Power and Control
I was born in 1969, a child of the-birth-control-pill-gone-wrong. Ironic since my mother never wanted to have children. I know this because…
I was born in 1969, a child of the-birth-control-pill-gone-wrong. Ironic since my mother never wanted to have children. I know this because she told me. She was nearly 41 when I was born, and I am told that my father was delighted at the news of an impending birth. She appears to have gotten with the program and my memories of my childhood up to age nine, were pleasant. I have some vague memories of my photo being taken in a park in Columbia South Carolina. Of being delighted by life. That photo shows a core essence of me, loving nature, delighted. I am told I was a care-taking child, always helping others and couldn’t stand to see people hurt.
I say mostly about the memories, because I do have memories that aren’t so nice. Those are of my father being in the hospital, my mother being worried and upset about it, his students intervening into his illness (which was heart disease). Mostly though, I have memories of playing in creeks, dappled sun, heavy rainstorms, warm weather, cookies, ballet school, being generally loved on by a lot of adults.
My father had a stroke just as I was turning nine years of age. After that point, my own childhood B.C. to A.D. moment, things changed. My mother was struck down into a nearly immobile state from profound grief. We moved to the state next door, Georgia, because her sister, my aunt, lived there. I expect it was a choice of fear and desire to be next to someone familiar. She could have moved back to Texas, where we’d lived near my father’s family, but I think the love she felt for that family was so strong and so reminded her of her husband, that it was something she just avoided at all costs.
From ages nine 21, when I moved away from Georgia, to run away, to get away, to avoid at all cost the feelings Georgia brought me, I lived within a narcissistic system.
Now, this was never formally diagnosed, but it was one, and it marked me in ways I’m still deconstructing. My mother was the more dependent partner in the system, the supply if you will, and her sister was the narcissist. I cannot tell my cousin’s stories, but they told many to me, and those, based on my own observations, led me to believe this diagnosis of the family system was correct.
I was young and small and my mother was in profound grief and she was also being trauma bonded to her sister, by her sister, and she (I think) knew something wasn’t right about any of it, but instead of getting a therapist she took a lot of it out on me.
I don’t mean that she hit me or harmed my physically, she never ever did that. It was more emotional neglect. She was, I think, in this very difficult situation. Horrifically difficult. She had a child she’d never planned on, she was a widow, and she was dealing with a very old family pattern of abuse with a sibling. She was abusing alcohol. She wished she could die, and I know this because she told me. She didn’t have good boundaries in this moment and she rose up as much as she could possibly rise up given the circumstances, but honestly, it wasn’t enough.
One of my cousins told me later in life that she had no idea how I survived during all of it, the aftermath of my father’s death and the advent of my mother’s deep co-dependency with alcohol and her sister.
I did survive though.
There are, I have learned, a few responses to fear and threat. Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn. I was a Freeze/Fawn type, and I still am to this day. A fighter might have told my relatives off, might have taken up rebellious activites. A flighter might have found a way to move out either running away or finding a way to live in some other place.
I was quite young, quite small, and as the photo above shows you, a sweet laughing child. I think that I knew I had to keep my mother alive and happy. So I learned to make myself both small, and also entertaining. Small during the fights they’d have, small in the back seat of the car when she was driving home crying. I was terrified if they were mad at each other, my mother and aunt. I was terrified that she was mad at me, like, all the time. And that that anger meant existential death you know?
So, fawning was the go to. defense. Entertaining at parties, a fantastic student, an exemplary Oboist, dancer, and performer. I learned to read moods, even the tiniest shift of them. I found solace in theater, in the community of making things up, in happy endings (or at least endings you could read ahead about if tragic).
Fawning is a terrible response, and I was about to say one that brings shame, but honestly all the responses probably bring shame. Run away? You get the shame of being a coward. Freeze up? You get the shame of feeling helpless. Hit someone? You get the shame of feeling complicit in their violence by being just like them. And finally Fawn? You get the shame of feeling complicit in their violence by your actions telling them their violence isn’t violence.
Fawning means you wind up taking care of (or doing care-taking type work) of the person that is harming you and then you feel both pride that you can somehow overcome your desire to scream at someone being terrible to you, or you gaslight yourself that it isn’t so bad, or you just feel complicit in your own abuse/neglect.
So, yeah, I’ve lived with a lot of shame actually. Shame when I tried to make myself big in my artistic work. I was told to my face by both my mother and my aunt that I shouldn’t get so full of myself, I shouldn’t “show off” when I was praised for my work, by them not coming to shows, or saying weird things after the shows about my weight or my looks. Shame when I tried to stand up for myself, because I was being “a brat.” Shame when I’d basically lie about what was going on to preserve their versions of things.
Honestly, it’s clear that I have some CPTSD from all of the aforementioned dynamics, and while I got therapy in my 20’s, and even after my mother developed Alzheimer’s and I had to care-take her on my own for 10 years (which let me tell you she was PISSED about and the process was horribly traumatic for me and my family), I may not have really gotten into the core of the matter which is shame.
And of course, I loved them (love them) both very much. That’s the hardest part.
The response that doesn’t bring shame is having a calm boundaried conversation about accountability that leaves both parties in a better place. I know that, and for the most part I can do that in my most personal relationships now, but it’s taken a hell of a long time to deconstruct and to find the courage to have those conversations.
Where the freeze or fawn response comes up most frequently for me is in work situations and I think that makes sense because work is a place of power differentials. I’ve worked in fundraising for a long time. It has a noble feel to it. A lot of people get into that profession because they care very much about a non-profit, social, or political issue and they enjoy being a bridge for philanthropy. In the best case, the patron has a resource that the non-profit needs, and there is a mutual and transformational relationship that can occur.
