What You Lose When You Feel Intimidated

And What You Can Do About It

The first thing you lose when you’re intimidated is your sense of agency.

Image by DALLe

Bullies have intimidated people for centuries. The bullying experience has always been with us.

When bullying shows up on a massive scale, as in national and global ways, it’s experienced by the masses, not just individuals getting beat up in an alleyway.

America has just experienced another body blow dealt by a particularly lethal group of bullies: the elite billionaire class. Others on Substack and elsewhere are sharing their perspectives about how this happened, what it means, and where we go from here.

What I want to address is the impact of intimidation on us as individuals, especially when it drives us to feel like victims. This is exactly what is unfolding within our collective consciousness, and understanding this is crucial and urgent.

Here’s how being intimidated affects you:

1. Lowered Self-Esteem and Confidence

• This is at the core of personal empowerment, so when it’s attacked, it can have a profound impact on behavior, leading to reduced self-assurance and increased self-doubt. You don’t know who to trust, including yourself. You lose your sense of personal agency. You forget your own sovereignty.

2. Anxiety and Fear

• The immediate stress response can make it difficult for you to act with courage or confidence. When you experience anticipatory anxiety, it can be crippling. You dread what’s coming; you don’t know what it is, but you fear the worst.

3. Decreased Motivation

• When you are in the midst of a fear response, you tend to disengage from activities that once mattered. But when you’re no longer engaged in what is vital to you, you feel even more disempowered, disconnected and helpless. You don’t feel motivated to extend yourself.

4. Social Withdrawal

• Withdrawing socially can create a feedback loop of isolation; where the lack of support and connection amplifies feelings of disempowerment and weakness. The feedback mechanisms you counted on no longer sustain you when you separate yourself from them. This is a mistake, but it’s hard to recognize when you’re reeling from shock.

5. Emotional Distress

• Emotions like helplessness, frustration, and sadness can make you either more passive or reactive. Chronic emotional distress can lead to a loss of agency. What began as a normal response to a crisis can become chronic before you realize it. And then your distress feeds upon itself in a frozen loop.

6. Altered Behavior

• In a crisis situation, you might fall into people-pleasing tendencies or passivity as a defense mechanism, but if you do this it impacts how you interact with the world and reinforces the sense of powerlessness you’re already experiencing. Tactics meant to keep you safe might only endanger you further. The only person you must please is you.

7. Hypervigilance

• Being constantly on guard can make you reactive rather than proactive. When you’re in reactivity instead of response-ability, your power to make confident choices and maintain a sense of control over your life is diminished. Your ability to self-regulate means that you can control your responses rather than react out of primitive emotions.

8. Reduced Performance and Productivity

• Poor performance due to intimidation can erode confidence further, creating a cycle where you feel increasingly unable to meet your potential. You begin to doubt what you can do. When your very essence or survival is threatened, you risk feeling small. Anything that wounded you when you were a child will come back to haunt you. And yet, you are no longer that child. You must reorient yourself to the changes you now face, and take back your adult power.

9. Long-Term Psychological Effects

• For anyone who has suffered from chronic stress or PTSD, intimidation is a major trigger. The more you can recognize what triggers you, the more you can recover your personal agency and sovereignty. The key is awareness. Then use all the tools at your disposal to come back to yourself.

10. Physical Symptoms

• You may experience quite a range of physical symptoms, depending on how sensitive you are and your general state of health. While these can be distressing, they are usually temporary. Please seek professional help for any unusual symptoms and follow your medical team’s advice. But put physical symptoms into the context of an overall need to heal from a traumatic experience; it’s part of how you cope and what you need to do for yourself to heal.

  
  
  Finally, acknowledge that all of us are in the process of the most transformative experience Humanity has known for centuries. We are moving from a time when power resides in the hands of a few, to a time when power is shared by everyone and is used for a greater good.

  
  Right now the future seems dark and a wholesome outcome unlikely.
  
  But it’s not over yet.
  

  What happens next is NOT up to the intimidators. It’s up to all of us.
  

  
  Recognize the ways you have been affected. Recognize where you feel that you have lost personal agency. Then take whatever actions you can that lead you back to yourself, to your full power.

  
  
  Intimidators want you to feel small. The question is “What do YOU want?” Your sovereignty is in your hands. HOW DO YOU CHOOSE TO RESPOND?

  
  
  Shed the rags of victimhood that the intimidators tried to make you wear. They don’t fit anymore. Cast them off and step forward into the truth of your fullness.

  No one can ever take away your Divine Right to be who you are. No matter what they do to you, no one will ever make you less than a spark of the Divine Presence. Shine when you can. Heal as you must.

  And then come join the brothers and sisters who are here to welcome and celebrate you. I will be among them. Then turn and welcome the others who will come when they too are ready.
  

  
  Together there is nothing that can or will stop us. Yes, they will try. But they will fail, because what is born of darkness can never rise to Light without the grace of Love. And that grace is what will save us all.
  
  
  

Thank you for reading this article. If you found it helpful, would you please share, Restack and comment on it?

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