Power Was Never Meant to Be Used This Way | Your Trauma-Wise Career Guide Ep 57

Summary

In this solo episode, Cyndi Bennett takes on a topic she has been sitting with for a while: power, and what happens when someone gets it and uses it the wrong way. This is not a political episode or a narcissism episode. It is an honest, grounded conversation about what misused authority actually looks like in the workplace, what it costs the people around it, and why, for trauma survivors, those environments can feel so painfully familiar. Drawing from her own study of leadership and her work with trauma survivors navigating their careers, Cyndi also paints a clear picture of what power used well looks like, and why you deserve to be in spaces where that is the norm, not the exception.

Key Thoughts

• When someone gets a title and the dynamic shifts overnight, your body recognizes that pattern long before your mind can name it.
• Power misused looks like taking up space. Power used well looks like making room.
• The leaders who leave the deepest mark are almost never the ones who use their position to elevate themselves. They are the ones who use it to elevate everyone around them.
• What gets taken first in a misused power dynamic is your voice. Not all at once, but gradually, until the cost of speaking starts to feel too high.
• When you are inside a harmful dynamic long enough, it starts to feel like just how things are. That normalization is what makes it so hard to leave and so hard to trust the next place you step into.
• Your nervous system is not overreacting. It is connecting dots that are real.
• You are allowed to want workplaces where power is used well. For those of us who were told our needs were too much, that can feel like a radical idea. But it is simply the baseline.

What This Means For You

If any part of this episode is landing in a way that feels familiar, here are some things worth sitting with:

• What you are experiencing is real. If you are in an environment right now where authority is being used against you rather than for you, you are not imagining it and you are not oversensitive. The impact on your nervous system is real, and it deserves to be taken seriously.
• Learn to assess your environments from a place of clarity, not hypervigilance. Who has power in the spaces you are in? How are they using it? What does it cost you to be there? These are not paranoid questions. They are important ones, and you are allowed to ask them.
• Notice what misused power takes from you. Your voice. Your sense of reality. Your sense of what is normal. Once you can name what has been chipped away, you can begin to understand why the healing work matters so much.
• Hold on to examples of power done right. If you have ever worked with someone who made you feel like your voice belonged in the room, who shared credit freely and stayed curious about the people around them, that is not a unicorn. It is what leadership is supposed to look like, and it is worth holding as your reference point.
• You get to want something different. Not someday, not when things settle down. Now. You are allowed to make decisions, over time, in the direction of environments where you can bring your whole self and not spend half your energy just trying to survive the room.

Come Journey With Us

If this resonated with you and you would like to go deeper with the exact tools, resources, and community built specifically to support trauma survivors navigating their careers, consider joining us in the Resilient Career Academy. You don't have to figure this out alone. There is a place where people understand exactly what you are carrying, and where your pace, your healing, and your story are not just welcomed, they are honored.

Learn more at https://resilientcareers.substack.com/p/become-a-member

When you're ready, here are 3 ways I can help you grow your career journey:

1. Free trauma-informed career development resources from my website! Visit https://www.cyndibennettconsulting.com for always up-to-date tips.
2. Ready to build a fulfilling career with trauma-informed support? Join The Resilient Career Academy Learning Community, where trauma survivors support each other, share resources, and develop career resilience in a safe, understanding environment
3. Ready for personalized trauma-informed career coaching? Explore my range of virtual coaching packages designed for different stages of your career journey. Visit my website to find the right support for where you are now. [Visit my website: https://www.cyndibennettconsulting.com/1-on-1-coaching]

DISCLOSURE: Some links I share might contain resources that you might find helpful. Whenever possible I use referral links, which means if you click any of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation at no cost to you.

Transcript

Cyndi: [00:00:00] Someone says, "Because I said so," in a Monday morning meeting, and something shifts in you. Not anger exactly, something older than that. Something that knows this feeling from a long time ago, long before this job, long before this person had a title.

If that lands for you, stay with me because that's exactly what we're talking about today.

Welcome back to Your Trauma-Wise Career Guide. I'm Cyndi Bennett, trauma-informed career coach and founder of the Resilient Career Academy. And today we are going somewhere that I think a lot of us need to go.

We're talking about power. Specifically, what happens when someone gets power and what they do with it.

