From Pain to Peace, Part 2: A Guide to Dignity and Power Dynamics:

From Pain to Peace

Part 2: A Guide to Dignity and Power Dynamics: 

Tools for When Relationships Hurt

If you’re reading this, you might be feeling confused, hurt, and exhausted by your interactions with others. You might leave conversations feeling small, sick to your stomach, or filled with a rage that seems to come out of nowhere. You may have been told you're "too sensitive" or that you "can't take a joke."

You are not crazy. You are not broken. You are likely experiencing the very real effects of dignity violations through power-over tactics.

This guide provides the two core tools you need to understand what is happening and how to protect yourself.

Tool #1: Identify the Problem 

– The Power-Over Tactic Checklist

Power-over tactics are behaviors people use to dominate, control, or feel superior. They are often a distorted way for someone to manage their own insecurity or shame by making someone else feel small. Recognizing them is the first step to disarming their power.

When you can name a tactic, it stops being a vague, agonizing feeling and becomes a specific, identifiable behavior. This validates your experience and gives you back your reality.

Comprehensive List of Power-Over Tactics:

I. Coercive Control & Intimidation

• Threats: Explicit or implied threats to your safety, job, relationships, or well-being.

• Intimidation: Using body language, size, shouting, or destroying property to create fear. This can include using explosive emotional outbursts as a tool to keep you in a state of fear and hypervigilance.

• "Or Else" Statements: Framing demands with a clear, unstated negative consequence.

• Creating a Debt: Doing something for you (often unasked) and then using it to create obligation.

• Destruction or Disposal of Property: Destroying or discarding your personal belongings to intimidate you and demonstrate control.

• Manufacturing Justification for Abuse: Provoking a reaction in order to justify their own subsequent escalation and violence.

II. Financial and Material Control

• Controlling Resources: Withholding or severely limiting access to money, food, clothing, transportation, or medication.

• Sabotaging Economic Self-Sufficiency: Preventing you from working, harassing you at your job, forcing you to quit, or sabotaging your employment or educational opportunities.

• Exploiting Your Resources: Stealing your money, running up debt in your name, or forcing you to hand over your paychecks or savings.

• Using Finances as a Weapon: Creating a total financial dependency to ensure you cannot leave the relationship or situation.

III. Psychological Manipulation

• Gaslighting: Making you doubt your memory, perception, or sanity. ("I never said that," "You're too sensitive.")

• Guilt-Tripping (Emotional Blackmail): Manipulating you by implying that your actions or boundaries will cause them significant emotional distress or practical hardship. They use phrases like, "If you don't do this, I'll be so sad/stranded," "A good partner would..." , or “if you love me you would…” to make you feel responsible for their well-being and coerce your compliance.

• Intellectual Presumption (Assumed Ignorance): Automatically assuming you have no knowledge or expertise on a subject, and interacting with you from a default "teacher-to-student" dynamic. This shows a lack of curiosity about your actual understanding and functions as a performance of their own superiority.

• Dogmatic Gatekeeping: Positioning themselves as the ultimate authority on a subject (e.g., art, writing, spirituality) and presenting their subjective opinions as inflexible, universal rules. They demand you conform to their specific standards to be considered "good" or "legitimate," invalidating your unique voice, style, or process. (e.g., "If you want to be published, you must write like this.”)

• Weaponized Morality (Virtue Compliance): Using the language of sacred virtues, ethics, or righteousness as a tool to shame, control, and punish you for not adhering to a rigid, often self-serving, interpretation of those values. This tactic hijacks culturally or spiritually significant concepts—such as 孝順 (filial piety) in many Asian cultures, respect, unconditional forgiveness in religious contexts, or rigid gender hierarchies (e.g., "man as the head of the house")—to demand compliance and silence dissent. It frames any disagreement or boundary-setting not as a difference of opinion, but as a profound moral or spiritual failure, allowing the user to claim the righteous position while casting you as deviant, ungrateful, or sinful.

