(reflections inspired by past group work on request) We always have power. The force that moves us, encourages us to do something, action or inaction, lives inside us and moves. It doesn’t matter whether we feel it or not, whether we know how to use it or not, it is always there. We may feel it as our own resource, or as something hostile that we want to resist, or think that we have no power... What do we do with it? Where are we heading? Do we see? Do we feel it or not? How do we treat her? How do we “deprive” ourselves of power or reject it? First of all, when we reject our own feelings. When I don’t want to admit, see my feelings of guilt or cover it up with something else, I rob myself, I don’t allow my strength to manifest itself. Because guilt is power. And only by allowing it to be, seeing and recognizing it as an integral manifestation of myself, can I feel my strength and then, over time, transform this guilt into something else. If I do not allow myself to be weak and vulnerable, I again block my strength . For at this moment my strength is in weakness and vulnerability. Only by recognizing them as part of myself, allowing them to be, do I regain my strength. Because I am returning myself - the me that I now am - weak and vulnerable. If I feel anger and irritation and suppress them out of habit, like “something alien” (good girls don’t get angry), I again deprive myself of strength, because how much of it is spent on “suppressing the rebellion”! If I give anger and irritation a disorderly course (like a “bad” girl) - I get angry right and left, indiscriminately, I again waste my strength - after all, it’s “they, the bastards, brought me down! “If I reject someone close, I again push away my power, because the close one is part of me, part of my family. And the connection with him has a deep and meaningful meaning for me, a hidden meaning. And I can unravel this meaning by daring to look him in the eyes without criticism and condemnation. For example, if I believe that my father is “a bastard who abandoned us”, like “that’s what my mother always said” - I do not accept the power of my father’s family , my strength, because my father is part of me. But if I just allow that hatred for my father that lives inside me to be, at some point (when I get tired of hating) the question suddenly arises: “Why do I hate him so much? I don’t know him at all!” And then I discover that he was, for example, a cheerful joker and played the guitar great, loved to fix his car and take me around in it - here I see in him a living person with his own weaknesses, and not a bastard. And I also understand that this is exactly how his love for me manifested itself, and I rejected this love, and what I reject in him is exactly what I reject in myself... and I also understand... hmm... well... and so on... To accept a person as he is, you must first remove him from the pedestal where you put him: “bad mother”, “abandoned father” - stop looking for in him what is not in him and put him in his place - the place of a living person – Vasya P. or Masha R. The most ordinary living person with his weaknesses and cockroaches, mistakes and imperfections. After all, he is who he is and cannot be different. And this is exactly how we needed him for something, to realize some deep connection with him, the revealed paradoxical meaning of which reveals that very power inside me. In order to feel your power and be able to use it, it is enough to simply allow what is to be, understand what kind of condition this is? And...get high! Because this state is exactly what I need now. When you allow yourself to be who you are here and now, and get high from it, and others - to be who they allow themselves to be here and now, and get high from this - you are cool, you are strong, you are real! Ekaterina Sokolova (Tver)