Use Your Power Skillfully

In this article, I play the guinea pig. I proudly demo for you how I misused my own power so you can be braver in exploring how you might better use your power at home, work, and, if you are a therapist, in therapy. I hope you will comment and share.

How do you use power in your relationships? If you are a therapist, how do you use power in therapy?

First some gratitudes: I have particularly been influenced by Sara Huang, Natalia Rachel, Annette Simmons, and David Pearl - all people I have met here on LinkedIn. They have been connecting with me on this topic for the last few weeks so thank you.?

Last week I posted an article on LinkedIn I wrote ten years ago on my concern men in psychotherapy aren’t given a fair shake sometimes in couples therapy. A curious piece where I wrestled with gender and power.? It got a reaction from men here on LinkedIn I was quite surprised by.? Some hung out in a power-sharing dialogue with mutual empathy, vulnerability, self-reflection, and dialogue. Others not.? I am not here to comment on them.? I am here to comment on me, as your humble guinea pig in how to do power better. I am often studying power-laden interactions with deep curiosity.??

Being a white lady from San Francisco, committed to justice but never interested in towing what conflict entrepreneurs are selling in the media, I ask ALL the questions. Studying political science left me mostly comfy with banter on hard topics, but still with a lot of trauma around powerlessness from my own childhood I work on every day.? As I questioned myself in this dialogue on LinkedIn I confronted how I was not in, what Cyndi Suarez calls, Personal Power or inhabiting Liberatory Power.? I was in covert powerlessness.? Was I an asshole?? No.? Did I waste a lot of energy?? Yes.

Liberatory power is committed to focusing on the agency you have in each moment and creating what one wants - always orienting towards the power and choice you do have, not obsessing about your lack of power and choice.

[Liberatory power] requires a commitment to living mindfully, constantly increasing one’s level of awareness, so that when one finds oneself in an interaction that positions one as powerless, one is able to perceive it, keep calm, and assert mutuality. Liberatory power helps one refrain from asserting power over others, or to do so carefully.?Cyndi Suarez, The Power Manual

For a long time, I have been curious about how therapists and their clients engage in different kinds of power - especially in couples therapy.? Therapy gets so fixated on early childhood wounds, we may miss another important area of consciousness-raising in the couples therapy encounter around power.? Childhood, after all,? is not the only site of influence for our personal power or lack of it.

What did I catch myself doing in my interactions last week here on LinkedIn?

• Over Attuning To Them:?At first blush, there was an indication from one person’s very first sentence they were speaking from a power-over place in them.? I empathized and attuned to what might be going on with them without attuning to me, at all, to ask myself if I wanted to engage in a dialogue.? That’s powerlessness in drag, folks. See below on the attunement survival wound a lot of therapists have. If you were neglected in childhood and ended up parenting your parents, you might too.? Those with an attunement wound move from covert powerlessness a lot.
• Intention to Change The Other: As the conversation continued I caught myself with an agenda, or as my own analyst pointed out, on a project to get someone to see me that cannot or won't (yep, that one is my childhood wound).? I chose to turn up in a conversation with the intention to change someone who was indicating they were not interested in seeing me.? It was clear they had not read my original article, so why did I engage? Powerlessness in drag, folks. Have you ever tried to change someone covertly? It's called manipulation.?
• Unilaterally Controlling the Rules of Interaction: I used empathic listening but even folks that teach empathy skills can bully someone into “using empathic listening” as the right way to dialogue in an attempt to gain power back.? The tools themselves can be innocent, but the intent and impact can still be nefarious if inside you still aim to dominate or control the rules of interaction. If you hold some self-righteous view that “this way of dialogue is more right than that way of dialogue” you are in a dominant position.? We would need to co-create those rules for true mutuality, wouldn’t we?? Couples therapists, I am looking at you.? I see therapists offering communication training without consent.? Hello, power-over?
• Meeting Dominance With Compensatory Oppression: As one person got increasingly dominant in the dialogue I got triggered and I tried to match them.? You may not have seen it in what I said, but I caught his affect in my body. Catching a dominator's affect is a telltale sign you aren't inhabiting your personal power. It does no good if I remain in the oppressed stance, catch someone’s affect, and try to “outmaneuver” them with self-righteous therapist speak.? I see spouses play this out all the time in the couples therapy room. Shoot, therapists are notorious for it.

Other ways power plays out in the couples therapy room…

Rank / positional power and any acting out around power over/ under is already coming into the room between couples based on;

• Gender
• Income level
• Physical strength / size
• Colorism / Race in Black or Mixed Race couples
• ACE’s score (who had more Adverse Childhood Experiences)
• Neurodivergence
• Privileges like: homeownership, health insurance, immigration status

Therapists often enact one or both of these core wounds in their work (which is why being in therapy and/or consultation is really important for therapists)...

1. Core Wound: The attunement survival style or what Freud would call an Oral Character: The self-narrative this kind of therapist plays out in the therapy is “I will learn to become so damn empathetic and attune to your feelings and needs at the expense of my own because at least I have some agency then.” ? Therapists who need to be seen as the hero or savior, the good object, that over give are doing therapy from a wound. It's ok. It happens. And it's worth naming. Powerlessness played out by having no needs, no boundaries, blocks clients from getting better.??
2. Core Wound: Compensatory Powerlessness: Therapists who were disempowered as kids can compensate and become extra powerful as a defense mechanism as clinicians.? This shows up when they work too damn hard in the therapy.? Some of my most important moments as a therapist, are surrendering to not knowing where we are headed but trusting my own personal power to be able to stay in connection.? Needing to know or be right or smart about every therapy case is a defense against powerlessness that may lead to misdiagnosing clients. Sadly, that kind of therapy usually dehumanizes or perpetuates the power abuses clients have already experienced prior to entering a therapy office.

What can we do as people, clients, and therapists to create a wiser form of power?

1. Come into a relationship with your own powerlessness and how it shapes your relationships.
2. Cultivate liberatory or personal power through various consciousness practices and training.? Org Development and Org Psych folks are pretty groovy at this stuff.? I like hanging with them a lot.? Cyndi lays out a lot in her book, The Power Manual.? A must-read.??
3. Work with your nervous system and trauma to learn to stay calm and open around differences and shift or move out of conversations where mutuality isn’t on offer.
4. Notice how you communicate: Is my communication mutual?? Am I listening as much as I am talking?? Am I curious about myself and this other person?? Am I discerning if this is a good use of my energy?? Does my body feel at ease and relaxed? Or Am I blaming?? Am I judging?? Am I trying to change someone? Am I manipulating?? Am I tense or agitated?? These poker tells help to remind us to come back into our own liberatory power before proceeding.

As I inhabit more personal power every day I realize it is not a one-and-done destination.? Inhabiting liberatory power means I commit to a practice of cultivating ease, joy, consciousness, and curiosity on the daily.? I have the humility to never assume I have arrived.? I am committed to cultivating the capacity to hold power virtuously and hope to inspire you to do the same.

One way I do that is in the Couples’ Double Date I started this year.? One of my greatest natural talents as a human is playfulness.? Playfulness, as a therapist, is unconventional but it gets underneath power dynamics in a fun way.? It is a simple thing to gather with couples online and play but the impact ripples out.? I hope you might join in for one.

Here is where I toss the ball over to you…how are you working on cultivating liberatory power personally, at home, and at work?? Share in the comments.