Key takeaways
Power doesn’t only work against you. Relationships, identity, skills, material resources and health are strengths you can draw on.
A trait that began as a threat response, such as watchfulness, can later become a genuine strength.
Listing your strengths is often harder than listing your problems, and that’s worth noticing.
It would be easy to read the last few posts in this series — power operating against you, threats to your core needs, painful meanings, survival strategies born of hardship — and come away with a rather bleak picture. That is not the point of the Power Threat Meaning Framework (PTMF), and it is very much not the point of this post.
Alongside its four questions about difficulty, the PTMF asks a fifth, equally important one: “What are your strengths? What access do you have to power resources?”
Power isn’t only something done to you
Earlier in this series, we described power as who gets their needs met, whose voice is heard, who controls the resources that shape a life. The crucial point we didn’t fully spell out yet is that power also flows toward you, not only against you — and everyone, even in very difficult circumstances, carries some of it. Power resources might include:
• Relationships — even one person who loved and believed in you, now or in childhood, can matter enormously; supportive friends, family, neighbours, or online communities.
• Identity — pride in being a parent, a professional, part of a cultural or religious community, or simply in qualities you recognise in yourself.
• Skills and abilities — intelligence, creativity, determination, a particular talent, resourcefulness under pressure.
• Material and institutional resources — education, information, access to good healthcare, housing, or financial stability.
• Physical resources — health, strength, energy.
Two people can face very similar adversity and end up in very different places, and one reason is precisely this: how many of these resources they were able to draw on, and when.
Why naming your strengths is not just a feel-good exercise
There’s a reason clinicians increasingly ask about strengths as seriously as they ask about problems. The story we tell about our own lives shapes what we believe is possible next. A person who sees themselves only through the lens of what has gone wrong — diagnoses, failures, threat responses — has a much narrower sense of what they can do about it than a person who can also see, clearly, what has carried them this far.
This isn’t about false positivity or minimising real hardship. Someone who has survived genuine adversity using very limited resources deserves recognition for exactly that — not a cheerful reminder to “look on the bright side.” The PTMF’s point is subtler: the same determination, watchfulness, or capacity for connection that shows up as a “threat response” in one context is often, quite literally, a strength in another. The hypervigilance that once kept a child safe can become, later, an unusually sharp read on other people’s moods. The self-reliance forged by early neglect can become genuine independence, once it’s no longer needed as armour.
An exercise worth trying
If you’d like to try this yourself, take a few quiet minutes and make a simple list — no need to show it to anyone. Who has shown you love or belief in yourself, even briefly? What have you gotten yourself through before, and how? What do you take quiet pride in? What skills, however ordinary they seem to you, have other people noticed in you? What communities, however small, do you belong to?
Many people find this list harder to write than the list of problems — which itself says something about how our culture, and often our own inner voice, is quicker to catalogue our flaws than our resources. That imbalance is worth noticing, and worth gently correcting.
Next in this series, the final post: “What Is Your Story? Bringing It All Together.”
This post draws on Mary Boyle and Lucy Johnstone’s A Straight Talking Introduction to the Power Threat Meaning Framework (PCCS Books, 2020).
