Power Versus Force
A thought I keep coming back to: each of us holds power of our own, and the people who prefer force to get what they want would rather we never figure that out. Think about how many people move through their days convinced they can't change a thing about where they've ended up.
Women tend to be on the receiving end of this. Sex trafficking is one version of it. Domestic violence is another. When a woman is pushed into depending on a man, and she has children who depend on her too, the whole arrangement breeds a sense of having no power at all.
Cutting someone off also does it. Isolate a person, control who they talk to and what reaches them, and powerlessness follows. If a woman knows nothing beyond the walls she's kept inside, where does she turn for help? Who is left to tell her that another kind of life even exists?
Nobody is required to swallow what they're told. But once you rely on other people to feed you, to pay for you, to narrate how the world supposedly works, your own thinking tends to go quiet. Kept isolated and fed a single story long enough, you start believing that change can't happen, or that reaching for it would be reckless.
Then there's the mirror problem. If the one strong-seeming figure in your life is really just someone wielding force, and you've got nothing to compare them to, copying them can feel like the sensible move. You become a smaller version of that same pressure. Picture how narrow a life gets once that takes hold.
Dr. David Hawkins lays out this split between genuine power and mere force in his book Power Versus Force. Dr. Wayne Dyer, who appeared in plenty of PBS programs over the years, pointed people toward Hawkins's work.