Introduction
This book is a training manual for battle. It will prepare you for war when it's necessary, and skillful collaboration when you desire it. It is a field guide to the impossible, the outrageous, the unimaginable. It contains instructions for achieving unattainable goals, ones so far out of your reach you feel stupid or crazy thinking them, let alone saying them out loud.
It is an education in breaking the ingrained conditioning that keeps women silent and accommodating when we should be expressing ourselves and having influence. It will teach you to know what you want and how get it, which will change the world around you.
It is a guide to power.
My name is Kasia Urbaniak, and I spent seventeen years studying to become a Taoist nun while working as one of the most successful dominatrices in the world.
These seemingly contradictory tracks gave me unexpected and unprecedented insight into how power works. In studying Taoism around the globe, I learned to read the human body, so I'd know a person's intention to attack or retreat before they'd moved a muscle or uttered a word. It taught me to follow and trust what's most alive-what's humming with energy and possibility.
From my work in the dungeon, I learned all the ways that imagination can heal us, and help us to discover deep emotional truths. In playing games with power, I learned to differentiate between real authority and a performance of it.
From both, I learned about power dynamics: influence on others that exists beyond the level of language alone.
In 2012, I founded a school with Ruben Flores, an emergency field coordinator for the humanitarian organization MŽdecins Sans Frontires (Doctors Without Borders), to teach other women what I had learned. At the beginning, our school felt like an exclusive but growing secret society of powerful women whose headquarters just happened to be my Manhattan apartment. We were a modern-day, real-world Bene Gesserit, a coven of the righteous, planning world domination and achieving it.
But in 2018, many women began speaking out about their lived experiences of sexual harassment and assault, which gave rise to larger cultural conversations about feelings of powerlessness in family units, in romantic and sexual relationships, and in the workplace.
As the #metoo movement gathered speed, women at large started speaking a truth that my students already knew and had trained for: that most-if not all-of us had clutched in a high-stake, high-stress situation.
When it was most important for us
to know and speak our truth,
we were unable to.
The world is on fire, and the concepts I teach are ones that every woman should have access to. That is why I am writing this book.
This book will inoculate you against "no" and resistance of all kinds, including your own. It will help you to identify the life-force, the juice, the beautiful moving energy in every interaction, which is the key to understanding true desire. It will provide you with a constructive channel for all of the rage every woman has spent her adult life tamping down. And it will teach you to harness one of the most powerful weapons we have-your attention.
And while there will be erotic absurdity and transcendent insight, what I really want to share with you is what I discovered underneath every interaction. Because power isn't a mood, an outfit, a moment, or a pose. It is the ability to access your deepest desires, express them fully, and use them to influence other people and the world at large.
Ultimately, this book is about relationships-in the den, in the bedroom, in the workplace, in Congress, and at the bar. It is about the dynamics that define them and decide their fate. It is about strength and vulnerability, dominance and surrender, and how each affects the flow of love, power, and influence.
I use binary terms-man and woman-when I speak about gender, not because I see gender as binary, but because my work is so deeply rooted in the cultural conditioning that all of us received when we were assigned "male" or "female" at birth. Regardless of how you identify now, the expectations of and treatment by your parents and society at large imprinted you, and make a difference in the way you behave in relationship to others.
You'll also notice that many of the examples I use are heteronormative. Much of what I teach addresses the ways that women have been conditioned to interact with men, including as romantic partners. But the behaviors outlined within these pages can be used with a spouse, sparring partner, coworker, friend, child, parent, or lover of any gender. Breaking the ties that bind will allow you freer, more powerful communication-with everyone.
When you play skillfully with power dynamics, the world changes. You stop being a servant of the life you're living, and become a creator of the world you want.
Let's get started.
Part One
It's Not You
Revealing the Invisible Bind
Chapter One
The Conversation under the Conversation
The Hidden Architecture of Power
Women are furious.
Instead of frolicking through fields of equal pay and the state-funded child care our feminist foremothers fought for, we're hanging on by shredded fingernails to rapidly eroding fundamental rights. Sexual assault doesn't seem to disqualify a man from public office; instead, they brag about it like it's a qualification. And every news cycle seems to bring a fresh story featuring our girl children, trafficked for the pleasure of wealthy, powerful men and covered up by their cronies.
We know that it has never been more important for us to speak-to be able to communicate the truth of our experiences, to ask for what we want, to be able to articulate our vision for the future we want to live in, and then make that vision happen.
And yet what I hear most from women is self-blame.
