Power and you
Dr Mark Huhnen
Systemic psychotherapist, coach, consultant and trainer
Systemark
Workshop Information
We all had a variety of experiences of power. We might have been oppressed by someone else’s power, or we might have been helped by someone more powerful. Or we might have been on the other end and have exerted our power – for better and worth?
It seems important to note not just negative aspects of power, the oppressive ones. As Foucault (1980) said “What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no; it also traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse.” (p.119) Power might also be used to protect, like parents might use their power to protect their children.
Chances are that we experienced both positive and negative aspects of power already early on and then throughout our life. And chances are that we formed our relationship with power, how we might use or eschew it, in our experiences with care givers, teachers and others that we met during a life potentially reformulating our relationship with power again and again. We probably have various scripts (Byng-Hall, 1995) around power. And we have power inscribed in our bodies.
I imagine most participants at the conference will have talked about power in their training and maybe as an ongoing conversation within supervision. But talking itself privileges one approach to any subject (including the subject of ‘power’). It is usually more intellectual. There are other approaches, more affective approaches, approaches that notice our physical response to power.
In this workshop we will privilege a bodily and affective approach to ‘power’, we will sculpt and move and position ourselves to power in different situations and explore what relationship with power we would like to have. It is my hope that participants can take their experiences, even if these experiences are difficult to articulate with them and can have a different access to their desired relationship to power in their practice, whether this is therapy, supervision, research or training.