world. And then by doing that, they'll go and they'll bully the bully, or they'll even bully the victim about the victim's story that they're stuck in and how they should just grow up. Or they'll buy the victim's story and they'll do some, uh, some kind of power under guilt trip dynamic on the bully. And then the bully will feel more alone and then they'll feel more likely to, to rage and attack both. And we can, and a lot of things that you've, that we've seen too, are that the bully and the victim can kind of flash back and forth a lot where somebody will be feeling like they're in freeze and then suddenly jump out of it and start attacking and then go back to freeze. Yes.

Yeah, so it's interesting. The way it works is that, the way I see it work is that internally, we have different voices in our head, and we have a voice in our head talking to us, and we'll play all 3 roles. We'll play the role of bully, and that might sound like, "Dude, you gotta stop talking over people." And then we'll play the role of victim, which is, "I've tried to stop, but I can't stop. I just, 20 years I've been trying to stop, I can't stop." And then we'll play the role, say, "Okay, so this time we're gonna do this and this and this. I'm gonna get a reminder on my phone and blah, blah, blah, blah." All 3 of those things are happening, all based out of fear, all inside of us. That's the internal version of it. And so of course, when we have an internal version of it, we have an external version of it. And the external version of that is you can see people run through all of these things in it, like sometimes in a minute. But there's usually one that's kind of forefront in that area. Like, if you go into a family and the dad is, is gonna run one of these traits with the family members most often, and everybody can identify it, and underneath the surface, all three of the things will be happening. So let's say that the dad plays the victim role, and so you can tell because it's kind of passive-aggressive. You can tell it because there's like a there's like maybe a lot of lateness for somebody who cares about tardiness. Maybe there's a whole bunch of chores that aren't done. Maybe— so you can see all that behavior in there. But occasionally they're gonna go, "Wow, you goddamn it, like, don't you trust me?" And occasionally they're gonna try to— they're walking on eggshells to make sure that the bully is happy. So all of those things is gonna— are gonna happen, but there's gonna be one that's kind of the dominant one under that situation. And what's fascinating to me is oftentimes people can be the bully at home and the victim at office, or whatever, the savior at home and the bully in the office. So it's really circumstantial, which is totally fascinating to me.

It's interesting. I'd like to relate this back to the previous episode that we did on anxiety, where a lot of times you'll see when someone is in an anxious state, which is by our previous definition that there's some constriction of life force that could be some constricted fear, it could also be be some— something else constricted, essentially being afraid of their own experience, that when they're in that state, they're far more likely to be in the triangle dynamic.

Correct.

And they're far more likely to exhibit any of these behaviors. So that just kind of points back to that whole episode as something that can be done about when you identify one of these dynamics in your own life.

I think that's the biggest question. So when I'm teaching this at a retreat or something like that, The biggest thing that happens is people go, "Okay, so now how do I act not from that place?" Which in itself is a bit of—

Saviors.

Yeah, you have a fear triangle inside of themselves. And the answer isn't trying to modulate how you act. It's being with the fear. It's having a different relationship with the fear. And it is not, okay, so if I act this way and this way, I'm not in the drama triangle. And if you're not acting out of the fear, you're not in it. And it might even be the same behavior that comes out of you. But it's very different with the emotional signature. Right? You might say to somebody, hey, that's not gonna work for me. And that's not from the fear triangle. And it's like, hey, that's not gonna work for me, is, could be from the fear triangle, just because of the emotional signature behind it.

So getting back to what you'd mentioned earlier in the sort of the intro to this episode, how you had this idea, you'd learned that power is something that comes from fear, and maybe you'd overattached to that particular definition of power, and that collided with Eckhart Tolle's, you know, book title. But let's talk a little bit about that power versus empower. And we can also, just to hearken back, we've done an episode on empower over power. Highly recommend it to anyone who's interested in going deeper on this particular subject. But I'd like to bring this into this conversation right now. What is the difference for you between those things?

