Power, love and presence

Power, love and presence are the three potentials at the center of my work. I call them potentials because, in my experience, they're in everyone and they come and go: easier to reach on some days and in some rooms, harder in others, and they can grow.

If you are a painter or an artist who uses colors, you know that there are primary colors of yellow, red and blue that can be mixed in infinite proportions to form almost any color in existence. The same holds for the primary colors of self: power, love and presence. Some of us have more inherent power, and others have more inherent love, or a combination of power and presence, and this may change over time, depending on an infinite number of circumstances, including one's drive to grow and heal.

The three, in the order they tend to grow

In the work, they usually grow in a different order from the name: presence, then power, then love.

Presence is one's living relationship to reality and to this moment, contact with what is, in the body and in the mind. I see what is. It tends to come first, because the other two start from what has been seen.

Power is agency: the capacity to act, to set a boundary, to say yes and to say no. I am here. Once a need has been seen, power is what can stand up for it and give it room.

Love is care and connection, warmth, holding and being held. I am held. It usually opens last, because opening asks for some safety, and presence and power are much of what makes it safe.

If you work with parts, the order may echo one you know: first noticing a part, then giving it a little space, then getting curious about it and, in time, befriending it.

Alone, and together

Each of the three can drift when the other two aren't there to hold it. Power cut off from love and presence can harden into domination. Love on its own can blur into enmeshment, where it gets hard to tell where one person ends and the other begins; presence by itself can go cool and far away, a watching from a distance.

Seen through parts, each drift belongs to a part, with the rest of the person still there around it. Domination is often a protector doing a job it took on long ago, when love and presence weren't safe to count on, and enmeshment and distance can be protectors too.

When the three come into balance, at whatever level, a coherence opens, for as long as the balance holds.

Healthy power

Of the three, power is the one people are most wary of, and with reason, since much of what gets called power has had little love or presence in it.

"…power without love is reckless and abusive, and that love without power is sentimental and anemic."Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here? (1967)

Held by love and presence, power becomes healthy power: strength with care in it and eyes open. Finding healthy power in one's self and relationships is a key to healing and awakening.

In IFS, the qualities of Self that Dick Schwartz describes already include compassion and connectedness, presence, and confidence and courage. The strength also shows in protective parts, who work hard, often for decades, to keep us safe, and it is at its healthiest when Self leads. I gather these into three: power, love and presence. Power held by love and presence is what I call healthy power.

Domination is what I write about as the Dominant Mindset.

The base note

At their smallest, the three are what I call the base note: Internal Presence, Relational Presence and Minimum Viable Action. Being in your own body is presence at its smallest; being with someone who isn't trying to fix you is love; the small thing you can still do on a hard day is power.

Within, Between and the All

The three live in each of three identities: who I am as myself (Within), who I am in a we, like a couple, a friendship or a group (Between), and who I am as part of everything (the All). Within is who I am as all my parts. I used to call these identities the intra-, inter- and omni-personal. Three potentials in three identities make the nine squares of the Matrix of Self.

What happens in one identity tends to show up in the others. When love is hard to reach within, trusting people and holding a boundary with them can get harder too, and so can taking up space in the world. And as presence grows within, it often shows up as more presence in the we, and in the All. It travels inward too: an hour among people who aren't asking anything of you can bring you back into your own body.

Power, love and presence are like the mycelium of a life, the underground network that connects the different aspects of our being, nourishing and supporting each other.

Still finding out

The more I play with this over the years, the less rigid the lines need to be around defining these primary colors, and the more they are secondary to the gestures each moment of my experience paints with them, and with all their blends.

Within, a free course, starts with who you are as yourself. Words I use has short definitions, and The Matrix of Self has the full map.