Power and Disempowerment

Hello everyone and welcome.

It’s really a privilege to be with you today.

My name is David Waselkow and I’m a therapist and consultant who specializes in conflict and relationships.

And I’m here today to talk with you about a concept that we all think we’re really familiar with until we really start thinking about it in detail.

And that concept is power.

Today we’re gonna talk about power. We’re gonna talk about feeling disempowered, power struggles, and we’re gonna talk about a mechanism or a belief of us versus them that so often influences, and I would argue infects the relationships that we engage in when we’re at work as staff members trying to assist all of our clients.

Right here from the very beginning, I want you to think about your definition of power.

Power is one of those hard things to pin down from a definition point of view, and there’s a bunch of different definitions and all of them are generally appropriate and acceptable, but I wanna know what you think about it and how you define it.

So as you’re listening right now, take a minute, get a piece of paper, pizza box if you got it, whatever it is, and start outlining how you understand power.

How do you define it? Maybe some of you think that power is a pathway to control.

Maybe some of you think that power is an example of what happens when you have responsibility for something or someone.

Maybe you think of power in terms of strength, your ability to do something, maybe grind through something or be resilient.

Lots of different ways to think about power.

The way we’re gonna talk about power today is in terms of what happens when there’s a power differential.

Us and them thinking where us very often can be staff and them can be the client that we’re there to assist and to support and to help.

You may think that your clients have all the power because you’re in service of them.

Your clients may think you have all the power because you’re in control, or you write the rules or you enforce the rules.

When both sides have questions about power, competition can emerge and other things can occur as well.

And that’s why I think it’s so essential to think through and to talk about power because it sets the stage for everything else that we’re gonna talk about.

Okay, couple bedrock principles I want to introduce right from the very beginning.

First, it is imperative as a staff member that you remember and adopt an orientation that all behavior is goal directed.

We’re all trying to accomplish something with the behaviors that we choose.

And sometimes we don’t even have conscious awareness of what that thing is that we’re trying to accomplish.

But remember, behavior is goal directed.

There is always a why behind a person’s behavior.

Principle number two, always and forever. And in my business we don’t like to use the words always and never, but in this situation, it’s appropriate always and forever separate person from behavior.

That principle is what allows us to say to another person, right now, I find your behavior totally unacceptable, but I accept you as a person.

We need to separate those two things.

Now, one of the places in which these two principles really show up in your work every day, every hour, if not every minute is when someone feels angry.

Maybe your client is feeling angry or frustrated and you’re thinking they’re becoming aggressive, or maybe you’re feeling angry and becoming a little bit aggressive because in your need to use power, you’re trying to control the situation and you’re doing that control under the banner of safety and responsibility and all those other types of things.

But you’re operating from a place of weakness already because of the definition of power.

So let’s talk about anger for a moment. Okay?

Anger is an emotion. Sure, right?

But it’s so much more than that.

Anger is a coping skill designed to deal with two more underlying phenomenon.

One is fear, the other is betrayal.

The thing that fear and betrayal have in common with one another is a sense of powerlessness.

That’s why we, that’s why a person goes to anger as a coping skill, because anger, we think or believe, helps us manufacture power so that we can cope with a powerlessness problem.

So I want you to understand, when you’re looking at behavior, when observing behavior in the people that you’re assisting in supporting, and you think or feel that you’re seeing anger, I want you to realize that what you’re really seeing is maladaptive coping for a fear or betrayal problem.

If you introduce aggression, if you introduce authoritarianism, if you introduce control to a person who is frightened to a person who feels betrayed, the unintended consequence of trying to control the situation is that we make it worse.

We make the vulnerability, the fear, the fight or flight response going on in the client more intense under the banner of safety or trying to be helpful.

So remember, if you see behavior and you’re seeing anger, separate person from behavior, you are not seeing an angry person, you’re seeing an anger in a situation of powerlessness. And more than likely, what you’re really seeing is fear or betrayal.

Now, how can it be fear and betrayal and how does that lead to powerlessness?

Well, if we introduce force or if we raise our voice, or if we show our anger and aggression, we’re gonna create a frightened person, or we’re gonna make a frightened person feel more frightened.

And how is betrayal part of it? Well, think of it this way.

If the person that you’re helping knows that you are there to help them, and all of a sudden you’re the person who is accidentally hurting or harming them because of your own anger, they feel betrayed.

The care, the connection, the trust gets severed, gets broken, and they become even more vulnerable and more exposed. And what happens? They act out even more.

And so then when we have a bad definition of power, we say, well, I’ve gotta control this.

I’ve gotta control this person. They are out of control, but it’s not them who’s out of control.

What’s outta control is their fear, their vulnerability, and their compelling unmet needs.

And I want you to think about it the other way too.

You know what it is like to be vulnerable, to be exposed.

You may not remember what it was like to be dependent or reliant upon somebody, but it was there nonetheless.

And when you have compelling unmet needs for safety, for reliability, for trust, for engagement, for connection, and those things appear to you to be threatened or to be broken, what happens?

