All Power Is Mutual

Here’s the blind spot almost everyone has:

They think power flows one direction.

Our culture teaches hierarchies:

• Men have power over women
• Facilitators have power over participants
• The rich have power over the poor
• The accused holds power; the accuser is powerless

And everyone looks at the “top” of the hierarchy and says: That’s where the power is. The bottom is powerless.

This is never true.

“There’s actually an advantage to every position.”

— Alex Hormozi

Every position has power. The “bottom” of the hierarchy has weapons the “top” cannot wield. The question is never whether you have power—it’s whether you see it.

Power Always Flows Both Ways

Every single dynamic. Every relationship. Every interaction.

The “powerless” party has weapons the “powerful” party cannot use.

The person who looks powerless often has more leverage than the person who looks powerful—especially when they’re willing to use it.

The Victim Position Is Powerful

This is the part nobody wants to say:

Crying victim is one of the most powerful moves available.

When you claim victimhood:

• You mobilize Rescuers to your cause — and you will always get some, because not everyone verifies the situation before their sense of fear and urgency drives them to act
• You gain moral authority
• You can justify Persecution of your “perpetrator”
• Cultural narratives side with you by default
• Others feel guilty challenging your story

This is why the Victim position isn’t powerless. It’s enormously powerful—and that power can be used to inflict consequences that far exceed the original harm.

The power doesn’t come from whether you were actually helpless. It comes from whether others perceive you as a victim. The mob doesn’t verify. They don’t check whether you had power you didn’t use, whether you fawned instead of speaking up, or whether the situation was as one-sided as your story makes it sound. They hear “victim,” they feel urgency, and they act. The perception is what mobilizes them — not the facts.

This means two things. First: real victims have more power than they realize. If something genuinely happened to you, the room will move on your behalf — and knowing that can help you ask for what you need instead of suffering in silence. Second: someone who wasn’t actually powerless can claim the same response. They can frame a situation where they had options, where they had 100% control they didn’t use, as one where they were helpless — and the mob will respond identically, because the mob shares the same blind spot. They assume powerlessness without checking whether it was real.

And it gets worse when the person crying victim is your friend.

A stranger claims victimhood and some people might be skeptical — they don’t know this person, they might check the facts first. But at a retreat, after a few days of sharing, connecting, building trust — these aren’t strangers anymore. They’re friends. And when your friend comes to you crying, saying someone hurt them, trust becomes a heuristic that replaces verification. You skip the checking. You don’t ask what exactly happened? or what was your part in it? — because that feels disloyal. Your friend is in pain, you care about them, and your brain jumps straight to who hurt them and what do I do about it?

That loyalty is real and it’s human. But trusting someone as a person doesn’t mean trusting their ability to see clearly under stress. You may have gotten to know them over days. You may genuinely like them. But unless you’ve specifically seen how they respond when things get tough — what their stories are, what their filters do under pressure, whether they tend toward righteous predation — you don’t actually know if their account of what happened is clear-eyed or narrative-locked. You’re trusting their character. You haven’t verified their sight.

Even friends who are generally clear-sighted can be locked in a specific situation. If someone you trust comes to you saying they were wronged, the loving thing to do — for them and for the person they’re accusing — is to walk through what actually happened. Ask questions. Listen for the parts that don’t add up. Not because you doubt them as a person, but because you care enough to make sure they’re not about to cause disproportionate harm based on a story their filters wrote. Your friend deserves someone who helps them see clearly — not someone who just validates whatever they’re feeling and joins the charge.

Vulnerability Creates Vulnerability

When someone is vulnerable in an interaction, everyone engaging with them becomes vulnerable too—vulnerable to make a mistake, to be misunderstood, to be labeled as taking advantage.

This is why power is always mutual. The “vulnerable” person isn’t just receiving risk—they’re creating it for everyone around them.

The Vulnerability Flip

Here’s a scene that makes this undeniable:

A woman is tied up in shibari at a play party. She can’t move. She’s physically helpless — suspended, bound, completely dependent on the person who tied her.

Everyone in the room sees her as the vulnerable one. And physically, she is.

Now imagine the man makes a mistake. His hand slips. He misreads a signal. Something happens that she didn’t want — not malicious, not predatory, just a moment of unconsciousness while she’s in the most vulnerable position possible.

Watch what happens next:

The room sees a bound woman and a man who just crossed a line. Every filter in every person activates at once. The story writes itself before anyone asks a single question. He’s the predator. She’s the victim. The righteous predators mobilize. His name gets spoken in whispers. His reputation could be damaged. He could be removed from spaces he’s attended for years. Friendships could shift. If she takes it further, he could face legal consequences. How far it goes depends on the community, the people involved, and whether anyone stops to verify before reacting — but the possibility is always there, and his body knows it.

And her? She has the sympathy of everyone in the room. She has moral authority. She has the cultural narrative on her side. She will be believed, supported, protected.

The person who was physically helpless holds almost all the power in the aftermath. The person who had physical freedom faces the most catastrophic consequences.

This isn’t about who should be protected — both should. It’s about seeing what’s actually there. The man in that scene isn’t just touching her body. He’s trusting her with his reputation, his community, his future. Your touch is a privilege — and so is your vulnerability. When you make yourself physically vulnerable with someone, you’re giving them enormous power over the narrative of what happened — and through that, power over your entire life.

The person everyone calls powerful is often the most exposed. The person everyone calls vulnerable often holds the weapons that can destroy.