Truly badass women tell me about freezing-moments when they know they should say something, moments when they need to say something, or maybe it's too many things, but when they open their mouths, nothing comes out. Sometimes this freeze happens in high-stakes scenarios, when a job or their safety is on the line. On one hand, this makes it worse, and certainly more dangerous; by the time they've returned to their bodies, his hand is up their skirt, the job has gone to someone else, or they've agreed to do something they really didn't want to do.
But on the other hand, they can't understand why it happens in ultra-low-stakes scenarios, too-like when the guy making their latte asks if they're single. And why can't they predict when this speechlessness is going to set in?
Baffled women confess that they don't know which version of themselves is going to show up for a meeting. Will it be the deer in the headlights, peeling herself off the conference room floor only to get steamrolled again-the one who mumbles a brilliant idea into her mug, just so the guy next to her can helpfully restate it and take the credit? Or the fearless Amazon who effortlessly holds the room in the palm of her hand, whose logic and charisma make her so irresistible, she could ask her team to ride to hell and back? Mansplainers and manterrupters exist in every workplace; so how come she's mostly able to neutralize those guys with a cocked eyebrow-except on the days when she sounds like a harsh, bitter shrew, even to herself?
I can-and have-filled pages with women's bewilderments:
"I was just about to ask this guy to help me with my stroller on the stairs-but when he offered to help me, I heard myself saying, 'No, that's okay; I'm fine.'"
"When my boyfriend said he wanted a night alone, I got so depressed, I went straight to bed. I knew he just wanted to play his new video game, but I still felt completely annihilated; it felt like he was rejecting me."
"When the holy day came, and my boss finally asked me exactly what resources I needed to complete a major project on time, why did I only give him half of my list?"
A recent study showed that women who knew the average salary for a job proceeded to ask for less than that when they were negotiating for themselves. Another study: many women find it much more challenging to ask for a raise than to remain catastrophically underpaid. And another: women wait to be 100 percent qualified for management positions, whereas men don't hesitate to apply-which at least explains why so many women end up answering to less-qualified men.
At first blush, the items on this laundry list may seem unrelated except in the most general sense-"women getting in their own way." But, in fact, every one of these is a symptom of the same underlying cause. And that cause is not insecurity, or childhood trauma, or women loving themselves less than men do; indeed, these paradoxes show up in the lives of the most therapized, self-actualized, self-loving women I know.
In fact, what appears to be a confidence gap could be considered yet another symptom of this underlying problem. Of course it is fundamentally destabilizing to realize that we can't trust ourselves to reliably, consistently, effectively advocate for ourselves, and to know that speechlessness may ambush us at any time, no matter how prepared we are.
The mystery isn't solved by a big-picture concept like sexism, either, though there's no shortage of evidence that misogyny is alive and well. Actually, it's good news that sexism isn't the culprit, because it means we don't have to wait to dismantle the patriarchy to put our hands on the levers of power, to dispel those confusions, and to learn to trust ourselves.
Every one of the bewilderments listed above took place-and could have been resolved-in a single moment during a conversation between people. In that one moment, a woman could not speak, or speak as effectively as she needed to. Which also means that if we can reclaim those moments, then we don't have to search for a psychological solution to these problems, or to wait until we've fixed the culture from the ground up.
The whole world is built on agreements, born from the conversations that happen inside relationships. All the seemingly fixed phenomena that surround us-from love to laws, from families to corporations to governments-are the direct result of an agreement. Private property is an agreement. So is monogamy, the nuclear family, the dictates of major religions, and our justice system. Even money is a collective agreement.
Many of those agreements were made without any women at all involved in the conversations that gave rise to them. We're at the table now, though-and this is why we must be able to have these conversations, reliably and well.
So what is it that stands in our way?
There is a set of mechanics, invisible to most of us, but consistent in every conversation, whether high stakes or low. These mechanics determine who has control-who leads, who follows, what is under discussion, and where the conversation will go next. The conditioning that women receive from earliest childhood makes access to these mechanics infuriatingly, and sometimes dangerously, unpredictable.
These mechanics are invisible to men, too; this isn't one of those times they "forgot" to invite us to the meeting. But because men are trained and conditioned differently, they have easier automatic access to these levers, even if they don't have the slightest idea how they work. (Most people don't know how a carburetor works either.) The invisibility of those mechanics, and of the conditioning that gives men access to them, also explains why even the very best ones can't really understand why we get tripped up.
But the cost for women is devastating. In fact, you could argue that the invisibility of these mechanics has resulted in a giant, culture-wide gaslighting for half the population.
But before we can talk about how power works, we have to talk about what it is-and what it's not.
