Where is the Power?

Recently I heard a presentation by Robin DiAngelo on White Fragility: Building White Racial Stamina. A thought-provoking analogy she used in speaking about systemic racism in America concerned the passage of the right for women to vote in 1920 (the 19^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution). Robin asked the question, “Who gave women the right to vote?” The answer was that men did. Women had no standing to change this, beyond agitation and informal pressure on their husbands. They were locked out of the system perpetuating this inequality.

This power imbalance is an existing reality in our system of racism in the U.S. Like the fish, we have been swimming in our own culture our whole lives, and don’t even realize we are in it. I’m not speaking here about acts of racism but rather of a system created for white Americans for white Americans. A tweak here or there will not create a more perfect union.

But there is also a similar imbalance we have today between healthcare professionals and patients/families. The system truly is stacked against the patient/family in terms of the distribution of power. Unless healthcare professionals invite patients/families not just “to the table” but into the power dynamic, there can be no balance possible. For even with such an invitation to sit at the table, it matters whether there is also a sharing of power. Patient Advisory Committees, by their usual description, can only advise. Who ultimately makes the system decisions? How many stories do we need to hear from healthcare professionals who, suddenly finding themselves as patients in their own system of care, realize how imbalanced the power is even for them as patients?

This is extremely important because healthcare professionals are going to hear some things from patients/families that they might not like hearing. Whether it is in tone or in the critique of procedures and policies by patients/families, it is incumbent on healthcare professionals to listen humbly and not take the very first opportunity to “explain” why this procedure or that policy is really the best approach.

Healthcare professionals must be willing to enter into this relationship with a commitment to receive, reflect, and seek to change. Patients/families must share in the power in the healthcare system or they may likely find themselves dismissed the first time they speak an unpleasant truth.

The Elephant in the Room

Do you have many elephants in your life? You know the kind I mean. They are the subjects or issues that, if acknowledged, will almost certainly wreck havoc somewhere in your circle of relationships! I have my share of the herd.

In my extended family the one elephant likely to be wandering around is labeled “politics.” It sometimes lies down under the Thanksgiving dinner table. I try and keep my foot on its trunk so it doesn’t snake out from underneath and spill the gravy, so to speak!

Most of us, I venture to say, have at least one or two elephants. But we learn to live with them – or at least maneuver around them when necessary. Some elephants are more dangerous than others. Like the ones labeled spousal abuse or alcoholism or sexual harassment. Some are just too dangerous in our lives, or even our society, to allow them to be ignored.

The problem, oftentimes, with disturbing these more dangerous elephants is that they are rather difficult to control. We know that. We have the hoof prints on our body to show for it! OK, I think I’ve taken this analogy just about as far as I can.

How do we handle difficult issues between one another? We need a place of safety where we can address such issues in a manner which leads to everyone involved being kept from harm. Something like a container that will contain the energy – the emotions – but enable the issue to be visible and addressed in whatever appropriate manner.

The technology developed by Scott Peck has the potential to create just that kind of container that can hold difficult issues. And not just difficult issues but life and death issues. It was used in Bosnia, following the war, to bring Muslim, Serb and Croat educators together for the first time of face to face communication. These were the men and women who would be responsible for helping children grow up with a different view from their parents of what constitutes different.

Raise your hand if you have ever experienced religion as a difficult issue! I sat in a room for three days with national religious leaders from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian faiths and heard people speak to relatives having been killed by the relatives of others in the room. And everyone in the room came out alive! Not only did they come out alive but they asked if we could do something like this that would include their spouses the next time.

For the last eight years I have been going inside prisons in America – both state and federal – using this technology with some tough men and women. From these experiences, and those with my own family, I can attest to the strength of the social containers built with this technology process for dealing with difficult issues.

Life is WHAT?!

In his best-selling book, The Road Less Traveled, M. Scott Peck begins Chapter One of the book with this sentence, “Life is difficult.” It is one of the great truths. Why is it then we are so surprised when we encounter difficulties in our life?! How often do we ask, “Why me?!” Or feel like: “I don’t deserve this!“ What does deserve have to do with it?!

