When Character Conflicts with Power

How Authority, Influence, and Responsibility Challenge Our Formation

“What makes the temptation of power so seemingly irresistible? Maybe it is that power offers an easy substitute for the hard task of love.” -Henri Nouwen

I grew up learning the basics of the Christian life long before I had language for psychology or formation. The fruits of the Spirit were some of the first words that lodged themselves in my imagination — love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. They were presented to me not simply as virtues to admire, but as signs that the Spirit was cultivating something real in me, something rooted at the level of character.

Later, the Beatitudes amplified my imagination — cultivating a vision for the process of character change.

Blessed are the poor in spirit. Transformation through surrender.

Blessed are those who mourn. Transformation through tears.

Blessed are the meek. Transformation through humility.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Transformation through holy longing.

Blessed are the merciful. Transformation through compassion.

Blessed the pure in heart. Transformation through wholeheartedness.

Blessed are the peacemakers. Transformation through shalom-stewarding.

Blessed are those who are persecuted. Transformation through cruciformity.

These were not the traits of the put-together or powerful. They were the traits of people who had surrendered to love — to the slow, interior work of becoming more mature, more Christlike. This was the work of growing up.

As I finished seminary and became a pastor and therapist, I devoured Henri Nouwen’s writing — he was a sage guide in those early days. I didn’t have the ears to hear back then, I suppose, but there was a repeated refrain: the temptation to power will only gain traction in you, Chuck.

Maybe you’ve felt it too.

You start making a living, gaining a reputation, climbing a ladder you didn’t even realize you were on. You’re given more authority, you gain influence, you build something — and suddenly you’re afraid to lose it.

The older you get, the more you have to defend, or so it feels.

And in that quiet drift, what grows in you is not maturity but self-protection: vigilance masquerading as wisdom, guardedness posing as discernment. The space once shaped by openness and humility slowly tightens around the anxious need to manage outcomes, preserve status, and shield yourself from anything that might expose your fragility.

Somewhere along the way, especially as we grow in authority, financial security, visibility, or institutional influence, something begins to shift. The fruits we once cherished feel… inconvenient. The Beatitudes become aspirational artwork on a church wall, not an interior compass. And the pull to self-preservation and protection bends our character away from those early fruits and Beatitude-flourishing.

We’re seeing, dear friends, the cost of self-protection and power-preservation ecclesially, politically, and personally. And we’ve got to find the courage to look in the mirror and see what’s happening within — to see the dynamics that are shaping our character, and find our way back home, to ourselves, to God, to each other.

From a psychological perspective, a few dynamics show up again and again:

1. Power expands the ego and narrows empathy

Dacher Keltner and others have shown that as people gain power, they often lose the capacity to see themselves and others accurately. The ego inflates, not necessarily through malice but through insulation. You stop receiving honest feedback. People adjust their behavior around you. Critique becomes rare. And slowly, the self you imagine becomes detached from the self you actually are.

2. Power amplifies inner divisions

As you gain responsibility and authority, you often relegate to the shadows the parts of you that feel tender, fearful, ashamed, needy, and unsure. Self-protective parts step forward: the performer, the manager, the fixer, the one who knows how to keep the machinery running and the image intact. And when you no longer have access to those tender, truth-telling places within you, you cease stewarding your power for good and begin preserving and defending your power — trading love, joy, peace, patience, and kindness for control, defensiveness, and the frantic effort to outrun your own fragility.

3. Power feeds the illusion of control

The paradox is this: the more influence you have, the more you fear losing it. Diane Langberg once said that we dupe ourselves into thinking our anxiety will diminish with age — but anxiety only grows, fueled by self-protection. The spiritual life invites surrender, but the dominant pull — even within the church — is toward more performative postures: performative competence, performative holiness, performative empathy, performative authenticity, performative outrage. You start curating an image rather than cultivating an inner life rooted in truth. And once the appearance of control becomes more important than honest dependence, you begin organizing your leadership around anxiety rather than love. In that place, power no longer frees you to serve; it traps you in the exhausting work of making sure nothing slips, nothing cracks, nothing reveals how fragile you actually feel inside.

4. Power distances you from embodied reality

This is something I write about often: when we live from the neck up, we lose the somatic grounding that keeps us humble and human. Power can relocate you to a world of abstractions and audiences, where your worth is measured by output, eloquence, or the illusion of being “above” ordinary struggle. You become a talking head — competent, articulate, productive — while your body quietly holds the grief, fatigue, doubt, and longing you no longer make space to feel. When you stop listening within, you lose access to the very cues that tell you the truth about yourself. The knot in the stomach that signals misalignment. The heaviness in the chest that whispers, slow down. The lump in the throat that invites you to speak honestly.

5. Power gives you shortcuts that bypass slow maturity

Character grows slowly — through failure, grief, reckoning, and repair. It grows through the moments you would never choose: sitting with your shame instead of explaining it away, facing the harm you’ve caused instead of defending your intentions, letting yourself be undone in order to be remade. This is the slow, sacred work of becoming whole: learning to welcome every part of yourself into the light and allowing grace to do its long, patient work. But power gives you alternatives — quicker, shinier, far more socially rewarded paths. Applause can soothe what grief would have healed. Authority can mask the places where you still feel small. Accomplishment can distract you from the inner reckoning you fear. Each of these can become a kind of spiritual bypass, offering the illusion of maturity without the substance. Instead of doing the interior labor necessary for wholeness, you can ride on charisma, intellect, or institutional confidence and call it growth.

The tragedy is that these shortcuts “work” — at least for a while. They allow you to function, even flourish externally, while your inner life atrophies. But eventually the gap widens between who you appear to be and who you actually are. And unless you return to the slow way — vulnerability, embodied presence, self-reflection, confession, relational repair — the bypass becomes a cul-de-sac, trapping you in roles that look impressive while your soul grows thin.

The Conditions for Deep Character Change

In the end, the way out of anxious self-protection is not more resolve but deeper connection. Your body knows this: it calms in the presence of secure love, steadies when it is seen, softens when it is held by something larger than your own effort. The Christian contemplative tradition taught this long before neuropsychology came along.

This is the sacred ecosystem where character grows — where the Spirit meets your nervous system, where belonging restores the possibility of transformation, where gentleness and patience begin to feel natural again.

Connection — with ourselves, with each other, with God — is not sentimental; it is the neural and spiritual ground of real formation.

So listen, even now, for the quiet hum of desire beneath your defenses. Listen for something true and whole — the simpler way of love, peace and patience, the nobler path of surrender, tears, and holy longing. Listen beneath the layers of self-protection, even the voices that whisper within — “grasp, clench, hold tight, or you’ll lose it all.”

Listen for the tender ache within that reminds you that you’re human, that awakens you to the needs that you’ve ignored.

Your heart longs for relinquishment and rest. Your heart longs for home.

(This is just a small sampling of what I’m writing about in my next book on character formation, arriving mid-2026.)

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