A Practical Definition of Power
"I want to be able to stand in my strength," women tell me when I ask what they want. "I want to feel powerful." "I need to build my confidence." "I have to find my voice."
These urges are valuable. They contain the germ of what I call "choiceless choices"-the desires we harbor that cannot be ignored. And we can do this; we can unroll our yoga mats, get our journals out, and recite affirmations all day long. I'll be right there with you, and I guarantee we'll have a great day, and end up feeling better rested than we have in years.
But that's not power.
Power isn't a feeling.
Power is influence, which means it must take place in a dynamic.
You'll note that I use the word "influence," as opposed to "control." What I am describing is not an imposition of will. To control another human being's behavior without making sure that they're on board-without their heart, their intelligence, their imagination, their ingenuity-is a terrible waste. Control squanders a tremendous amount of energy for comparatively very little reward. And, as every dictator knows, tyranny is fundamentally unstable; you're always going to need more capital, more control, more suppression to stay on top. Inevitably, the revolution comes.
Influence is the opposite of control. If you are able to powerfully influence someone, then you gain access to all of their inner resources: their smarts, their creativity, their passion. This kind of cooperation often creates a third possibility, a solution even better than either person involved could possibly have imagined by themselves.
So the kind of power I'm talking about is generative, not destructive, but it does mean being able to ask people for all kinds of things, including for what you want. (We are going to talk a lot about asking in this book.) Power means doing, and receiving.
Which is why power requires us to control the direction of the conversation. This might mean deploying the verbal jujitsu necessary to get the hell out of the hotel room, if that's what's required. Or deflecting a question you're not ready to answer, or keeping the topic focused on your concerns, despite someone else's discomfort or insistence on another direction. Ultimately, it means being able to move another person-staying curious in the face of someone else's entrenched resistance, and staying with your desire until they change their minds.
When students come to me talking about wanting to "feel" empowered, I ask them to tell me what they would do if they felt that way. "What would it look like, if you were more confident? Would you make an appointment with your accountant to open the stack of unpaid medical bills you've been ignoring for six months? Would you finally break up with the person you've been dating because you're no longer afraid of being alone? Would you name your childhood abuser? Would you embark on an all-female polar expedition?"
Introduction
This book is a training manual for battle. It will prepare you for war when it's necessary, and skillful collaboration when you desire it. It is a field guide to the impossible, the outrageous, the unimaginable. It contains instructions for achieving unattainable goals, ones so far out of your reach you feel stupid or crazy thinking them, let alone saying them out loud.
It is an education in breaking the ingrained conditioning that keeps women silent and accommodating when we should be expressing ourselves and having influence. It will teach you to know what you want and how get it, which will change the world around you.
It is a guide to power.
My name is Kasia Urbaniak, and I spent seventeen years studying to become a Taoist nun while working as one of the most successful dominatrices in the world.
These seemingly contradictory tracks gave me unexpected and unprecedented insight into how power works. In studying Taoism around the globe, I learned to read the human body, so I'd know a person's intention to attack or retreat before they'd moved a muscle or uttered a word. It taught me to follow and trust what's most alive-what's humming with energy and possibility.
From my work in the dungeon, I learned all the ways that imagination can heal us, and help us to discover deep emotional truths. In playing games with power, I learned to differentiate between real authority and a performance of it.
From both, I learned about power dynamics: influence on others that exists beyond the level of language alone.
In 2012, I founded a school with Ruben Flores, an emergency field coordinator for the humanitarian organization MŽdecins Sans Frontires (Doctors Without Borders), to teach other women what I had learned. At the beginning, our school felt like an exclusive but growing secret society of powerful women whose headquarters just happened to be my Manhattan apartment. We were a modern-day, real-world Bene Gesserit, a coven of the righteous, planning world domination and achieving it.
But in 2018, many women began speaking out about their lived experiences of sexual harassment and assault, which gave rise to larger cultural conversations about feelings of powerlessness in family units, in romantic and sexual relationships, and in the workplace.
As the #metoo movement gathered speed, women at large started speaking a truth that my students already knew and had trained for: that most-if not all-of us had clutched in a high-stake, high-stress situation.
When it was most important for us
to know and speak our truth,
we were unable to.
The world is on fire, and the concepts I teach are ones that every woman should have access to. That is why I am writing this book.
This book will inoculate you against "no" and resistance of all kinds, including your own. It will help you to identify the life-force, the juice, the beautiful moving energy in every interaction, which is the key to understanding true desire. It will provide you with a constructive channel for all of the rage every woman has spent her adult life tamping down. And it will teach you to harness one of the most powerful weapons we have-your attention.
