Relationships and Power

The best relationships serve to increase your power rather than diminish it. The point of entering into a relationship is to increase your alignment with truth, love, and power, thereby experiencing greater wholeness. If a connection pulls you further out of alignment, it isn’t worth maintaining. The longer you cling to disempowering relationships, the weaker you become. Your best relationships will help you meet your needs, fulfill your desires, gain clarity, and feel more connected. They’ll add value to your life in ways that are important to you.

If you succumb to relationships that weaken you or make you feel trapped, you’re giving your power away. It’s your responsibility to remedy such situations, regardless of the circumstances. Realize that you can choose to leave at any time. There may be negative consequences to doing so, such as loss of income if you leave an abusive partner, but such problems are temporary. When you drop disempowering relationships, you can expect to regain your power soon enough. Unfortunately, the very nature of abusive connections is that they undermine you to the point that it’s hard to even imagine being strong again. If you find yourself in a situation that weakens you and you don’t choose to leave, then you’re choosing to stay, which means you’re choosing to abuse yourself.

A conscious relationship requires effort and commitment on both sides. One person can’t carry the whole thing alone. If you’re spending more time fighting resistance instead of sharing love, you’re better off letting go. Put yourself in a position to enjoy something more mutually rewarding, and don’t settle for less than you’re worth. Empowering yourself isn’t a selfish act. When you hold your relationships to the standard of empowerment, you grow stronger, and your strength flows out to the people around you as well.

What do you do if your most disempowering relationships are with your own family members? There’s no honor in remaining loyal to someone who disempowers you. When you weaken yourself like that, you do the same to the people around you as well, dragging everyone else down with you. Don’t force yourself and others to suffer from a misguided sense of loyalty. If you’re a very loyal person, then give your commitment to those who actually deserve it; don’t blindly yield it to those who claim it as their birthright.

What do you really want from your relationships? What character qualities do you find most attractive in others? While you’re always free to connect with anyone at any time, it’s important to set standards for deeper levels of bonding. Allow yourself to form friendships and even intimate partnerships with people who empower you and increase your alignment with truth, love, and power. Filter out those who would only lead you astray.

It’s been said that you can predict your future by looking at the people with whom you spend the most time. That isn’t far from the truth. Your relationships will have a tremendous influence on your self-development. If you find yourself using all your power and self-discipline to resist the negative influence of your own friends, you’re fighting a losing battle. Use your power to break off such relationships, and surround yourself with people who naturally empower you. As a general rule, whenever you find yourself stuck in a disempowering environment, don’t fight the situation. Just get up and leave. If you still wish to address the problems of that environment afterward, you’ll be in a stronger position to do so from the outside looking in.

There are times when it can be difficult in the extreme to leave a disempowering relationship. The degree of challenge doesn’t change the solution, however. You’ll actually free up tremendous energy when you stop struggling against the currents and start thinking about how to escape such a negative situation. Even while you remain physically stuck, you’ll feel more empowered as soon as you begin turning in the right direction. That’s because it’s your alignment with power that makes you truly stronger, and this alignment can be achieved regardless of external circumstances. Power is a direction, not a position.

The best thing you can do to empower others is to empower yourself. You’ll do a lot more good for others when you keep yourself to be strong. Weakening yourself helps no one. In order for the whole body to be strong, the individual cells must take good care of themselves.

Be careful to avoid relinquishing your power to your relationships. In order to achieve an empowering level of interdependence, you must retain a reasonable degree of independence. If you find yourself unable to make decisions as an individual and must defer to someone else to make all the important choices, you’re giving away your power and shirking your responsibility to live your own life. As Kahlil Gibran wrote in The Prophet: “Let there be spaces in your togetherness.”

If you want to attract high-caliber partners, the best thing you can do is to improve your own alignment with truth, love, and power. If you find yourself constantly attracting the wrong kinds of people—or if you have trouble attracting anyone at all—it’s because you’re out of alignment with these fundamental principles. If you think the solution is to apply phony techniques to charm the right person, then you’re succumbing to falsehood and deception, which will only backfire on you. If you want to attract someone honest, work on your own honesty. If you want someone loving and caring, seek to deepen those qualities in yourself. If you want someone bold and adventurous, work on your courage.

While there’s a wide variety of personality traits people find attractive, the principles of truth, love, and power are universal attractors. No sane people wants a relationship filled with lies and deception. No one wants an apathetic or uncaring partner. And no one intentionally enters an abusive relationship. Despite our differences, we’re all attracted to the same fundamental qualities in each other. We all desire relationships centered in truth, love, and power. The more you develop these within yourself, the more universally attractive you’ll become.

* Source: Personal Development for Smart People by Steve Pavlina