So if I am operating out of my fear, then I'm in the dynamic, the drama triangle. If I'm not operating out of fear, then I am— I'm cool with whatever consequences come by me being authentic and being true to myself. And I don't mean cool like, go ahead, bring it on, and then I go fight. I mean cool like I'm happy if they need to yell at me, like cool with, and, but I'm gonna be true to myself. This is the more important thing. And if you can let go of the consequences in that way, then there's a deeply empowered state. And the consequences that people can hold over you just evaporate. You know, the other day I had a conversation with one of, so I'm coaching somebody at a really big, organization, and the head of human resources calls me up and he goes, "We're just deciding if we're gonna pay you again next year." And I was like, "Oh, yeah. So I don't serve you. I serve the executive. That's my job. I'm not here to serve you. If you need me to serve you, I am the wrong coach for you because it's just way out of alignment for me." And so this whole power dynamic just fizzled because there was nothing in me that was worried about losing this thing. If this is what needs to happen, I'm happy to lose it because it's, it's inconsistent with how I want to be in the world. There was— there, they didn't have any power over me. And so, so that's an example of what it's like to be in an empowered state. It means I know principally that if I behave this way, my life is the life that I want. If I don't, my life is not the life I want. So I'm not gonna behave outside of that for some future reward, some potential future reward, or some potential avoidance of punishment.

So it sounds like power, power is when it's contingent to something happening.

Yeah.

And empowered is, it's not actually contingent to any outcome.

It's contingent to how you are going to experience yourself Power can be taken away from you if you're worried about it. If you're worried about losing it, it's power.

Mm. Yeah, including financial power, social power, all of it.

All of it. If you're worried about losing it, it's power. Which is amazing because that's often the cause of a lot of the fear, right? So I hadn't thought about it this way, but hey, let me see if I can articulate this. I'm not sure if I can. There is a drama triangle. It's because you're scared of losing something, and oftentimes the thing that you're scared of losing is power. Because when you are empowered, there's no fear of losing it, so there's not as much reason to be scared generally. And so I've never recognized this, but now that I say it, I can feel it in my, in my system and in my past, is that it's a virtuous cycle. The more you recognize that your authenticity creates the life that you want rather than accumulation of power or things, then the less there is to lose and therefore the less fear and therefore the less drama, the less of this triangle that you're in. So yeah, I've never thought about that way, but it's— it resonates deeply with me.

Yeah, yeah. And that thinking about the way that we get, the way that feeling, allowing ourselves to feel emotions can get us out of the triangle. Sometimes it's fear, but sometimes it might be, I've seen times and you even see this in movies where somebody who's being a bully for the entire movie suddenly has, like they're brought face to face with some reality that they had been not seeing. And then they break down and they cry and there's grief. And there's hurt and they show their hurt. And then others who they were in the triangle with see that hurt and they're, they see a new perspective, and then they have their own emotional process, and then the whole thing falls away. And so it could be fear of different emotions within us. It could be fear of feeling grief that makes us, you know, get angry around anything that has to do with the idea of our business failing, or our, you know, our marriage failing, or a friend being—

any loss of identity, really. Yeah, any loss of identity. Really will create a lot of fear for people, for most people, unless they're— unless they have a lot of experience losing their identity, you know, years of transformation work, you know, or happens to be disposed that way that it's okay for their identity to shift. Yeah.

Right. Which, which points to something else that you were in your story earlier about how quickly this dynamic can fall away, whether it's a dynamic with a group of people or an internal dynamic with yourself about your identity. The moment you actually allow the tension to process through, to be felt.

Yeah.

And allow that, that sense of identity, whatever it is that you're attached to and holding on to, to fall away, then it's amazing how fast the dynamic in your life falls away too.

