Summary
Joe Hudson and Brett Kistler explore how fear creates power dynamics in relationships, teams, and society. Joe begins with a personal story about his allergy to the word “power” after hearing a teacher say “power is the ultimate expression of fear” — only to realize his rejection of power was itself an expression of fear and a power move over reality.
The core teaching is that all power dynamics involve two scared people, each believing they’re defending themselves while perceiving the other as attacking. This mutual misperception, fueled by binary thinking, is what drives all conflict — from marriages to political systems. Joe maps the drama triangle (which he calls the “fear triangle”) onto fight/flight/freeze responses: the bully (fight) feels alone and self-reliant, the victim (freeze) feels stuck, and the savior (flight) feels obligation and responsibility. Each role carries shame, and all are driven by underlying fear.
Brett shares a personal example of dropping his savior pattern — simply showing up authentically, validating people without trying to fix them, and watching the entire dynamic dissolve instantly. Joe emphasizes that acknowledging the fear without judgment is the quickest way to disintegrate the fear triangle: the bully saying “I’m scared,” the victim saying “I have choice,” and the savior saying “I can only save myself.”
Key Concepts
- All power dynamics are two scared people defending themselves
- The fear triangle maps bully, victim, and savior to fight, flight, and freeze
- Acknowledging fear without judgment dissolves power dynamics
- The savior role is flight from yourself to control others
- Power seeking is the ultimate expression of fear
Key Quotes
“All power dynamics are two people who are scared. I’m not talking about play power dynamics… I’m talking about when somebody wants to get their way and the other person wants to get their way.”
“It’s two people who think they’re defending themselves and think the other person is attacking them.”
“The emotional signature of the savior is a sense of obligation and responsibility. The victim is stuck, I feel stuck. And the bully feels like they’re all alone in it, no one is helping them, they have to be self-reliant.”
“A lot of this disintegrates when the bully says ‘I’m scared.’ A lot of this disintegrates when a victim says ‘I can do this, I have choice here.’ A lot of this disintegrates when a savior says ‘the only person I can save is myself.‘”
“It doesn’t take anything to drop a hot frying pan.”
Transcript
We all get scared sometimes and so we all get into power dynamics sometimes. It’s the way it is. It doesn’t matter how old you are almost and it definitely doesn’t matter how much you’ve meditated. If there wasn’t some of this tension we wouldn’t be alive.
Welcome to the art of accomplishment where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease. I’m Brett Kistler here today with my co-host Joe Hudson.
Welcome back Joe. We are continuing into our emotions series. Yeah we’ve been kind of having a pretty good run at fear lately. Just finished up the fear and anxiety episode and we still have a little bit more to talk about with regards to fear, right? Fear and anxiety, we left it at we did the fear general, we did the anxiety, but I think there’s the power dynamics that we haven’t really touched yet. Yes, yeah. Power dynamics, fear triangle, how fear influences the way that we see power and get into games around it.
Yeah. I remember there was a, I have this story and it doesn’t relate to power so much but it kind of does so I want to share it. I remember I was really into non-duality, I think it was like around 30 years old or something and I was really into non-duality and I was like collecting different teachers who had different ways to see it. And one of the teachers, he said, his name was Stephen Harrison, and he said power is the ultimate expression of fear. And so I was like cool, that resonated, it made so much sense to me. And then I came across a book that somebody recommended called The Power of Now by a guy named Eckhart Tolle and I was like “ultimate expression of fear!” Oh he needs to have power, ultimate expression of fear, teaching other people to have power, the ultimate expression of fear. And then I was in this hot springs and they had this video thing happening and it was Eckhart Tolle and I listened. I was like oh my God that guy’s saying the same thing as Stephen Harrison, very different way but same thing. And then I found out he was the author of The Power of Now.
And so I’ll start off on that which is that even that whole thing of me saying power like that, power that means an expression of fear, that was me trying to have power over my reality. That was my allergy to that word. That was my expression of fear. Right, oh my, I can’t just be in the unknown of life evolving in the way that it does. I need to be able to have some sort of control mechanism and that created the ignorance. And that in itself was all fear, like I needed something to hold on to, which is even more hilarious when you think about the way that Stephen Harrison teaches which is he destroys everything you think you hold on to.
