It is unfortunately common for individuals to give up their personal power. It’s a weird twist where our need to associate and connect at the individual and group level which worked to create families, tribes, villages, and people, now serves to set us up for consumerism, manipulation, and on going life struggles. We willingly let others set our expectations, dictate our paths, and strive for lives that have nothing to do with anything that would make us happy or allow us to thrive. But there is an even more shadowy and pernicious issue people experience and this is something I think of as power dysmorphia.
The same people who feel they have no power over situations will at times see themselves as completely responsible for random events. This can be a form of magical thinking. They hear that some number of people they know have been killed in a short amount of time and, realizing they had been thinking about those people (ignoring that they had been thinking of others as well) they empower themselves with the ability to have thought those events into being. It’s as if karma actually heard them but with waaaayyy over the top consequences that they never intended and would never have actually wanted to have happen to anyone.
This is an adult version of what children feel when their parents get divorced or when something really traumatic happens that they don’t understand: “Is this my fault?” Even though, when looked at logically, there is no possibility that the person’s thoughts or even their actions could have or would have caused such a thing, even when they haven’t seen the person in years, have completely lost touch, and are as disconnected as two people can be, the mislogic of power dysmorphia causes our brains to try to make meaning and connection where there is none. It’s like the worst of both worlds, where we have none of the power to make things right, but all the responsibility for things when they go wrong. And yet the responsibility is just as much a mirage as our lack of personal empowerment. It’s a torment of the mind: a chimaera. If we ground ourselves in reality, we’ll see that we’re not a mythical hero, but a flesh and blood human being responsible for our own actions and transformations. Which is power enough for one lifetime…possibly two…