I want to be clear about something before we dive in. This is not a political episode. This is not a religious episode. This is not even a [00:01:00] narcissism episode, even though if you've been here a while, you know that territory is not new to us.

This is an episode about something I've been sitting with for a while now, both in my own professional experience and in my ongoing study of leadership. Good leadership. What it actually looks like, what it feels like to be on the receiving end of it. And what it feels like when it goes the other way.

Because here's what I keep coming back to: power was never meant to be used this way.

I want to start by asking you something, and I invite you to just notice whatever comes up for you.

Have you ever worked alongside someone, maybe a peer, maybe someone you respected, and then something changed? They got a title. A promotion. A new role. And almost overnight, the [00:02:00] dynamic shifted.

Suddenly, they were the one source of truth. Suddenly, it was their way or the highway. Suddenly, the conversations that used to feel collaborative started feeling like directives. "I'm the boss, that's why." "Because I said so." "I've already decided."

And something in you recognized that. Not just as unfair. Not just as frustrating. But as familiar.

If you've been with us since episode 51, when I sat down with Kimberly Weeks to talk about narcissism in the workplace, you might already have language for why that familiarity lives in your body the way it does. For a lot of us who grew up in homes where one person's voice was the only voice that mattered, these workplace dynamics don't just feel uncomfortable. They feel like home. And that is worth sitting with.

Here's what I've observed, both in my own [00:03:00] experience and in working with trauma survivors navigating their careers.

There are people who move through the world as if power is something to accumulate. Something to protect. Something that requires everyone around them to get smaller so they can feel bigger. And when those people get a title, the mask often slips. Because now they don't have to hide it anymore.

You might notice this looks like shutting down input. Dismissing questions. Taking credit. Keeping information close so others stay dependent. Using authority not to serve the people around them, but to remind those people of the hierarchy.

And here's the thing. None of that is leadership. That is power being misused. And your nervous system knows the difference, even when your mind is still trying to make sense of it all.

[00:04:00] I am a student of leadership. Good leadership. It's something I find myself returning to again and again, observing it, studying it, noticing what it looks like in practice.

And what I keep finding is this: the leaders who leave the deepest mark are almost never the ones who use their position to elevate themselves. They're the ones who used it to elevate everyone around them.

You might notice what that looks like. It looks like someone who listens to learn, not just to respond. Someone who, when something goes wrong, looks inward before looking outward. Someone whose door, literal or figurative, is open to anyone, regardless of their rank or their role. Someone who measures their success not by how much credit they receive, but by how many people around them are growing.

That kind of leadership doesn't [00:05:00] demand to be heard. It doesn't need to remind you who's in charge. It doesn't have to, because the people around it already know they're safe.

Power used well looks like making room. Power misused looks like taking it.

If you are navigating a workplace right now where power is being misused, where someone's title has become a weapon rather than a responsibility, I want you to know something.

You are not imagining it. Your body's response to that environment is not an overreaction. It is information. And you deserve to be in spaces, professional spaces, where power is used to lift people up, not hold them in place.

In today's episode, we're going to look at what this pattern actually looks like in practice. What it costs the people around it. And what it might mean for you as you think [00:06:00] about the kind of work environments you want to move toward.

This is not about fixing anyone. It's about getting clear on what you're experiencing, why it feels the way it feels, and what you get to want instead.

I want to spend some time here because I think this is the part that often gets unnamed.

When someone in a position of authority uses that position to serve themselves, there is a cost. And that cost is rarely carried by the person doing the harm. It is carried by the people around them.

You might notice this in yourself if you've been in one of those environments. Maybe you started second-guessing your instincts. Filtering everything you said before you said it. Shrinking your ideas down to something small enough that they wouldn't be rejected or dismissed. Watching your energy drain by Wednesday and not being able to [00:07:00] explain why.

That is not a performance problem. That is not a you problem. That is what happens to a nervous system that is working overtime to stay safe in an environment that doesn't feel safe.

And for those of us who came into the workplace already carrying a history, already knowing what it feels like to be in a room where one person's needs take up all the air, this kind of environment doesn't just feel hard. It can feel reactivating in ways that are genuinely difficult to separate from the present moment.

Your body is not confused. It is connecting dots that are real.

There are a few specific things I want to name because I think naming them matters.

