The Key 🗝 to Reclaiming Your Power 💥

Hey guys, Natalie Moore, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist here, and I'm going to talk to you today about the word power and how to change your relationship to the idea of power, how to reconnect to your personal power, and how to use this amazing force— I was going to say this powerful force, but that's a little bit repetitive— how to use this force to create positive change that you want to see in the world. As humans, we have so much power. We have the power to speak our truth. We have the power to listen to our intuition. We have the power to express ourselves fully and authentically. We have the power to simply be. Ourselves. Throughout childhood and throughout our lives, we receive certain messaging, explicit or implicit, and certain feedback from people in our lives when we express our authentic selves. Sometimes we're reinforced by positive feedback and compliments, and sometimes we are actually punished for being ourselves, whether it's by being ignored or ridiculed or told not to do that or not to be that way. What we tend to do in order to be accepted and loved is we actually reject certain pieces of ourselves and we actually give some of our power away to other people and even to society and to external forces sometimes. We were wired and evolved as social beings, and so the brain's job is to survive. And for a social being, survival means being accepted by society and by our family. Unlike other animals that are born and wobble off and can take care of themselves, as infants and as children, we need to be cared for by our families for much, much longer than other animals. And so we need— in order to survive, we need to be accepted by our families. And And so when we're in this process of self-growth and self-discovery, it's not actually about finding ourselves. It's actually about reclaiming parts of ourselves that we've given away to other people or to other entities like society because we felt that those parts of ourselves were not accepted. We can give our power away in so many different forms. For me, the one that comes to mind the most is I was in an abusive relationship for almost 5 years, and in that relationship, I gave away so much of my power to this other person. I believed that there was something wrong with me or that I wasn't lovable enough because if I didn't have this person's love and acceptance and approval, I didn't feel like I was anything just being myself. And so you could understand why it would be hard to get out of a relationship like that. If you've given all of your power of self-love and self-acceptance to someone else. In my healing from that relationship, I went through a tumultuous time of having to learn what my identity was and who I was without this person in my life who I felt validated me as a person. And so there were times of intense grief and sadness and there were also times of amazing self-discovery, and it really opened me up to being whoever I was going to discover. There was some element of surprise there. I got to know myself and fall back in love with myself in a multitude of different ways, one way being finding and reconnecting to, I should say, nature and the healing properties of nature, I went on a hike with my mom and my stepdad, and we actually hiked, if you're familiar with Los Angeles, there's a hike called Chantry Flats, just north of Arcadia, and we did a hike there, and I just found it so peaceful and so restorative being near the trees and the trails and some streams, and on that hike, I decided that I wanted to summit Mount Whitney, and for me it was really symbolic of having this difficult journey ahead of me that I knew I had, of grieving my relationship, grieving the city that I had left, the job I had left, all of the friends I had said goodbye to, and basically recovering myself. Now, I'm not fully healed in terms of the giving my power away phenomenon. There are many ways in terms of my time and my energy and my focus, where I still have room to grow for sure. But I feel like this at least is an area of my life that I've become more aware of, more conscious of, and understand that I have so much power if only I can harness it and funnel it in ways that are beneficial to myself, my loved ones, and to the world at large, my clients. Everybody who I can have an impact on. How wonderful, right, if we can take our power and use it for good. Even the word power itself is something that I have recently reclaimed. When I used to think of the word power, I would think of people who misused and abused their power in ways that were negative and detrimental to others and to society. Now I have a very different relationship to this word. As you can see, having come from an abusive relationship, it makes sense that I would see power as something that was bad or something that was wrong. And so of course I didn't want to embody that word or have power. But what I realize now is that power is not inherently good or bad, just like money is not good or bad, a gun is not good or bad, a drug is not good or bad. All of these things either take on a positive or negative quality depending on how you use them. And so power is our force, it's our energy, it's what the impact and the influence that we can have in this world, in this one lifetime that we're given, unless you believe in multiple lives, but at least even even if there are multiple lives, I still want to use this lifetime as best as I possibly can. And so even reclaiming the word power has been a transformative part of my reclaiming my power. In what ways have you given away your power in the past, or in what ways do you continue to give away your power currently? And what can you start to do to bring more awareness to this and to empower yourself to take back more of your own personal power. Remember that this is not power and control in order to manipulate or to do things that are detrimental. This is your personal power in terms of executing your mission in life. So start to ask yourself, how can you bring more power into your life for positive change? I hope this video inspired you to change your relationship to the idea of power and to start stepping into your own power. I'd I would love to hear from you. Please leave a comment if you have a question or concern or something you want to bring to my attention, or even a question for a future video. I hope to see you soon. Bye!