And while there will be erotic absurdity and transcendent insight, what I really want to share with you is what I discovered underneath every interaction. Because power isn't a mood, an outfit, a moment, or a pose. It is the ability to access your deepest desires, express them fully, and use them to influence other people and the world at large.
Ultimately, this book is about relationships-in the den, in the bedroom, in the workplace, in Congress, and at the bar. It is about the dynamics that define them and decide their fate. It is about strength and vulnerability, dominance and surrender, and how each affects the flow of love, power, and influence.
I use binary terms-man and woman-when I speak about gender, not because I see gender as binary, but because my work is so deeply rooted in the cultural conditioning that all of us received when we were assigned "male" or "female" at birth. Regardless of how you identify now, the expectations of and treatment by your parents and society at large imprinted you, and make a difference in the way you behave in relationship to others.
You'll also notice that many of the examples I use are heteronormative. Much of what I teach addresses the ways that women have been conditioned to interact with men, including as romantic partners. But the behaviors outlined within these pages can be used with a spouse, sparring partner, coworker, friend, child, parent, or lover of any gender. Breaking the ties that bind will allow you freer, more powerful communication-with everyone.
When you play skillfully with power dynamics, the world changes. You stop being a servant of the life you're living, and become a creator of the world you want.
Let's get started.
Part One
It's Not You
Revealing the Invisible Bind
Chapter One
The Conversation under the Conversation
The Hidden Architecture of Power
Women are furious.
Instead of frolicking through fields of equal pay and the state-funded child care our feminist foremothers fought for, we're hanging on by shredded fingernails to rapidly eroding fundamental rights. Sexual assault doesn't seem to disqualify a man from public office; instead, they brag about it like it's a qualification. And every news cycle seems to bring a fresh story featuring our girl children, trafficked for the pleasure of wealthy, powerful men and covered up by their cronies.
We know that it has never been more important for us to speak-to be able to communicate the truth of our experiences, to ask for what we want, to be able to articulate our vision for the future we want to live in, and then make that vision happen.
And yet what I hear most from women is self-blame.
Truly badass women tell me about freezing-moments when they know they should say something, moments when they need to say something, or maybe it's too many things, but when they open their mouths, nothing comes out. Sometimes this freeze happens in high-stakes scenarios, when a job or their safety is on the line. On one hand, this makes it worse, and certainly more dangerous; by the time they've returned to their bodies, his hand is up their skirt, the job has gone to someone else, or they've agreed to do something they really didn't want to do.
But on the other hand, they can't understand why it happens in ultra-low-stakes scenarios, too-like when the guy making their latte asks if they're single. And why can't they predict when this speechlessness is going to set in?
Baffled women confess that they don't know which version of themselves is going to show up for a meeting. Will it be the deer in the headlights, peeling herself off the conference room floor only to get steamrolled again-the one who mumbles a brilliant idea into her mug, just so the guy next to her can helpfully restate it and take the credit? Or the fearless Amazon who effortlessly holds the room in the palm of her hand, whose logic and charisma make her so irresistible, she could ask her team to ride to hell and back? Mansplainers and manterrupters exist in every workplace; so how come she's mostly able to neutralize those guys with a cocked eyebrow-except on the days when she sounds like a harsh, bitter shrew, even to herself?
I can-and have-filled pages with women's bewilderments:
"I was just about to ask this guy to help me with my stroller on the stairs-but when he offered to help me, I heard myself saying, 'No, that's okay; I'm fine.'"
"When my boyfriend said he wanted a night alone, I got so depressed, I went straight to bed. I knew he just wanted to play his new video game, but I still felt completely annihilated; it felt like he was rejecting me."
"When the holy day came, and my boss finally asked me exactly what resources I needed to complete a major project on time, why did I only give him half of my list?"
A recent study showed that women who knew the average salary for a job proceeded to ask for less than that when they were negotiating for themselves. Another study: many women find it much more challenging to ask for a raise than to remain catastrophically underpaid. And another: women wait to be 100 percent qualified for management positions, whereas men don't hesitate to apply-which at least explains why so many women end up answering to less-qualified men.
At first blush, the items on this laundry list may seem unrelated except in the most general sense-"women getting in their own way." But, in fact, every one of these is a symptom of the same underlying cause. And that cause is not insecurity, or childhood trauma, or women loving themselves less than men do; indeed, these paradoxes show up in the lives of the most therapized, self-actualized, self-loving women I know.