When power is misused in the workplace, what often gets taken first is your voice. Not [00:08:00] dramatically. Not all at once. It happens gradually. You offer an idea, and it gets dismissed. You raise a concern, and it gets minimized. You ask a question, and the response makes you feel foolish for asking. And after enough of those moments, you stop. Not because you have nothing to say. But because the cost of saying it started to feel too high.

The second thing that often gets taken is your sense of reality. This is especially true when the person misusing the power is skilled at maintaining a certain image. When they are charming in some rooms and dismissive in others. When they take credit publicly and deflect blame privately. You start to wonder if you're reading situations correctly. You start to question your own perceptions.

And the third thing, the one I think is the most costly, is your sense of what is normal. [00:09:00] Because when you are inside a dynamic long enough, it starts to feel like that's just how things are. And that is exactly what makes it so hard to leave, and so hard to trust the next environment you step into.

I want to come back to the contrast now because I don't want to leave us only in the hard part

As someone who studies leadership, here is what I keep observing about the people who use power well.

They are not passive. They are not without opinions or direction or standards. Good leadership is not the absence of authority. It is the right use of it.

What I notice is that leaders who use power to elevate others tend to be genuinely curious about the people around them. They ask questions they don't already know the answer to. They create room for input before decisions get made, not after. When [00:10:00] something goes wrong, their first question is what can we learn from this, not whose fault is this.

They are also accessible. Not in a way that has no boundaries, but in a way that communicates that your role or your rank does not determine whether you matter. Anyone who needs them can reach them.

And maybe most importantly, they share credit. Freely. Publicly. Without it costing them anything, because they understand that someone else's success does not diminish their own.

That kind of leadership creates something in the people around it. You might notice it feels like permission. Permission to bring your whole thinking. Permission to take up space. Permission to grow without it being a threat to anyone.

That is what power is supposed to do. And when you have experienced it, even briefly, you [00:11:00] know the difference in your body.

I want to bring this back to you now, and to your career specifically.

If you are in an environment right now where power is being misused, I want you to hold a few things at once.

First, what you are experiencing is real. The dynamic is real. The impact on your nervous system is real. You are not oversensitive, and you're not imagining it.

Second, you get to be discerning about this. As a trauma survivor navigating your career, one of the most important skills you can develop is the ability to assess the environments you are in. Not from a place of hypervigilance, but from a place of clarity. Who has power here? How are they using it? What does it cost me to be in this space?

And third, you get to want something different. [00:12:00] You're allowed to want to work in environments where your voice matters. Where your contributions are recognized. Where leadership actually leads by lifting people up. That is not too much to ask. That is the baseline.

For those of us who grew up being told that our needs were too much, that wanting more meant we were ungrateful or difficult, this can feel like a radical idea. But I want you to sit with it.

You get to want workplaces where power is used well. And you get to make decisions, over time, in the direction of that.

I want to close today with something simple.

Power is not the problem. Power in the hands of someone who understands that their role is to serve the people around them is actually a beautiful thing. It creates safety. It creates growth. It creates the kind of environments where people [00:13:00] can show up and do meaningful work without spending half their energy just trying to survive the room.

The problem is when power gets handed to someone who sees it as an end rather than a means. Who measures their worth by how much control they have rather than how much good they do. Who needs everyone around them to be smaller in order for them to feel significant.

Your nervous system already knows the difference, and so do you.

If today's conversation is resonating with you and you want to go deeper, I want to invite you to join us at the Resilient Career Academy on Substack. It is a community built specifically for trauma survivors navigating their careers, and it is a space where this kind of conversation continues. You can find the link in the show notes.

And before I let you go, I want to ask you something. Have you ever experienced leadership done right? A manager, a [00:14:00] mentor, a colleague in a position of influence who actually used that position to lift people up? I would love to hear about it. Share it in the comments. Your example might be exactly what someone else needs to hear right now, a reminder that it is possible, that it does exist, and that they deserve it too.

Thank you for being here. Take good care of yourself this week, and I will see you in the next episode.

Speaker 2: You're not walking this path alone. Every step you take toward a trauma-wise career is an act of courage, and I'm here cheering you on. If today's episode resonated with you, share it with another survivor who needs to hear this message. Together, we're rewriting the rules of career success. Keep rising, keep healing, keep building.