Coming Out on Top: Power Struggles in Your Relationships

In the piece on Dale Carnegie’s advice, a commenter asked about dealing with power struggles:

“Hey Chase this is a great article. Could you do an article about how to handle power struggles in friendships? I find it really has to do with investment. For example, my friend wants me to meet him somewhere, but I want him to meet me. Its like five minutes away, but its a power struggle thing. I get really annoyed when people do this because I’d like to have friends who don’t try to make things a competition like this. But I also have learned from this site that everyone is like this. Can you help me out?”

In the end, power struggles are always about the same thing, whether they’re in your romantic or sexual relationships, or your platonic ones – and I’ll cover all of these and everything else in the scope of this article.

There’s little more frustrating than having to deal with the relationship equivalent of guerilla warfare, but this is exactly what power struggles are – someone using frame control attempts, passive aggression, moral superiority and other forms of social subterfuge to undermine your position and climb the social ladder to a position above you in the hierarchy.

Not fun at all... and frequently quite draining.

So let’s talk about how power struggles come about, and what you can do once you realize you’re in one.