You become frightened. You may feel betrayed, and then you become angry.

And when people get angry, they often introduce aggression, right?

They’re trying to solve a problem.

Anger is maladaptive coping because we’re trying to solve the problem of being disempowered.

So our job as staff members is to help people with adaptive coping, recognizing that anger is a coping skill and all behavior is goal directed. What are they trying to achieve? Safety, control.

We need to help them find an adaptive way to get there.

Now, you may think to yourself, this sounds really hard and really complicated. I don’t know if I have the skills, the training. I’m not sure that I am empathic enough to maintain my composure and my patience when someone seems to be losing it over here.

I wanna tell you a little story about something. It’s a little intellectual, a little nerdy. I have a tendency to do that.

You probably all heard about the invisible hand in market economics. It came from a guy named Adam Smith, who was a moral philosopher and an economist, wrote long time ago, but before he published The Wealth of Nations, he published another book, much less well known, it’s called The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Inside that book, Adam Smith argued that innate to every human being there exists an impartial spectator.

The impartial spectator has innately the ability to use their imagination when observing what is happening to another person.

And when they’re observing what’s happening to the other person, they can evaluate intuitively as well as intellectually whether what is happening is right or wrong, appropriate or inappropriate.

The impartial spectator—I want you to resource this idea because recognize, you don’t have to be a deeply empathic person to be good at this.

You just have to be human.

And you have to remember that you’re dealing with humans and not herds that you’re trying to control with authoritarian, threatening, dominating behavior, okay?

The impartial spectator inside of us is accessed if we apply a methodology that we’re going to teach you in this particular segment of your training, and we’re calling it the minute method.

You ever said, “I need a minute, I gotta take a minute,” right?

The most difficult, potentially violent, high-energy, high-conflict situations can be resolved or damaged badly in one minute.

So we’re gonna ask you to apply the minute method and take a minute.

What do you do to do that? What are the steps? What is the protocol? How do we actually apply these theoretical concepts of separating person from behavior?

Remembering that all behavior is goal directed, you take the minute method:

• Step one: Detach, take a step back. I’m not saying leave the room. I’m not saying have a grand pause. I’m saying somewhere in your mind or even physically take one step back. What that does is it buys you a minute; it gives you time to think instead of letting your own fear or betrayal or emotions control the situation. And right then and there, you’re already modeling to the person that you’re trying to help that what we need to resolve this situation is our brain, not our fight or flight or our anger. So detach. When you take one step back and you detach, your field of vision expands. And by definition, the scope of conflict narrows. It comes into proportionality for what the situation is.
• Step two: After having detached and modeling that calmness, that composure, which I argue is genuine power, ask the person—and remember it’s a person—”What do you need?” A simple question, “What do you need?” And in that moment, we’re doing something crucial to get to solution, and that is needs identification. A person cannot fulfill their needs until they advocate for those needs. And we cannot advocate for those needs until we identify them and know what they are. When one of your clients is frightened, is feeling betrayed, is upset, is angry, there’s a whole series of unmet needs in there, and one is likely primary, one is likely first. So you ask the question because your client already knows they’re in jeopardy of getting in trouble and getting punished. So that makes them even more frightened. When you ask them what they need, it creates a cognitive shift in what’s called the prefrontal cortex, where we do all of our logical and rational thinking. We’re locating something different than our immediate experience. “What do you need?” And then you wait. You wait for an answer to that question. So maybe your client says, “I don’t know what I need. I’m scared, I’m upset, I don’t know what I need.” You say, “Okay, that’s okay. Take a minute, find what you need right now. What do you need right now more than anything else?” And let them define that. You know why? Because now they’re doing adaptive empowerment. They’re searching themselves to discover what they really need. And now instead of operating from a place of fear, they’re operating from a place of strength. And so are you. And now we’re on the path to resolution instead of on the path to annihilation.
• Step three: As soon as you hear that need, whatever it is, so long as it’s remotely reasonable, you affirm the existence of that need. And in so doing, you’re doing step three, which is communicating safety. What does that mean? It means the person who is vulnerable and exposed and frightened and maybe feeling betrayed now knows that there is an engaged, caring person who’s listening to what they need. As the impartial spectator, you know what it’s like to have needs that people ignore or dismiss or make fun of. You know how much it hurts to have compelling unmet needs that don’t get fulfilled. So you resource the impartial spectator, and what you’re looking at is the problem, not the person. What is the problem? An unmet need. And as soon as we talk about the path to need fulfillment because they’re advocating for that need, we are literally communicating safety.
• Step four: Real need fulfillment. You collaborate with your client to get as close to fulfilling that immediate need as possible. And in so doing, you have created trust, you have created a bond, you have created a connection, and you have done a professional job at solving a problem instead of doing the unprofessional thing and becoming angry, and then justifying your anger under the banner of safety and control to get the herd in line.

These are not cows that you’re herding, branding, controlling under the banner of safety. These are people. They are real people with real problems and great difficulty being expressive of the truth.

Maintain your composure, maintain your positive control. Apply the minute method, and that’s how you resolve high conflict situations.