Power in the Intrapersonal/intrapsychic Realm

In the psychosocial realm, power means that one knows what one thinks and has the ability to critically examine one’s own thoughts and those of others. A person can change one’s mind when new data appear that would warrant such a change; in other words, one is flexible without being suggestible. Power entails the capacity to trust in the information available from one’s own intuition and inner knowing, and the ability to find sources of information that will expand the range of one’s world and capacities. Powerful people know what they feel as they are feeling it and can use their feelings as a useful source of information about what is happening in the here and now. Power in the realm of affect means an absence of numbness, with current feelings reflecting current, not past or possible future experiences. Psychosocial power includes the ability to experience powerful and intense emotions, to contain affect as needed to function effectively in one’s psychosocial world, and to channel emotions into effective interpersonal strategies. Power on this axis includes, as well, the capacity to self-soothe in ways that are not harmful to self or others physically, psychosocially, or spiritually.

Interpersonal/Social–Contextual Power

Powerful people are more interpersonally effective than not, able to have their desired impacts on others more of the time than not. They realize that they do not control others or the physical world and are able to accept the limits of power and control with grace. Powerful people forgive themselves their humanity and are able to forgive the humanity of others, but do not forget to protect themselves from people who are unsafe emotionally or physically to them. Powerful people are well defined and differentiated, yet flexible when this will increase the likelihood of a desired outcome. Powerful people have access to their capacities for creativity and fantasy as sources of delight and have a sense of reality that assists them to function in their chosen pursuits.

In the interpersonal realm of psychosocial power, powerful people are capable of forming relationships that work more of the time than not with other individuals, groups, and larger systems. Powerful people can create and sustain intimacy, can be close without loss of self or engulfment of other, and are able to be differentiated without being distant or detached. They are able to decide to end relationships when those become dangerous, toxic, or excessively problematic for them, and they are also able to remain and work out conflict with others when that is a possibility. They enter roles in life—parent, partner, worker—most often from a place of choice, intention, and desire, not accidentally, although they welcome serendipity and the opportunity to encounter the new.

Power in the Spiritual Realm

In the realm of spiritual and existential experience, powerful people have systems of meaning making that assist them in responding to the existential challenges of life and that have the potential to give them a sense of comfort and well-being. They have a sense of their heritage and culture and can integrate it into their identity in ways that allow them to better understand themselves. They are aware of the social context and can engage with it rather than being controlled by it or unaware of its impact. Powerful people have a raison d’etre and are able to integrate that into important aspects of their daily lives.

PATRIARCHY AND DISEMPOWERMENT: CAUSES OF DISTRESS

Feminist therapy asserts that patriarchal systems surrounding most human life intentionally and unintentionally disempower almost all people on one or more of these variables, such that this paradigm of the powerful person is entirely aspirational. At the same time, the theory behind feminist therapy argues that much powerlessness can be transformed, even within the material constraints of patriarchal realities, and that one disempowerment strategy of patriarchies has been the creation of a trance of powerlessness that is both cultural and personal, in which various messages are conveyed that most people cannot empower themselves. The wide-scale disempowering messages conveyed by patriarchies about the inevitability of hierarchies, the impossibility of effecting real social change, and the immutability of gendered and other socially constructed roles and relationships all contribute to this societal trance. Feminist therapy subverts and interrupts the trance of powerlessness by inviting its participants to notice where and how greater power is actually available to them. Feminist analysis exposes how power, both intrapersonal and interpersonal, is not truly constrained by sex, phenotype, social class, body, or any of the usual rationales given by the larger context as to why someone cannot do or be a particular thing. By instituting and sustaining challenges to cultural messages suggesting that to give up and go along is the only available option, feminist therapy and its practitioners undermine what is dangerous in patriarchy and create hope, which is a necessary ingredient of the change process.

