Power, Self-protection, and Responding to Injustice
"Hurt people hurt people."
The drama triangle: where money and mission meet
My career has focused on creating positive change, from personal challenges to community projects to large social issues.
Along the way, I’ve spent a lot of time in the nonprofit sector. As the name suggests, that sector has an awkward relationship with money.
On the one hand, nonprofits aren’t designed to make money like corporations. On the other, a tremendous amount of time and energy is spent securing funding to support nonprofit missions.
Enter philanthropy: a network of nonprofit-entities-with-money that distribute it via grants to nonprofit-entities-with-none.
As you can imagine, nonprofits who need money have a love-hate relationship with philanthropy.
A whispered refrain among nonprofit leaders is, “If philanthropy X didn’t give us money, it’s because they just don’t get it.”
The sad result is that grantmaking often ends up as a drama cycle of hero-villain-victim. Everyone is trying to “do good” while embedded in pervasively dysfunctional power dynamics.
All of this echoes society’s attitudes toward wealth in general.
Wealthy people “have it all,” no problems, amazing lives…yet they’re selfish and out of touch, “…they just don’t get it.
Lucky them, curse them.
Real humans in the context of wealth
What I’ve experienced is very different.
Most wealthy people I’ve met are very close to serious, agonizing problems exacerbated by their wealth: fractured family relationships, physical and mental health issues, life-draining addictions, aching imposter syndrome, and gnawing concerns about personal security.
Lucky them?
In the first post of this series, I suggested that humanity crossed a tipping point from giving back to taking more than we return, both ecologically and internally. A similar tipping point seems to show up when the pressures of wealth extract the wellbeing of those who have it.
For understandable reasons, people with wealth often develop “Protector” identities. Many people want to use them for their money. The stakes of mistakes are high. They need to be cautious about whom to trust. This leads to behaviors centered on control, avoidance, fear, and anxiety. It does not create conditions for the loving, creative, confident Self identities described in the previous post.
Seeing this moves me to deep compassion.
How sad to “have everything” and realize that it leads to such heartbreaking distress. How sad for society that many of us long for abundant money, not expecting this outcome.
When Protectors run the system
When decisions and actions are rooted in self-protection, they send negative ripples far and wide.
This is the story of “everyday” families with dominating fathers who exert their will with anger and control. It’s the story of charismatic leaders who hide addictions out of shame until their facade crashes. It’s the experience of wealthy families where one generation seeks to control subsequent generations through money. And it explains controlling philanthropists who can never truly trust their community partners, limiting the potential of their work together.
Despite these headwinds, I’ve met many people who discover a link between their wealth, self-protection, and sorrow. They become motivated to engage in introspection, gradually learning that more confident, open-hearted characteristics await beneath Protector habits.
Learning to operate from Self is not just personally meaningful but systemically transformative. The changes can be profound:
Decisions slow down enough to shift from compulsive habit to insightful response.
Risk is assessed in terms of broader impact, not just personal loss.
“Return on investment” is redefined to include repair, relationship, and regeneration.
The idea of “enoughness” becomes imaginable, not just for them, but for everyone in the system.
The leverage here is enormous.
Unhealed Protectors are often structurally amplified, shaping the policies, markets, and cultural norms that affect all of us. A single Self-led decision at the top of a system—how a foundation shifts its grantmaking, how a business treats its employees, how a family narrative talks about “success”—ripples outward through thousands of lives.
When Protectors soften and begin to trust Self, the system gains access to new possibilities that were literally unthinkable before.
Responding to Protectors: grappling with conflict in MN
Protectors with great influence are very effective at accumulating power and exerting their will. As the history of authoritarianism shows, they are very difficult to stop.
Recent events showcase how Donald Trump’s actions as president are amplifying confict, fear, and Protector-driven dominance on a massive scale.
His style doesn’t suggest someone eager to do inner work. This raises a fair question about the limits of what I’m advocating here. I want to grapple with that openly.
Protectors are going to protect. The sad truth is, most of us operate from a Protector mindset when threatened. Most arguments end up with one side’s Protectors hammering against the other side’s Protectors.
When this persists until two sides fully demonize each other’s Protector instincts, it creates perpetual conflict.
It’s easy to see that dynamic as events have escalated in Minnesota. It’s easy to see how it has driven generations-long conflict in places like the Middle East and Northern Ireland.
Yet we can break the cycle. Change accelerates when we stop feeding a Protector’s fuel (rage, fear, dehumanization) and starve it through non-reactive presence. It’s about neutralizing the most destructive ripples by refusing to play the game.
Instead, what if tap into our Self-led qualities? What if we insist on seeing the full picture of the human experience playing out?
We might gain compassion that Protector-driven power plays are a sure sign of inner scarcity and fear. We can gain the confidence to admit that this is true on both sides of a conflict, including our own.
Acknowledging this, might we see options we would otherwise miss?
Long ago, Gandhi discovered ways to provocatively resist without becoming a mirror of the oppressor. The transformative actions he led were both inward and outward. Through courageous self-discipline by many across India, the hypocritical gap between British values and actions was put on display.
For Gandhi, injustice was untruth, and nonviolent resistance aligned people with what is real and good, not just politically expedient.
Today’s context is very different, but the principle that injustice is untruth remains.
How might we practice being as loving, creative, and courageous as Gandhi’s “truth forces”?
I think the answers will emerge from accessing our intrinsic Self qualities. I would love to hear what you think. It seems to me these are solutions we can only find together.
Next in the series
It can be tempting to relate to wealthy people and institutions as monoliths: “the 1%,” “the funders,” “the establishment.” But when we reduce people to their roles, we unintentionally mirror the same extraction logic I’m critiquing. We treat them as symbols rather than as humans with their own histories, wounds, and intrinsic gifts.
This does not mean abandoning accountability. It means holding more complex truths:
We can be both beneficiaries of unjust systems and participants in healing them.
We can carry immense privilege and genuine pain.
We can cause harm and be capable of meaningful repair.
In the final article in this series, I hope to explore what it might look like to practice this Self lens: how we can notice where our Protectors are driving, and how small shifts toward Self can change the micro- and macro-systems we touch every day—families, neighborhoods, and movements.
Please share your reflections.
Great insight!