No, the quicker we come to terms with this truth concerning the difficulty of life, the quicker we can stop wasting our energy in futilely trying to remain difficulty-free! Because it's not gonna happen. So what do we do?

Learn to live in health and wholeness in the midst of difficulties. Many of us live in the future to such an extent we miss the opportunities in the present. “If only ______ “(YOU fill in the blank) usually begins a sentence that frames our circumstances beyond anything we can do to make them be what we wish them to be. But what if we could live in the most toxic of situations and still thrive. Sound impossible? Not at all. It’s just a matter of understanding power.

It’s the lack of power which many times leads a person to throw up their hands in despair and begin living as a victim. Don’t misunderstand. One can truly BE a victim through no fault of their own but one chooses whether to live AS a victim.

Most self-improvement courses, be they personal or professional, will often start with helping you discover what you can change in your environment. What was it that Oprah uncovered with The Secret?! We can “picture” what we want? We just don’t imagine properly what our circumstances could be? Sorry, there is no short cut or magic solution to being in a difficult life! Did you know that the majority of the world’s populations live in physical circumstances they are unable to change?

This applies to where we find ourselves in our work environment. How many courses have you uncovered that speak about being in health and wholeness with a boss who is toxic – by ANY definition?! Not many. But unless you can learn to live in that “landscape” you will continue to remain hostage to the “If only…” of life.

Reflections on I-Thou, -You & -It

About 75 years ago a Jewish theologian, Martin Buber, wrote a book whose title has been translated into English as, "I and Thou." In it (which I would only recommend if you like dense, scholarly books) Dr. Buber wrote about human relationships. In fact, Scott Peck ( who "turned me on" to Martin!) believed that this work by Buber was "...one of the most important books ever written on the subject of human relationships - organizational behavior - in general and on the subject of human narcissism in particular." He even went on the record in one of his books to state that belief.

Well, Scotty was sometimes known to speak in hyperbole but, in this case, I don't think that was the case. I knew Scotty for about twenty years and was president of his nonprofit organization for a portion of that time. When he was writing "A World Waiting To Be Born" in the early 1990s, he suggested I read Buber for a deeper perspective on how community building and civility are interwoven.

It was a further "opening" on my personal journey of wholeness. Let's see, how many years did it take me to read that Buber book...?! Thank God, Scotty gave the crib notes in Chapter Five of the book mentioned above.

The reason I am mentioning ANY of this right now is that I've been reflecting on whether what Buber had to say about relationships actually provides some insight into what we are seeing in Washington, D.C. and, I guess, across the country right now - including prisons? Remember, this blog is about the P,Q,Rs.

Let me start with the people housed in prisons - a population of whom I have had the opportunity to rub shoulders over the last almost ten years. The current thinking on the personality traits of criminals describes them has having a criminogenic mindset. One aspect of that mental condition connects to an emotion - empathy. See, it's better for someone that commits a crime that they not really "see" their victim as a person at all. It's extremely difficult to care about one's victim and still commit a crime against them. So, what does this have to do with Buber, Bill? Good question.

Buber writes about different ways to relate to another person. The closest of those types of relationships would be that of a beloved - a mother, father, spouse, son, daughter,etc - a thou in Buber's parlance. Most of us have few of these types of relationships, rightly so. They take a good deal of time and intention. Most of our relationships tend to be more I-You. That is, I see you as different - distinct - from me.

But, should I lose sight of the humanity of another just because I view them as apart - other -from me, they can become an It to me. They move from simply being distinct from me to being something of lesser value; an It is something I might choose to use (my car, for example, since I do not, as I have known some to do, name it!) but it is not on an equal footing with my existence. A person with a criminogenic personality would very likely have many more people within their world who were seen in an I-It relationship.

In my lifetime I have noted how people-groups will sometimes establish I-It relationships with other groups of people, usually with serious outcomes (think Hutu and Tutsi). I'm not a sociologist, nor the son of one, but I did study propoganda as part of my communications degree and know how labeling can be used to dehumanize others. It's only a short step from there to seeing monsters where once there were people.