Oh yeah. I mean, it's instantaneous. Once you see it, it's just, whoosh, just goes away. What's interesting is I often will ask people like, what are you defending? 'Cause we all say we're defending us. I'm defending myself. But what, like, what's the you that you're defending exactly? Like, okay, so this person, I don't feel seen. I have to be seen. I'm defending the fact that I'm actually a good person. So what if someone doesn't see that you're a good person? Who actually gets hurt? Like, you know, like what's the thing that you're actually protecting? And what makes you think it's destroyable? You know, like, so oftentimes there's one look at it, which is just when you feel the tension, it can drop away. Another is to just see that the whole thing is a ruse, like that it's a card game, right? Or a shell game. There's nothing underneath any of them. There's nothing to defend. I was just talking to a client about this the other day, and somebody in the circle of people I've worked with ran across a big challenge, internal struggle for him, and did not wanna work it out and wanted to avoid it. And I don't push people to do things that they don't wanna do. And so left. And the other person, my circle, was like, "Oh my gosh, we need to make sure that this doesn't hurt the reputation. And, you know, I love your work and I want it out in the world." And I was like, "There's no way I'm doing that. There's no way I'm going to defend myself because it's so antithetical to my empowerment. And it also usually doesn't do good usually doesn't do great work for you. Like, it doesn't increase your reputation. And it also, it puts me into the, to the fear triangle, which I don't want to be in. I'd rather have all the work that I'm doing in the world collapse than choose to get in a fight with somebody or think I have something to defend, you know? And so it's really, it's a fascinating, when, when you're there, there's a tremendous amount of freedom. And there are definitely moments where you're like, "Oh, I have to be with this fear." You know, you can't, it's not like it's fearless. I'm sure it's very much like when you would jump off huge bridges or cliffs or whatnot. There's a moment where you're like, "Oh wow, really?" And there's this recognition that, "Oh, every time that I choose my authenticity, eventually it was the right move." And eventually the world meets me as who I am, not who I think I'm supposed to be.

Yeah, which speaks to sort of the increasing subtlety of our journey. You know, for me early on, BASE jumping and just air sports in general were a way for me to be authentic. And then there were also ways that I was inauthentic within them. And, you know, like the journey over decades has been to recognize when I'm standing at an exit point How much of what I'm doing is coming from some sense of fear? If I do this jump and then I'm seen as the person who is capable of doing this jump skillfully, then what do I get? What power do I get in the world? What social clout do I get? What events do I get invited to? What sponsors might I get? And all those different incentives can kind of come in. And I imagine this might be true for you in the role that you that you have as a coach, where there's probably a lot of times where people would be just looking for even the subtlest defensiveness in you to be like, "Aha, see, I can't trust him. Look, he's somebody who's just like talking all this game and he's even, he's just a little bit defensive right now. So like, there, emperor has no clothes." Totally.

Looking for imperfection, you can absolutely find it in me. And in every single way, there is nothing in humanity that isn't in me and that doesn't rear its head from time to time. And if I am looking for other people to love it, I'm in hell. So all I can do is learn to love those aspects of myself.

Yeah, something further interesting for me was how through my journey, you know, I've identified by, you know, learning about the fear triangle, I've often found myself identifying as a savior. And that's been sort of one of the main roles that I've sat in. And there's a number of stories I could tell in a very general sense about how I was in a dynamic with two other people. And there's probably half a dozen people who would think it was them I'm talking about. And they'd be both right and wrong. Right.

Exactly, the pattern replays itself. Yeah.

Yeah. And also I've become more and more recently, I've been simmering in how I've been doing this internally. When I'm recognizing a limiting belief or I'm recognizing some sense of identity that I'm trying to hold onto, and then I'm like, aha, here's how I could construct an experience that gets me out of that box. Or here's a workshop I could go to to explore that. And that's my internal savior of like, oh look, I see two parts of myself fighting. Here's how I can control the outcome without actually feeling the emotions underneath it.