Within this broad aspirational construct of what constitutes inter- and intrapersonal power, feminist therapists invite clients to discover strategies for becoming more powerful, using the tools of psychotherapy and the relationship of therapist and client as the womb in which such power can grow. It is more usual than not for most people entering therapy to have their power be invisible and unavailable to them and the notion that they might have power at all frankly risible. When the feminist therapist first asks in a therapy session, “What is the powerful thing you could do now?” many people’s response is a variation on, “There is no powerful thing.” Offering the model of power described previously to clients, and framing power as being a continuous variable rather than a matter of having or not having, breaks the trance of powerlessness, as people begin to understand that they have already been powerful innumerable times and in a wide range of ways.

Gary, a working-class Euro American man in his early thirties, had been diagnosed at a young age with Asperger Syndrome (AS), placed in special education classes, teased and bullied by peers because of his socially odd behaviors. His parents, who had each attended community college for training in the skilled trades, were compliant with the medical and psychological authorities who told them that their son would never be capable of normal relationships and thus responded to his complaints about mistreatment by peers by implying that it was all due to his AS. When he sought psychotherapy for the persistent posttraumatic responses to the peer violence of his childhood, he expressed surprise when Bill, his feminist therapist, asked him about what powerful thing he could do. He responded that he was and always had been powerless. But Gary came to his third session with a print-out of several online thesaurus entries about the word power, telling Bill, “I think that if I study these, I will find a powerful thing to do.” The therapist reflected to Gary that he had just done a powerful thing—he had used his considerable skills and talents as an online researcher to begin to unpack and subvert what he had been told about power.

Frequently, prior to the feminist therapist offering this frame for power, when that power has been apprehended by the individual, it has more often felt negative and dangerous than self-affirming. For people who have been abused by power, power may have become confused with abusiveness, including abusiveness toward self. Many people who enter therapy perceive their strategies for responding to disempowerment—strategies in which creativity, talent, and desperation have combined to now-problematic outcomes—as what is wrong with them, evidence of their powerlessness and failure. “I failed to protect myself,” says the woman who was horrifically abused by her parents from her earliest memory, not seeing her dissociation as the way in which she protected herself when no other models of self-protection were available. “I’m not smart enough for graduate school,” says the man who dropped out of high school at age 16 to help support his struggling family and who acquired his subsequent education in settings that failed to offer him the study skills available to the children of the middle class with whom he must now compete in his master’s program. Often people have experienced extreme violations of body, mind, thought, feeling, spirit, culture, or some combination of all of these, and have protected themselves by developing strategies of passivity; dissociation from body, affect, or memory; or self-inflicted violence (Brown & Bryan, 2007; Rivera, 2002). For the feminist therapist, all of these strategies and struggles to maintain the capacity to be alive are evidence of a person’s previous struggles to achieve power in the face of patriarchy. The pain a person feels is seen, not as psychopathology, but of evidence of an already-present and active capacity in the struggling person to move toward the model of powerful individual. The first step of empowerment involves reframing pain as the sign of the desire to become that powerful person.

Consequently, how empowerment is experienced and nurtured in feminist therapy will vary dramatically from person to person, and even from therapy session to therapy session for the same client. For one individual, empowerment may take the form of learning to feed himself healthy food every day rather than neglecting his body and its nutritional needs. For another, empowerment may look like developing tools for functioning more effectively at work by becoming more politically savvy and better equipped to deal with the interpersonal dynamics of her workplace, keeping her employed and out of poverty. For a third, empowerment may be deciding that she will choose not to integrate her alter personalities but rather will develop a functional strategy of collaborative consciousness and action between those parts that allows her to no longer be dissociated and thus more able to respond to her world in the here and now. As a result, she will stop adopting the modus operandi of people who have always been unitary in their internal personality structure.

Feminist therapy attempts to accomplish the goal of empowerment through several specific overarching strategies, which in turn inform how the therapist functions in a given session. These include the development of egalitarian relationship, the reframing of psychopathology into distress and dysfunction, the diagnosis of attempts to resist patriarchy, and the nurturance of a sense of one’s multiple identities derived from an analysis of gender and social location.

KEY CONCEPTS IN FEMINIST THERAPY