So, I'm wondering if what I observe happening in our public political discourse isn't something different from what some have labeled partisanship? Could it be something more destructive? And is what I'm seeing just a natural progression coming from the "collateral damage" vocabulary of the military or the "faceless numbers" losing their jobs today in the U.S. economy? Are we losing our civility toward one another? Why does this matter? Because civility and civilization come from the same Latin root. We can't lose the one without having it deeply affect the other.

Hope - For What?

As I write I'm sitting in a comfortable hotel in Ontario, California after a week in the high desert at the Federal Penitentiary in Victorville. I have gifts of appreciation from the Bureau staff in my carry-on luggage packed for my flight back to Seattle tomorrow morning. To paraphrase an actress living nearby where I sit tonight, "They appreciate me! They really, really appreciate me!" It will be good to get back to Seattle, sleep in my own bed and not have to crawl out of from under the covers at 5:00 am.

The problem is, I'm having difficulty getting my thoughts - and spirit - out of USP Victorville. I spent three days with forty men who are living in a high security prison and two more days training the treatment staff working not only with these men but with many more.

Most of the men in the workshop this week would probably say they deserve to be where they are. Some said just that during our time together. No one mentioned what they did to deserve their present address but it wasn't hard to imagine the possible crimes as they spoke of the sentences they were serving. One man had been in prison for twenty-five years, having started serving his sentence at the age of twenty-five, and had twenty-five years left. Not everyone in the room was staring at that kind of time but a majority were years from release.

One man, I would guess he was in his late twenties – serving eighty-two years – talked about being on the phone last Friday with his young daughter who was celebrating her birthday. He asked her what she wanted for her birthday and she said, “I want my daddy to drop me off at school like my friends’ daddies do!” He said they were both crying during that phone call. It caused me to ache for the daughter who did nothing to cause the loss she knew in her young life.

I’m reading a book this month entitled, “Change or Die.” In it the author says that hope must be present for a person to make the effort to change any significant part of their life. I must say I can’t imagine having any kind of hope if I were looking at 40, 50, or 82 years in prison.

But it seemed to me that I could see hope in the eyes of every one of the men in the room this week. Hope for release? No, not for many. The hope was, rather, focused on creating something of value from the ashes of their lives. And, for some, they are finding a path to freedom while knowing they will never be released from prison.

Big Boys Don't Cry

See, now, this is what I mean when I talk about "Lies We Believe." I would like to see a show of hands of how many have never heard that saying. Of course big boys cry...and medium-sized boys, to say absolutely nothing about small boys!

There are beliefs we sometimes hold as Americans that inform our behavior (or way of being connected to our cultural environment). They can be as patently false and destructive to our development as, "Big boys don't cry." Or they can be ones, repeated so often without denial, that they become an accepted way of viewing life in community. For example, such a value statement from American sport is, "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing."

In the case of the former, when we really examine the "truth" about boys and crying we might say, "Well, I don't really mean - or believe - that." Those are the easiest to place as cultural value lies which often are allowed to exist in our society as if they were true. The latter type, like the one about winning and sport, seem to have face validity, coming as they do from authority figures and thoughtlessly repeated by others. Plus these often contain a seed of truth i.e., "Winning isn't everything."

So my antennae is out for those insidious lies. Any help would be appreciated! And rightful annotation provided!

I have a few more but let me just mention a couple. "There is safety in strength." OK, test time: is that "true" or "false?" Or, how about, "There can only be one #1!" Hmmm, maybe I'll save my Reflections on those to another time. But I think you get the direction of my thinking.

You may be asking yourself, "Why bother, Bill?" Well, I think there is a power in words. And I think that when a lie is exposed it loses some of its ability to cloak itself in truth. Finally, I think some of these lies are wrecking havoc on American society, and to some extended extent, other parts of the world. I also have this Don Quixote kind of complex too! Don and I go waaaay back. He's also for another day when I write about working in prisons. I'm done for now.