What I notice in what you're saying there is there's a little way in which when you mimic the savior voice inside of your head, it was derogatory. And I think that that's one of the things that keeps the fear triangle in place generally is that is the shame that I spoke about earlier, the shame of being a bully or being a victim or being a savior, instead of seeing it as like, I'm scared. I mean, it's amazing. It's like you said this, a lot of this disintegrates when the bully says, I'm scared. A lot of this disintegrates when a victim says, I can do this, I have choice here. A lot of this disintegrates when a savior says, only person I can do is save myself. And so it's this acknowledgement of the fear without the judgment that is the quickest way to disintegrate the fear triangle is just to acknowledge that there's fear and there's, we all get scared sometimes. And so we all get into power dynamics sometimes. It's the way it is. It doesn't matter how old you are almost. And it definitely doesn't matter how much you've meditated. You know, there's— if there wasn't some of this tension, we wouldn't be alive.

It might even be acknowledging that there's sadness or acknowledging that there's hurt or that there's joy.

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All I would say, like we said before, it's a constriction. Fear, anxiety, that part of it is a constriction of life force. So it could be anything, but it is the acknowledgement of what is. Yeah. And to some degree, when you're particularly in a power dynamic, it's the fear of something. Maybe it is the fear of sadness, and maybe it's the fear of joy or pleasure, often, yeah. Yeah, so I have a question for you. You talked about this, like in movies, you've seen it unravel in a heartbeat. And also, you mean in the work that you've seen me do and that we've done together, you also can see it unravel in a heartbeat. It's just like the whole game, the whole war can be dropped. It doesn't take anything to drop a hot frying pan. I'm wondering if you have an experience that you can share with us, a story of when you were in it and it just dropped like a hot frying pan.

Yeah, absolutely. So this is an example of one of those stories that I think a half a dozen people listening to will probably think is about them.

Yeah.

And you're wrong. And you're right.

Um, yeah, but yeah.

And, and a common pattern for me coming from a family where I always felt like I was trying to save the peace and trying to, you know, make, you know, everybody not fight and be in harmony so that I could feel safe. Uh, I've recreated that a lot in my life and One time, it was relatively recently, it was after we had talked about one of our fear and anxiety episodes that we recorded about a month back. I was feeling into the anxiety, letting myself just have it, including the helplessness, especially the helplessness of that as much as I could bullshit myself into thinking it, I actually didn't have power over the situation. All I had was how I could show up, and I wasn't enjoying the way I was showing up. And I just showed up in a way that I enjoyed more, which meant that I wasn't in a conversation feeling like I was holding back and walking on eggshells. I was in a conversation saying what I felt needed to be said, and also being okay with being imperfect saying it, being okay with maybe coming off as a little bit of a bully, and being open to the feedback and iterating. Yeah. At least getting myself out of the savior, like better than mode that I had been in. Mm-hmm. And it was amazing how quickly things changed in this particular instance. Uh, it was immediate. My jaw was on the floor. Two people that had had a lot of tension with one another. I had a conversation with each one of them that was just basically, okay, yeah, I validate your experience. I understand what you're feeling. And also I'm not gonna be able to fix this for you. And I know that you can do this and you can take responsibility for this relationship yourself. And in each of those, I didn't feel entirely clean in my delivery. There was like some new tension with me and the person that I was speaking with that like, they were like, hey, wait a minute, that's not— and I was like, well, okay. And suddenly the whole thing shifted and it shifted so quickly that I actually couldn't even trace back to was it even Could it even have been that I shifted my dynamic and then they shifted theirs? Or did they shift theirs and then that shifted mine? Because I could hardly even draw a causal relationship either way, other than just noticing that the whole thing fell away immediately. And I was just grateful and enjoyed, like it happened just the moment that I actually enjoyed showing up and didn't feel either resentful or in resistance or afraid of showing up.

It's amazing what just sharing our truth can do.

Yeah.

Yeah. Ah, pleasure. Pleasure, Brett.

Yeah.

Until next time.

All right. Thank you, Joe.

All right.

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