Power Dynamics and the Body: What No One Says

Power is not just structural. It is somatic.

We speak about power as though it is primarily a social phenomenon — something that exists in hierarchies, institutions, relationships. And it does. But the conversation almost always stops there. What doesn't get said is that power also lives in the body — in the way the chest closes around a certain kind of authority, the way the voice quiets in certain rooms, the way the hands still and the breath shortens in the presence of someone who, decades ago, held something over you.

Until we understand how power is stored in the body, we will keep replaying the same dynamics in different rooms with different faces.

How Power Gets Embodied

From the earliest experiences of dependency, the body is learning a lesson: who has power here, and what do I need to do to be safe?

This is not a cognitive process. It happens at the level of the nervous system — through repeated experiences that shape automatic responses. The child who learned that loudness meant danger will shrink in the presence of a loud adult decades later. Not because they choose to. Because the body already chose, and chose long before the prefrontal cortex had a say.

These patterns become the invisible grammar of every relationship we enter. We arrive in boardrooms, bedrooms, friendships, with a pre-loaded set of responses to power — responses that were adaptive once and may now be working against us.

What Gets Mistaken for Personality

Many traits that feel like personality are actually survival adaptations to early power dynamics:

The person who can never say no directly — learned that directness was punished

The person who preemptively appeases — learned that someone else's emotional state determined their safety

The person who controls everything they can — learned that unpredictability meant danger

The person who collapses in conflict — learned that fighting was futile, that the only safe move was surrender

None of these are character flaws. They are intelligent responses to the environments that shaped them. The problem is not that they were learned. The problem is that they persist long after the environment has changed.

Reclamation Is Somatic

Understanding this intellectually is insufficient. You can read every book on power dynamics — and still, in the moment, feel yourself go small in the presence of a certain kind of person.

That is because the pattern is not held in thought. It is held in tissue. In posture. In the patterns of breath and muscle tension and autonomic activation that the body runs automatically, before thought has a chance to intervene.

Genuine reclamation from disempowering patterns requires work at the somatic level. It requires, over time, the building of a different physical experience — learning that the breath can stay full in the presence of authority, that the voice can remain grounded in conflict, that the body does not have to contract to protect itself.

This is slow. It is not primarily verbal. It cannot be thought through to completion.

But it is the level at which lasting change actually happens. Because the body is always the final word.

This essay is part of Nikita Datar's writing on power, consciousness, and embodiment. Her book You Are the Love You Seek addresses these themes across 365 structured days of self-reclamation.