So, power dynamics as an expression of fear. Yeah let’s talk about it. All right so how fear creates power dynamics. We’ve talked a lot about something called the fear triangle before. Yeah, and we’ve kind of touched on it a number of different times in several different episodes but we really haven’t dropped into like a comprehensive description of the fear triangle, what it is and then sort of the underlying power dynamics and then some of the peripheral stuff that happens around it. So let’s go into that.
Let me pull up just a second before we do. So on the general power dynamics, basically all power dynamics is two people who are scared. I’m not talking about play power dynamics, not like agreed upon, like oh yeah let’s have a game of power dynamics, or sexual power dynamics. I’m talking about a boss and their peer getting into a fight, or a wife and a husband getting into a fight, or two friends. I’m talking about when somebody wants to get their way and the other person wants to get their way around something. So that’s what I’m talking about when I say power dynamics and it’s always based in a fear. It’s always based in fear.
And the most simple way to look at it, even more simple than the drama triangle, is to see that it’s two people who think they’re defending themselves and think the other person is attacking them. So one person feels like they’re defending and the other person feels like they’re being attacked. And so both people walk around thinking what they just said was a defense and the other person is hearing that as an attack. And I’m not saying which is true or not true but that is the basic structure of all of it. And whether you think of that in a political system, right, where one group thinks they’re defending themselves or the other group feels like they’re being attacked, or a marriage. And if you can see it that way, if you can see all of these conflicts where someone’s trying to have power over the other person, it immediately the whole thing dissolves. You’re just like oh wait a second, okay that person’s not trying to attack me. That person thinks they’re defending themselves right now.
It seems like this comes from that characteristic of fear where we go into binary thinking. Yes. And then we start to think that it’s a win or lose thing. You can win the argument or lose the argument. You can have somebody see your position or they just don’t because they’re stupid. Right. Yeah, yeah. In this both people are scared that they’re going to lose something that they love. Both people are scared that they’re going to be controlled or whatever they’re scared of. They’re both scared, maybe of different things, but they’re both scared.
And the fear either presents itself in fight, flight, or freeze. The flight is the most complicated so we’ll start with the other ones. The fight is like the bully behavior of the fear triangle. And the freeze is the victim behavior of the fear triangle. And the flight is the savior. And savior means, and the flight means that you’ve left yourself and you’re going outside of the world to other people to control them so that they will make you feel safe.
So all the complication, the way that people can’t see each other, the way that they feel like they’re being attacked when the other person’s actually defending themselves, is all because of the way in which the fear works inside of the person. And they call this the drama triangle. I call it the fear triangle because all of the behaviors are driven out of this fear and they’re driven out of the fight, fright, or freeze situation.
And they all have an emotional signature with them which is also usually not explained. And the emotional signature of the savior is a sense of obligation, responsibility. And the victim is stuck, I feel stuck. And the bully feels like they’re all alone in it, no one is helping them, they have to be self-reliant. And those are the emotional signatures of those particular places.
And so I’ve been in like rooms in companies with like 100, 120 men and this time it was men. It was like they had this company doing something to help men with EQ. And so a whole bunch of engineers and I kind of put them out into corners. Are you the fight, are you the flight, are you the freeze? And then I put them into corners and then I had them like hey fighters, you know bullies — I didn’t call them bullies because nobody wants — first of all the first thing is they all had shame. They all had shame around what they were. The fighters were ashamed of being fighters. The freezers were ashamed of being freezers and the flight was ashamed of being flight.
But the other thing that happened is that they got to see — hey fighters, like when you fight and somebody doesn’t fight back, when they walk away from you, how does that feel in your system? That feels like an attack. Feels like they’ve disengaged.
This is where this comes from, that characteristic of fear where we go into binary thinking. And then we start to think that it’s a win or lose thing. Both people are scared that they’re going to lose something that they love. Both people are scared that they’re going to be controlled or whatever they’re scared of. They’re both scared, maybe of different things, but they’re both scared.
Something further interesting for me was how through my journey I’ve identified by learning about the fear triangle. I’ve often found myself identifying as a savior and that’s been sort of one of the main roles that I’ve sat in. And there’s a number of stories I could tell. In a very general sense about how I was in a dynamic with two other people. And there’s probably a half a dozen people who would think it was them I’m talking about and they’d be both right and wrong. Right, exactly. The pattern replays itself. Oh yeah, yeah. And also I’ve become more and more recently, I’ve been simmering in how I’ve been doing this internally. When I’m recognizing a limiting belief, where I’m recognizing some sense of identity that I’m trying to hold on to, and then I’m like aha, here’s how I could construct an experience that gets me out of that box, or here’s a workshop I could go to to explore that. And that’s my internal savior of like oh look I see two parts of myself fighting, here’s how I can control the outcome without actually feeling the emotions underneath it.
