Power or Depression?: The Cultural Roots of Abuse points out the historical roots of abuse and patriarchal society's systematic breeding of depression as something like a cultural disease.

However, the author does not stay with the analysis but shows practical ways to get free from the cultural trap so as to find a way of personal liberation and creative realization. The approach of this book to healing the abuse pattern is mainly focused upon establishing a strong identity, building soul values, and realizing a high level of personal autonomy. This involves working on the integration of emotions and the dissolution of patterns of codependence and emotional abuse in our lives and relationships.

And beyond current cutting-edge psychiatry that has recognized the devastating effects of codependence and emotional abuse in individual relationships, this essay shows these same effects to happen in the relation individual-organism, individual-group, individual-ideology, and individual-sect. Fusion is even more dangerous when people seek to dissolve themselves within organizations because what happens then is that they will indeed be eaten up by the organism and become wheels in a murderous system.

One essential element in this process of identifying and healing an abuse pattern in your life is to stay as much as possible untouched by the current media propaganda that focuses on labeling certain people as abusers and certain people as victims, thereby occulting the real causes of abuse in our culture. In truth it's the system itself that perpetuates abuse, as forensic psychiatry precludes any reform with the argument that the abused of today will inevitably be the abusers of tomorrow.