Empowerment without Exploitation
Your Empowerment Can't Come at the Cost of Someone Else's Disempowerment
“Her empowerment can’t come at the expense of your disempowerment.”
A colleague framed this for me recently when I was reviewing an interaction I’d had with a friend. I’d felt my boundaries had been violated and an agreement had been breached, and I’d tried to name that.
I felt that my friend’s response was dismissive. The message underneath her response read to me as, “I will do what I want to do, and there is no room for your needs here, even though I said there was.” To my own surprise, I wasn’t angry with this, I was actually accepting, as well as non-reactive. I just decided not to continue engaging and made other plans.
No drama, no extended argument. Just a pivot: “Then I’ll do something different, and I respect your decision.” But the exchange stayed with me, it lingered a while, because of what it revealed about how empowerment actually functions between people. We talk about empowerment like it’s something you cultivate in isolation.
You find your voice.
You stand in your power.
You honor your needs. All of which is true enough, as far as it goes.
But empowerment doesn’t live inside a single person. It shows up in the space between people, in how we negotiate what we each need and whether we’re willing to let the other person remain whole in that process.
Empowerment, at its most basic, is agency.
The ability to voice what you need, to act in alignment with your own values and boundaries, and to make choices that serve your wellbeing. It’s not about winning or getting your way. It’s about remaining a participant in your own life rather than someone who is simply acted upon.
The thing about agency is that it doesn’t require someone else to lose theirs.
I can advocate for what I need without requiring you to abandon what you need. I can say no without erasing your yes. This is what empowerment looks like when it makes room. Two people, both present, both with voices, negotiating the space between them without one of them having to disappear.
But empowerment can also displace. When one person’s exercise of agency leaves no room for the other’s, something shifts. It’s not always dramatic, sometimes it’s subtle — a dismissal, a refusal to engage, a response that communicates your position was never actually part of the equation. The agreement was provisional. Your voice was heard but not binding.
This isn’t about naming villains. People displace each other’s agency all the time, often without realizing it. Sometimes it’s defensive, and sometimes it’s just what we learned. Sometimes the situation itself is genuinely zero-sum and something has to give. The point isn’t to assign blame but to recognize the pattern when it’s happening—to see it clearly enough that you can make a choice about how you want to respond.
There’s a particular skill in recognizing displacement without accepting it. It doesn’t look like fighting. It doesn’t look like accommodation, it looks like staying intact. You see what’s happening, you name it if that serves you, and then you make a decision that honors where you actually are. Not where the other person needs you to be. Not where conflict-avoidance would put you. Just the honest position you’re standing in.
In my situation, that looked like declining to argue. My friend had made her position clear: she was going to do what she wanted regardless of what we’d agreed to. I could have pushed back, tried to get her to see my perspective, explained why I was hurt. But her response had already told me there was no room for that conversation. So instead of trying to create room that didn’t exist, I accepted the information she’d given me and made a different plan. No resentment, no performance of being wounded. Just recognition and a pivot.
Refusing disempowerment doesn’t mean refusing relationship. It means refusing to be erased as a condition of staying. You can still care about someone and choose not to engage in dynamics where your voice doesn’t count. You can respect someone’s right to make their own choices while also choosing not to absorb the cost of those choices as if it were your job.
What does it look like when both people stay empowered in a conversation?
It doesn’t mean both people get what they want. It doesn’t mean everyone leaves happy. It means both people are present as agents throughout. Both people voice their needs. Both people are heard, even when the answer is no. The process itself doesn’t require anyone to vacate their position just to keep things comfortable.
Sometimes this kind of honesty reveals incompatibility. If someone can only operate by overriding you, that’s information. If you can only maintain a relationship by shrinking, that’s also information. These aren’t failures, they’re clarifications. They tell you something about what’s actually possible between you and another person, which is far more useful than a pleasant fiction that requires your constant disappearance.
The goal isn’t to protect every relationship — it’s to be honest within them. To communicate in a way that lets you remain visible, audible, and present — without requiring the other person to lose those things in order for you to have them.
Empowerment that makes room is not passive.
It’s not about letting people walk over you while you nod and affirm their choices. It’s about staying in the conversation as yourself. It’s about speaking when you have something to say, honoring your own limits, and recognizing when the other person’s version of agency doesn’t leave space for yours. And then deciding what you want to do with that information. You don’t have to fight someone to refuse to be displaced. You just have to stay where you are.