How to Stop Giving People Power They Were Never Supposed to Have

Think about the last time someone's opinion of you sent you into a spiral. A comment from a coworker. A look from a parent. A perceived shift in tone from someone you love. Think about how much time you spent parsing it, managing it, trying to course-correct in response to it. Now ask yourself an honest question: does that person actually have authority over your worth? Not in theory — in practice. Because if your internal state moved significantly in response to their response, they do have authority. Whether or not they should is a separate question.

This is what I mean when I talk about illegitimate power — power that was granted, implicitly or explicitly, by circumstances you didn't choose, to people who may not deserve it and almost certainly didn't earn it. Power that lives in the body long after its original justification expired. And the work of reclaiming yourself, in large part, is the work of identifying who holds this kind of power in your life and beginning the deliberate, legally precise process of revoking it.

How Power Gets Assigned in Childhood

In early childhood, the people who care for you hold almost total power over your world. This is not ideology — it's developmental reality. Your survival, your safety, your sense of self are entirely dependent on their response to you. Whether they approve of you or disapprove, whether they delight in you or are burdened by you, whether they see you clearly or project onto you — all of it lands not as opinion but as fact. A child does not have the cognitive development to hold a parent's approval as one data point among many. The parent's approval is the whole dataset.

This is how worth gets anchored outside the self. When approval from a specific person is survival-level important, the nervous system codes their approval as the measure of your value. And because the nervous system doesn't update its records automatically, that coding persists. You grow up. You move out. You build a life. And yet, somewhere in the architecture of your psychology, that original person — or the type they represent — still holds the pen that writes your worth.

What makes this especially complex is that the person holding the pen doesn't have to be present. The parent doesn't need to be in the room. The critical teacher, the dismissive caregiver, the emotionally unavailable figure whose approval you could never quite secure — their influence operates through the internal representation you built of them. You carry them with you. Their voice becomes part of the internal committee that evaluates your choices, your worth, your right to take up space. And unless that committee is audited, it keeps voting.

Recognizing the Signatures of Illegitimate Power

How do you know when someone holds illegitimate power over you? Here are some reliable markers. You find yourself editing what you say or do before you've even interacted with them — pre-emptively managing their response before they've had one. You feel a disproportionate need for their specific approval, in a way that doesn't apply to most people whose opinions you respect. Their disappointment or disapproval produces shame — not regret, not concern, but shame, the particular sensation of being fundamentally defective rather than simply having done something wrong.

You replay interactions with them in detail, long after the conversation has ended, looking for where you could have presented your case better. You change your behavior not to align with your own values but to align with what you imagine their values require. You feel relief — disproportionate, almost physical relief — when they seem pleased with you. And underneath all of it, a quiet, chronic exhaustion from maintaining a case you've been trying to win for years, in a courtroom where the verdict was written before you arrived.

You cannot revoke power you haven't first admitted was given. The audit begins with honesty — not judgment, just honesty.

Why We Maintain These Structures Unconsciously

Here is the question that deserves a real answer: if this power dynamic is costing you so much, why do you maintain it? The answer is not weakness. It is, again, biology and developmental logic. The original assignment of power happened at a time when maintaining it was adaptive. Keeping the caregiver appeased, keeping the authority figure calm, staying legible and manageable to the people who controlled your world — this was not just emotional strategy. It was practical necessity.

The psyche also maintains these structures because they provide a kind of terrible comfort. If someone else holds the authority over your worth, you are not responsible for determining it yourself. And determining your own worth is, it turns out, one of the most terrifying and difficult things a person can do. It requires trusting yourself as the primary evaluator of your own value — and for people who were taught explicitly or implicitly that their self-assessment was not to be trusted, that is an enormous ask.

There is also, sometimes, hope embedded in these structures. A hope that if you can finally do it right — finally say the right thing, achieve the right thing, present yourself in the right way — the person who holds the power will finally give you what you needed from them originally. That hope is real and it is heartbreaking and it deserves compassion. But it is also, in most cases, a hope the evidence does not support. People who were unable to see your worth when you were a child rarely develop that capacity simply because you've gotten better at trying to earn it.

The Process of Revocation

In law, when authority has been improperly granted, there are processes for reclaiming it. The process isn't instantaneous — it requires documentation, deliberation, and often, a formal proceeding. Revoking illegitimate power over your sense of self works similarly. It is not a decision you make once and are done with. It is a process. And it begins with the audit.

The audit means sitting with an honest inventory: who holds outsized influence over your self-perception? Not who you wish held it, not who logically should — who actually does, based on the evidence of your own reactions? Name them. This is not a blame exercise. It is a fact-finding exercise. You cannot revoke a grant you haven't clearly identified.

From there, revocation is practiced in small moments. It's the pause before you contort yourself in response to someone's perceived disapproval, and the question: do I actually agree that this person's assessment of me is accurate? It's the decision to take one action that is aligned with your own values even when you know it will not be approved of by the person in question. It is the slow, repeated practice of consulting yourself first — of building enough of a relationship with your own judgment that it becomes the primary reference point, rather than a distant second to someone who was assigned authority over you decades ago.

This work takes time. The older the assignment and the more central the person was to your early survival, the more patient the process needs to be. But each time you choose your own assessment over the reflexive deference, you are filing the paperwork. You are building a new record. And slowly, the authority that lived outside you begins to migrate inward — to the one place it was always supposed to reside. You.