What I notice in what you’re saying there is there’s a little way in which when you mimic the savior voice inside of your head, it was derogatory. And I think that that’s one of the things that keeps the fear triangle in place generally is the shame that I spoke about earlier. The shame of being a bully or being a victim or being a savior. Instead of seeing it as like I’m scared. I mean it’s amazing, it’s like you said, a lot of this disintegrates when the bully says I’m scared. A lot of this disintegrates when a victim says I can do this, I have choice here. A lot of this disintegrates when a savior says the only person I can save is myself.
And so it’s this acknowledgment of the fear without the judgment that is the quickest way to disintegrate the fear triangle. It’s just to acknowledge that there’s fear and there’s tension. We wouldn’t be alive. It might even be acknowledging that there’s sadness or acknowledging that there’s hurt or that there’s joy. Yes, yeah, yeah. All I would say is, like we said before, it’s a constriction. Fear, anxiety, that part of it is a constriction of life force. So it could be anything but it is the acknowledgment of what is. And to some degree when you’re in the, when you’re particularly in a power dynamic, it’s the fear of something. Maybe it is the fear of sadness and maybe it’s a fear of joy or pleasure. Often, yeah.
So I have a question for you. You talked about this like in movies you’ve seen it unraveled in a heartbeat and also you mean in the work that you’ve seen me doing, that we’ve done together. You also can see it unravel in a heartbeat. It’s just like the whole game, the whole war can be dropped. It doesn’t take anything to drop a hot frying pan. I’m wondering if you have an experience that you can share with us, a story of when you were in it and it just dropped like a hot frying pan.
Yeah absolutely. So this is an example of one of those stories that I think a half a dozen people listening to will probably think is about them. And you’re wrong and you’re right. Yeah, but a common pattern for me coming from a family where I always felt like I was trying to save the peace and trying to make everybody not fight and be in harmony so that I could feel safe. I’ve recreated that a lot in my life. And one time, it was relatively recently, it was after we had talked about one of our fear and anxiety episodes that we recorded about a month back. I was feeling into the anxiety, letting myself just have it, including the helplessness, especially the helplessness of that. As much as I could convince myself into thinking it, I actually didn’t have power over the situation. All I had was how I could show up. And I wasn’t enjoying the way I was showing up.
And I just showed up in a way that I enjoyed more, which meant that I wasn’t in a conversation feeling like I was holding back and walking on eggshells. I was in a conversation saying what I felt needed to be said and also being okay with being imperfect saying it. Being okay with maybe coming off as a little bit of a bully and being open to the feedback and iterating. At least getting myself out of the savior like better-than mode that I had been in.
And it was amazing how quickly things changed in this particular instance. It was immediate. My jaw was on the floor. Two people that had had a lot of tension with one another, I had a conversation with each one of them that was just basically okay, yeah, I validate your experience. I understand what you’re feeling. And also I’m not going to be able to fix this for you. And I know that you can do this and you can take responsibility for this relationship yourself.
And each of those, I didn’t feel entirely clean in my delivery. There was like some new tension with me and the person that I was speaking with that like they were like hey wait a minute that’s not — and I was like oh okay. And suddenly the whole thing shifted. And it shifted so quickly that I actually couldn’t even trace back to was it even, could it even have been that I shifted my dynamic and then they shifted theirs? Or did they shift theirs and then that shifted mine? Yeah, because I could hardly even draw a causal relationship either way. Other than just noticing that the whole thing fell away immediately. Yeah. And I was just grateful and enjoyed like it happened just the moment that I actually enjoyed showing up and didn’t feel either resentful or in resistance or afraid of showing up. It’s amazing what just sharing our truth can do.
Yeah. Pleasure, pleasure Brett. Yeah until next time. All right. Thank you Joe. All right. Thanks for listening to the art of accomplishment. If you enjoyed what you heard today please subscribe and rate us on your podcast app. We’d love your feedback so feel free to send us questions or comments. You can reach out to us, join our newsletter, or check out our courses at artofaccomplishment.com.