COMING EARLY 2027
Stop Giving Your Power Away
A Path to Greater Vitality and
More Fulfilling Relationships
Doyanne Aspen Darnell, PhD
About the Book
Many people find themselves feeling depleted and unfulfilled in their relationships without understanding how they ended up there. Despite their best efforts, they may repeatedly encounter patterns that leave them frustrated, resentful, or disconnected from their own needs.
What if understanding the hidden influences shaping our relationships could open the door to greater joy, vitality, and fulfillment?
Drawing on psychology, clinical experience, and personal reflection, Stop Giving Your Power Away explores how our relational patterns are shaped by influences we may not fully recognize—including deeply held beliefs, fears, early conditioning, cultural expectations, and other people's efforts to influence or control us. These influences can constrain our choices and lead us to unknowingly give our power—our ability to make conscious and informed choices about how we direct our energy and resources—away, leaving us depleted and unfulfilled.
The book is organized into two parts, moving from understanding personal power to reclaiming it.
Part I: Understanding Personal Power
In Part I, I explore what personal power is, how it operates in relationships, and the ways it can become constrained. I introduce a framework for understanding how our needs for connection and belonging, alongside our needs for autonomy and individuality, shape the choices we make about where to invest our energy and resources. I examine how our beliefs and conditioning influence these choices, sometimes without our awareness, as well as how narcissistic personality dynamics can undermine our autonomy through the exercise of power and control by individuals, groups, and institutions. Together, these perspectives help us recognize how important needs can go unmet and how we can be left feeling depleted, constrained, or unfulfilled.
Part II: Reclaiming Personal Power
In Part II, we move from awareness to intentional change with practical guidance and reflective exercises. The book teaches how to work with emotions, clarify values, assess relational needs and investments, and make more conscious choices about engaging in relationships. We explore strategies for changing relational patterns, communicating needs and limits, and navigating the grief that can accompany meaningful change.
At its heart, reclaiming our power is about reclaiming authorship of our own lives—making choices that reflect our needs and values while honoring our connections and interdependence with others, restoring vitality, authentic expression, and opening the way to more fulfilling relationships.
About the Author
Doyanne Darnell, PhD, is a psychologist, scientist, and author devoted to helping people recover from trauma and abuse and pursue joyful, meaningful, and fulfilling lives.
Trained as a clinical and community psychologist, Dr. Doyanne recognizes that our well-being is shaped by our psychology, relationships, communities, and larger social systems. A central interest throughout her career has been the role of power—how it can harm or constrain others and how we can reclaim the freedom to shape our lives.
At Georgia State University, Dr. Doyanne studied the psychological and social factors contributing to sexual violence and its prevention. She later joined the University of Washington School of Medicine faculty, researching ways to improve services for people affected by trauma.
Dr. Doyanne is an affiliate associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington and maintains a private practice in Tacoma, Washington. She specializes in recovery from trauma, narcissistic abuse, codependency, burnout, and grief and loss. She also offers workshops that strengthen personal agency by helping people become more aware of the thoughts, feelings, and patterns influencing their choices, including through dream exploration.
Through her professional work and personal experiences, Dr. Doyanne recognized the importance of understanding both how personal power can be undermined by abuse and control and how we may unknowingly give it away through conditioned patterns of relating to others. This perspective inspired her to write Stop Giving Your Power Away: A Path to Greater Vitality and More Fulfilling Relationships to help readers make more conscious choices and cultivate more fulfilling relationships and lives.