Let's Talk About Power

Any number of people have phoned in to radio programmes to give their opinion on todays 4 hour NHS strike. Many have said something along the lines of, “The rich have always been rich. The poor have always been poor. There’s no point putting in any energy to try and change that.”

Feeling powerless against what seems like an overwhelming force is not unusual, it happens when we’re bereaved, become ill, are bullied at work and at other times when it can seem that there’s no point in fighting. It’s often true that retreat can be the better part of valour: if bullying isn’t taken seriously then rather than take on the entire organisation (which is an entirely proper, if frightening, course of action) you may want to seek new employment. If you’re struggling with endless drama in your social life then, rather than get embroiled in crisis after crisis, it may be better to lose some friends and begin living the kind of life that suits you better.

Retreat and rumination are a normal, natural part of adapting to new and unpleasant situations, we all need time to lick our wounds. Then we begin to look for ways forward. People with long-term illnesses find new ways of living. The bereaved begin moving on and even feel guilty about it, but that forward momentum is irresistible.

Feeling defeated is another matter. You feel you have no control over your life or your environment. Whatever you do it seems you can’t move forward and other people seem both to have more than you and to control the way you live.

While this situation can lead to depression it can also lead to the very common and very unpleasant phenomenon of Punching Down. You can’t do anything about your rubbish boss but you can feel powerful by making the apprentices life a misery. You can’t do anything about your awful housing but you can feel powerful by blaming immigrants for taking all the houses. You can’t do anything about your minimum wage job but you can feel powerful by despising the unemployed. Remember that respectable, hard working, professional woman who stuffed a cat in a bin? She was punching down.

Punching down has become a national pastime in Britain. I heard a black woman tell a Polish electrician to ‘Go back where you came from,” last week. Attacks on disabled people have soared. What next? Can we begin kicking the elderly?

The thing about punching down is that it denies and distorts reality. What has caused the lack of housing is that hardly any houses have been built in the last decade. The causes of low wages are complex  – not least that we have so demonised the unemployed that people will accept dreadful wages to avoid stigma.

There is enough money out there to pay you a living wage – we know this because this year the top 100 executives in this country had a 20% pay rise, MP’s are getting an 10% pay rise, and we are the 7th most affluent nation in the world.

You just have to decide whether you want to be someone who tugs their forelock and punches down, or if you can deal with a little complexity and find a little courage.

Why is this anything to do with counselling? Because people who punch down are profoundly unhappy. They think they're defeated. They’ve given up acknowledging their needs let alone their desires. They’re surviving but that’s about it. Their only sense of authority comes from exerting power over extremely vulnerable people, and that almost always leads to abuse.

If you feel energetic after some pub-politics, or after voting for an extremist party, or after reading and sharing a Britain First post on Facebook, then it may be time to consider that you are losing your own personal power and giving power to a way of life that historically has brought terrible misery into the world, not least to the people who practice it.

This process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the faint-hearted. It involves the stretching and growing of becoming more and more of one's potentialities. It involves the courage to be. It means launching oneself fully into the stream of life. 
Carl Rogers