• Baiting and Provocation: Deliberately engaging in behaviors designed to elicit an emotional reaction from you (e.g., anger, frustration) to then portray you as the "unstable" or "abusive" one.

• Playing the Victim: Portraying themselves as the one who is wronged or abused, especially in response to a reaction they deliberately provoked, to evade responsibility and gain sympathy.

• Triangulation: Bringing a third party into the dynamic to gossip or create alliances against you.

• Love Bombing & Intermittent Reinforcement: Overwhelming you with affection, then withdrawing it, creating an addictive cycle.

• Weaponized Morality (Virtue Compliance): Using the language of ethics, justice, or inclusivity as a tool to shame, control, and punish you for not adhering to their personal, often rigid, standards. This tactic frames disagreements as moral failures, allowing them to claim the "good" position while casting you as "bad."

IV. Undermining Autonomy & Agency

• Infantilization: Treating you like a child, incapable of making decisions.

• Unilateral Decision-Making: Making significant choices that affect you—from daily matters to life-altering ones—without your consultation, consent, or regard for your will. This treats you as an extension of themselves or a object, not as a person with the right to self-determination.

• Micromanagement: Excessive control over how you do tasks.

• Constant "Correction": Relentlessly pointing out minor flaws.

• Withholding Information: Deliberately keeping you in the dark to maintain an advantage.

V. Verbal and Emotional Abuse

• Name-Calling, Labeling, and Insults: Attacking your character, identity, or intelligence.

• Condescension and Sarcasm: Talking down to you or making "jokes" at your expense.

• Yelling or Raising Their Voice: Using volume to intimidate.

• Public Shaming or Humiliation: Mocking you in front of others.

• The "Silent Treatment" (Stonewalling): Refusing to communicate as punishment.

• False Accusation & Character Assassination: Attacking your character by falsely accusing you of holding malicious intent or committing ethical violations that you did not commit. This often involves twisting your words, taking them out of context, or inventing hypothetical scenarios to "prove" your supposed bad character.

VI. Invalidation and Distortion

• Dismissing Your Feelings: "You're overreacting," "You're too sensitive.” or “You shouldn’t feel that way.”

• Moving the Goalposts: Changing the rules just as you're about to meet them.

• Twisting Your Words: Taking what you said out of context.

• Blaming and Scapegoating: Holding you responsible for their actions or mistakes.

• Distortion of Reality: Deliberately misrepresenting your words, actions, or intentions to create a false narrative that casts them as the victim and you as the perpetrator. This includes inventing hypothetical consequences or offended parties to justify their accusation.

• Emotional Scapegoating (Being the "Trash Can"): Making you the target for pent-up anger, frustration, or dissatisfaction that originated from other sources or people. You are punished for minor infractions with the full weight of their unrelated, accumulated emotional baggage. This treats you as a convenient dumping ground for their dysregulation, refusing to take responsibility for managing their own emotions.

VII. Exploiting Vulnerabilities

• Using Your Triggers Against You: Deliberately using topics or tones they know are dysregulating for you.
• Weaponizing Diagnoses/Traits: Using your traits or mental health against you to invalidate your perceptions.
• Isolation: Limiting your contact with friends, family, or support networks.

This check-list works wonders when held up to behavior. If you see these patterns from others, you are likely in a dynamic where your dignity is being violated. If you see these patterns from yourself, your social norm is likely to be dominance centered, where participants take turn dominating one another. 

Your emotional distress and subsequent emotional outrage are not the root problem; they are the consequence. The root problem is the power-over tactics themselves. Protecting yourself from them is a righteous and necessary act of self-preservation. If you're one who has these behaviors, protecting your loved ones from your own power plays will be your key to harmonious and genuinely connected relationships. 

Why This Hurts: It's Biological

This pain is not "all in your head." Brain scan studies show that dignity violations like insults, humiliation, and exclusion activate the same neural pathways as physical pain. Your "agonizing pain" is a real neurological signal that your well-being is under threat.