Everyone’s instinct is to protect the person who looks vulnerable. Which is exactly why the person who doesn’t look vulnerable has no protection when things go wrong. Nobody’s watching out for them. Nobody thinks they need it. And that blind spot is where the most damage happens.

The person who looks the least vulnerable is usually the most vulnerable. They have no safety net. No one will rally to their defense. No cultural narrative protects them. If something goes wrong, they absorb the full weight of it alone — and often can’t even name what’s happening to them, because the language doesn’t exist. We have words for the vulnerability of the person who’s tied up. We don’t have words for the vulnerability of the person who’s about to lose everything over a mistake.

Top and Bottom Vulnerability

Now we do.

Bottom vulnerability is the vulnerability everyone sees — the physical exposure, the boundary risk, the fear of being harmed without consent. It’s real, it’s serious, and it has protections built around it. If your boundary is crossed, you have a safeword. You say it and the room mobilizes. Thirty people will stop everything to protect you. The cultural narrative is on your side.

Top vulnerability is the vulnerability no one sees — the reputational exposure, the narrative risk, the reality that one mistake can cost you your community, your livelihood, and your name. It has no protections built around it. If you’re accused, there is no safeword you can call that makes the room pause and verify before reacting. No one mobilizes to protect you. The cultural narrative is against you. And you often can’t even name what’s happening, because until now, there wasn’t a word for it.

Bottom vulnerability has a safeword. Top vulnerability doesn’t.

Bottom vulnerability ends when the scene ends. Top vulnerability can follow you for the rest of your life.

And the contrast in what happens when things go wrong is stark. If someone crosses a bottom’s boundary, the room will not let it continue — everyone intervenes, the scene stops, the bottom is surrounded by support. The bottom is in a protected position from the moment the scene begins.

Now mirror it. Someone accuses you. They’re screaming. They’re in your face. You look around the room for help and no one moves. Some are nodding. Some are joining in. You try to explain what actually happened and every word you say is heard as manipulation. You raise your hands to show you’re not a threat and the gesture itself looks guilty. There is nothing you can say — no word you can call out — that will make this stop. You are in an unprotected position, and no one in the room thinks that’s a problem, because no one in the room is looking at you.

If you’ve only ever bottomed, try to sit with this: imagine your boundary is crossed, and instead of the room rushing to protect you, the room agrees you had it coming. Someone gets in your face and threatens you, and the people watching nod along. The facilitator doesn’t intervene. You try to call a safeword and nothing happens — there is no safeword, and even if there were, no one would honor it. That is top vulnerability. For most people in the protected position, it’s unimaginable.

But it happens. Regularly.

Their attention is entirely on their own fear — which is real and valid — but it’s not the only fear in the room. Top vulnerability is invisible precisely because no one in the protected position has ever had to look at it.

Every top who engages with you is trusting you with their reputation, their community, and their future. That’s not a small thing. Your touch is a privilege — and so is theirs.

There is no such thing as one-way vulnerability. If one person is vulnerable, both people are vulnerable — just in different directions. The bottom has the entire room ready to stop everything the moment they say the word. That’s not helplessness — that’s an instant safety net. The top has no equivalent. There’s no word they can say that makes the room rush to protect them. If they’re accused, no amount of “stop” will make the room pause and verify before acting.

In play spaces especially, the idea that only one person is at risk is a dangerous fiction. Both people are at risk. One is at risk of a boundary violation. The other is at risk of having their entire life destroyed by the response to a mistake. Seeing only one of those risks — and building all your protections around it — is how the other risk goes unmanaged and causes the most damage.

Power flows both ways. Always.

This is especially true in play spaces — which may be the safest environments in the world to say “stop,” yet where many people still fawn instead of using the power they have.

Why This Matters

When you believe power only flows one direction, you:

• See yourself as powerless when you’re not
• Miss the weapons others have against you
• Fail to take responsibility for your own power
• Get blindsided when the “powerless” party destroys you

When you see that all power is mutual, you:

• Recognize your own power in every situation
• Understand the risks you’re exposed to
• Take responsibility for how you wield your power
• Choose carefully who you trust with vulnerability

Power Can’t Be Taken, Only Transmuted

Here’s an even deeper truth:

You can’t actually take power away from someone. You can only change what kind of power they have.

When someone “takes” power from you in one form, they give you power in another form. Power isn’t destroyed—it’s transmuted.

This is the conservation of power. It can’t be created or destroyed—only transformed.

When you understand this, victimhood becomes impossible to sustain. Yes, they may have taken something from you. But in doing so, they gave you something else. The question becomes: What will you do with the power you now have?

This doesn’t mean what they did was okay. It doesn’t mean the exchange was fair. It means you’re never actually powerless—even when it feels that way.

The Practical Takeaway

When you find yourself thinking “they have all the power and I have none”—stop.

Ask:

• What power do I actually have here?
• What weapons are available to me that aren’t available to them?
• What responsibility am I avoiding by pretending to be powerless?

And when you find yourself thinking “I have all the power and they have none”—stop.

Ask:

• What power do they have that I’m not seeing?
• How could they hurt me if they chose to?
• What am I risking by being vulnerable with them?

All power is mutual. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Related

• Responsibility — Responsibility is also always mutual
• Power Dynamics — How this plays out between participants and facilitators
• Drama Triangle — The Victim role’s hidden power
• Fawning — Your vulnerability is a gift you can rescind