In fact, what appears to be a confidence gap could be considered yet another symptom of this underlying problem. Of course it is fundamentally destabilizing to realize that we can't trust ourselves to reliably, consistently, effectively advocate for ourselves, and to know that speechlessness may ambush us at any time, no matter how prepared we are.
The mystery isn't solved by a big-picture concept like sexism, either, though there's no shortage of evidence that misogyny is alive and well. Actually, it's good news that sexism isn't the culprit, because it means we don't have to wait to dismantle the patriarchy to put our hands on the levers of power, to dispel those confusions, and to learn to trust ourselves.
Every one of the bewilderments listed above took place-and could have been resolved-in a single moment during a conversation between people. In that one moment, a woman could not speak, or speak as effectively as she needed to. Which also means that if we can reclaim those moments, then we don't have to search for a psychological solution to these problems, or to wait until we've fixed the culture from the ground up.
The whole world is built on agreements, born from the conversations that happen inside relationships. All the seemingly fixed phenomena that surround us-from love to laws, from families to corporations to governments-are the direct result of an agreement. Private property is an agreement. So is monogamy, the nuclear family, the dictates of major religions, and our justice system. Even money is a collective agreement.
Many of those agreements were made without any women at all involved in the conversations that gave rise to them. We're at the table now, though-and this is why we must be able to have these conversations, reliably and well.
So what is it that stands in our way?
There is a set of mechanics, invisible to most of us, but consistent in every conversation, whether high stakes or low. These mechanics determine who has control-who leads, who follows, what is under discussion, and where the conversation will go next. The conditioning that women receive from earliest childhood makes access to these mechanics infuriatingly, and sometimes dangerously, unpredictable.
These mechanics are invisible to men, too; this isn't one of those times they "forgot" to invite us to the meeting. But because men are trained and conditioned differently, they have easier automatic access to these levers, even if they don't have the slightest idea how they work. (Most people don't know how a carburetor works either.) The invisibility of those mechanics, and of the conditioning that gives men access to them, also explains why even the very best ones can't really understand why we get tripped up.
But the cost for women is devastating. In fact, you could argue that the invisibility of these mechanics has resulted in a giant, culture-wide gaslighting for half the population.
But before we can talk about how power works, we have to talk about what it is-and what it's not.
A Practical Definition of Power
"I want to be able to stand in my strength," women tell me when I ask what they want. "I want to feel powerful." "I need to build my confidence." "I have to find my voice."
These urges are valuable. They contain the germ of what I call "choiceless choices"-the desires we harbor that cannot be ignored. And we can do this; we can unroll our yoga mats, get our journals out, and recite affirmations all day long. I'll be right there with you, and I guarantee we'll have a great day, and end up feeling better rested than we have in years.
But that's not power.
Power isn't a feeling.
Power is influence, which means it must take place in a dynamic.
You'll note that I use the word "influence," as opposed to "control." What I am describing is not an imposition of will. To control another human being's behavior without making sure that they're on board-without their heart, their intelligence, their imagination, their ingenuity-is a terrible waste. Control squanders a tremendous amount of energy for comparatively very little reward. And, as every dictator knows, tyranny is fundamentally unstable; you're always going to need more capital, more control, more suppression to stay on top. Inevitably, the revolution comes.
Influence is the opposite of control. If you are able to powerfully influence someone, then you gain access to all of their inner resources: their smarts, their creativity, their passion. This kind of cooperation often creates a third possibility, a solution even better than either person involved could possibly have imagined by themselves.
So the kind of power I'm talking about is generative, not destructive, but it does mean being able to ask people for all kinds of things, including for what you want. (We are going to talk a lot about asking in this book.) Power means doing, and receiving.
Which is why power requires us to control the direction of the conversation. This might mean deploying the verbal jujitsu necessary to get the hell out of the hotel room, if that's what's required. Or deflecting a question you're not ready to answer, or keeping the topic focused on your concerns, despite someone else's discomfort or insistence on another direction. Ultimately, it means being able to move another person-staying curious in the face of someone else's entrenched resistance, and staying with your desire until they change their minds.
When students come to me talking about wanting to "feel" empowered, I ask them to tell me what they would do if they felt that way. "What would it look like, if you were more confident? Would you make an appointment with your accountant to open the stack of unpaid medical bills you've been ignoring for six months? Would you finally break up with the person you've been dating because you're no longer afraid of being alone? Would you name your childhood abuser? Would you embark on an all-female polar expedition?"
Women are infinitely powerful. In work, in politics, even in the home, there’s no reason to settle for any less than what you want and what you deserve. If you’re on a journey of fighting misogyny and reclaiming your power, these titles will help you connect with your body and spirit so you can find
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