However, our reactions aren't always straightforward. Have you ever wondered, "Was that a genuine dignity violation, or is my reaction magnified by unresolved past?" Or conversely, "Is my anger justified, or is it an unfair expectation I'm placing on someone else?" These are the critical questions that separate simple pain from profound self-understanding.

If we truly desire to create a dignity-preserving power-with environment, it is crucial to become a detective of your own reactions. In Part 3: The Deeper Work, we delve into the crucial difference between a true dignity violation and a reaction fueled by past trauma or personal entitlement. Learn how to spot your own triggers and unconscious "shoulds" to achieve true emotional clarity and stop the cycle of pain.

Tool #2: The Antidote – The 10 Essential Elements of Dignity

Power-over actions diminish, violate, and erode human dignity. It feels like our existence is being chipped away. Power-with actions protect, preserve, and restore human dignity. Our existence would feel warm, full, being held in comfort. Human connection only deepens when all parties’ dignity is intentionally protected. Micro-violations of dignity in human relationship will eventually break down any connection previously built.

If power-over tactics are the poison, then dignity is the antidote. Dignity is your inherent, unearned worth as a human being. It is your birthright.

But what does it look like in practice? Dr. Donna Hicks, a conflict resolution expert, provides a clear map. These 10 elements are not just ideas; they are the building blocks of safe, respectful, and healthy relationships. They are your guide for what to demand for yourself and what to give to others.

Here are the 10 Essential Elements of Dignity:

1. Acceptance of Identity: Approach people as neither inferior nor superior to you. Give others the freedom to express their authentic selves without fear of being negatively judged.

2. Recognition: Validate others for their talents, hard work, thoughtfulness, and help. Be generous with praise.

3. Acknowledgment: Give people your full attention by listening, hearing, validating, and responding to their concerns.

4. Inclusion: Make others feel they belong.

5. Safety: Put people at ease both physically and psychologically. They should feel free from harm and from being shamed or humiliated.

6. Fairness: Treat people justly, with equality, and in an even-handed way.

7. Independence: Empower people to act on their own behalf so they feel in control of their lives.

8. Understanding: Believe that what others think matters. Give them the chance to explain and actively listen to understand them.

9. Benefit of the Doubt: Treat people as trustworthy. Start with the premise that others have good motives and are acting with integrity.

10. Accountability: Take responsibility for your actions. If you have violated another's dignity, apologize. Make a commitment to change hurtful behaviors.

(From: Dignity: Its Essential Role in Resolving Conflict by Donna Hicks)

How to Use These Tools

• Diagnose: Use the Power-Over Tactic list to understand what is happening to you. "Ah, what my partner just did was infantilization and dismissing my feelings." This immediately reduces confusion and self-blame.

• Validate: Remind yourself that a part of your pain is a rational response to an irrational behavior. Your feelings are valid.

• Set a Boundary (If Safe): You can now set a clear boundary. For example: "When I hear you speaking to me in a condescending tone, I feel disrespected. I need us to speak as equals for this conversation to continue.”

• Use the Compass: Use the 10 Elements of Dignity as your guide for what you deserve. They also serve as a mirror for your own behavior, helping you avoid accidentally harming others.

A Final Word

You have the right to occupy space without apology. Your dignity is your birthright.

The tools in this guide—the list of power-over tactics and the elements of dignity—are your armor and your compass. They will not change other people, but they will give you the clarity to see dynamics for what they are, and the strength to choose how you respond. This is the foundation of protecting your peace.

But what about the pain that comes from within? What happens when your own reactions feel confusing, or when you wonder if you might be contributing to the cycle?

This is the frontier of true empowerment. In Part 3: The Deeper Work, we turn the lens inward to untangle past triggers from present violations, and to examine how our own expectations can sometimes be the source of our pain. This is the journey from understanding the map to mastering the terrain of your own inner world.