Can we make power dynamics visible in organizations and families?

This past Monday a devoted group of students of the constellation work and guest participants joined me for an exploration of power, especially how power affects relationships in groups. We had a lively discussion and explored power from within two very different constellations (and shared some fabulous pie! Happy birthday, Leonie, and thanks, Veronica!)

We started our exploration with the question: what is power? There are probably as many definitions of power as there are people! Several of us described power in terms of personal experiences of power, and some of us took a larger view of the social and historical forces that shape the sense of agency within relationships. For the purposes of this article, I will approach power as a construct, a word we made up to describe certain experiences, either collectively or individually, that describes agency between individuals or groups in relationship. It’s useful to note that power is not a thing in the world like a mountain or a tree (which are actually “things” cut out of the whole cloth of life by language, but that’s for another article.) Power is relative to the people or groups involved, that is, it is inherently relational. Who can do what to whom when (and who can’t) is one way of understanding how power operates in relationships.

Power has different dimensions. We can talk about physical power, the strength or skill one person or group of persons can exert on another. Power can also take the form of command of necessary resources for physical survival. Withholding clean water, for instance, is a form of power over others. Power can be shared through consensus or collaborative processes or used to dominate others.

Language also creates subject-to-object relations that have implied power. Cultures encode these relations differently based on word order and other grammatical aspects of the dominant language. English is a particularly noun-based language. We turn unfolding life processes into objects that we can manipulate. For instance, once we define a patch of land and trees as a “forest”, it becomes a thing that can be “harvested”. The subject-verb-object word order makes it easier to envision power dynamics between the subject and the object, as in the girl hit the ball, the teacher disciplined the student, the boss corrected the employee. 

Within these larger cultural groups, we have what we call “conscience groups” – groups bound by hidden (or not so hidden as in the case of membership dues!) rules of belonging (for example, the white jacket of medical doctors).

Then we have smaller scale, interpersonal power dynamics, such as the influence, persuasion, charisma, lies and manipulations that happen within families. Finally, we could look at power as an intrapersonal quality, for example, how well you can manage your emotional states and reactivity. We can talk about the perception of power as well. You may perceive your boss as being more powerful than she feels. Julie Diamond, in her book, Power: A User’s Guide, https://www.amazon.com/Power-Users-Guide-Julie-Diamond/dp/0996660305 notes that discomfort with position power (such as a manager might have) can lead to misuse of power, either through over using authority or not providing structure.

While the constellations we set up were personal to the participants, I took away a few observations about power from a constellation perspective.

Social emotions like guilt or shame influence power dynamics between individuals and groups. If you’ve ever wronged someone and felt guilty, you may feel “one down” in relation to that other person and treat them as more powerful because you have a sense of “owing” them. In our work, we saw that this can show up between groups as well. We can lose our belonging to a group due to our innocent membership in a group that has wronged another group.

Within a group, larger forces (hello, capitalism and so-called market economics!) and historical advantages can privilege one group’s sense of power over another. This form of internalized entitlement can be hard to pinpoint and shift because of the layers of custom and history that shape feelings of power or the lack of power.

These experiences of power are deeply felt, yet often confusing. We discovered that constellation work can help clarify these relationship tangles and help us find both our right place and potential leverage points for change. By making relationships visible, the power dynamics can be seen and studied. Thus, it seems that constellation work might be useful for social change work.