This is not the essay for me to break down my feelings about American Philanthropy and Capitalism, but suffice it to say I wish that human services and the arts did not need the non-profit structure to survive. I’m tempted to write more about it though, because the very nature of the relationship, transformational as it may be, is fraught with power and control dynamics.
Money as weapon. Monetary violence. Power versus power.
One of the bright sides of the work is that you get to help be a care-taker of a mission. This feels good and wonderful. But one of the shadow sides of the work is you really don’t get to tell the real truth of your feelings much of the time. It’s a customer service job, and customers in our culture always want to be right, even when they clearly are not, and of course donations are vital to the work of the non-profit so you don’t want to alienate the donor base. The overarching philosophy of development work for the past 20 years has been this highly donor-centered focus. The donor as hero of their story (instead of the non-profit’s focus). The donor has the funding, thus the power, thus the organization may not be able to be truly honest and intimate with those donors in the relationship built between resource and need.
This can wind up being benign-ish in many cases, but can lead to things like harassment of employees with no real recourse, gift officers having the choice to fight/flight/freeze/fawn. I suspect most of us have fawned many times in our career. Just “get the gift” and have a cynical laugh at the bar, brush it off, it’s not that bad, ignore the voice that says you are complicit in…something?
This power differential doesn’t really allow the gift officer (or any customer service rep if you get down to it and most workers in a hierarchy) to be fully human and accountable with the patron/customer.
I think things are changing rapidly actually, just as a side note. Community Centric Fundraising is growing. Workers all across the boards are demanding more equity, accountability, and humane treatment from not only bosses but customers. But power and control (and where money, and resources meet and intertwine) are still part of the picture.
So…if you are a person who grew up with a strong caretaking and loving heart, and your Fawn response was strengthened due to trauma, and you enter a career that may ask you to cater to the needs of the donor no matter how off they might be or no matter how they might treat you…is that a good combination????
You might play a game with yourself about getting the gift no matter what, or tell yourself it isn’t that bad, or feel complicit if someone makes a sexist, racist, homophobic joke and you Freeze or Fawn. I held myself back in my career in huge ways because I scared of this very dynamic in major gifts.
I once did a panel at a Big 12 Conference at The University of Texas about the changing racial demographics in Texas and in UT students and how the institution needed to respond more appropriately to the needs of students dealing with racism. In that panel, and from the audience, I heard stories from gift officers from many institutions that would break your heart about having to hide their true selves, about sexual harassment, assault, racism, homophobia. No response or accountability from their bosses to help them.
This is not my current situation. I’ll come back to that in a second.
I’m a person who has grown up believing in justice. I have believed it to be, wanted it to be, a value of mine since I was a child, and I am only seeing now, how my Freeze and Fawn response has hindered my ability to make a difference in that justice work. Or, to be fair to myself, its kept me at middle ground. Because the deeper dynamic was to not truly confront Power. Yes I’ve done activist work. But yes, I’ve also been really twisted up about things at times. Held back out of fear of…being powerless. Something.
Speaking of power, I think power is. It exists as our breath exists. It flows. It is maybe an energy? An energetic part of the universe? And we can wield it maybe? Or we can try to hoard it, abuse it, steal it, use it against each other, and our family systems and our cultural systems play with it and create either healthy or toxic. Sometimes power being used for horrific means turns into a force that destroys the one who wields it. Sometimes it launches out an sweeps people up in revolution. I’m making no sense on paper, but in my mind I can see this force, perhaps Good and Evil, perhaps Love and Hate, perhaps something more mundane like…animal primates seeing dominance and control, just flowing and eddying and people grappling for it even at great costs to themselves.
I used to think of Ripley from Alien as a role model, but I’m worried I really am a lot more like Lambert or even Brett. Brett was just trying to get it all done, man. Confronting power is also having, or knowing, power. That’s part of the irony. Ripley had to confront power and she had to find her sense of it, her maternal love, her inner sense of fucking justice, to stand up.
If you believe in your own power, if you have an accountable and moral relationship with power, and if it wasn’t used against you in fear and shame, then can you wield it in the face of immoral and unjust uses? If you are afraid of your own power, if you feel shame at yourself or your own complicity with that injustice, then how on earth would you ever be able to really stand up for right action.
To me, this is part of what nonviolent antiracism and anti-white supremacy work is about. It’s about seeing the difference with the power that flows between us all, and the power that is hoarded and twisted, and how that hoarding destroys us, devastates real community, separates us from each other, and creates a dense mat of shame that holds many of us away from the part of ourselves that could help break cycles if it could just be decolonized.
I’m afraid this part of my essay is going to fall apart. My essays often do.
I said I’m not in a situation now where my work is dependent on Fawning. It’s actually, in many ways, more dependent (or more inter-dependent) on accountability and understanding that power flow. Of being able to speak, literally, truth to power in moments that are really counterintuitive to the cultural upbringing I have experienced. I love my job and I love that it’s focused on real justice and real honest relationships and real centering of art and artist and human beings in the work. Its different and it is needed. I am grateful to be there.
How to step up and into this and unlearn those old dynamics? Because if you want to be up for speaking truth to power, you have to be able to see what it’s doing, where the violence of that control is manifesting IN ONESELF and be willing to do some serious work on understanding shame, control, and the like. To recognize how that power is aimed at others through me and how to stop that cycle. To be ok with people being mad at me (which in my personal past? Was part of the whole fucking problem).
Well, it starts by telling the truth about myself and my past. Not being ashamed to state for the record what I grew up with, what molded me, what was just not ok, and how that gift of empathetic sensitive care-taking was in part of a trauma response that a sweet young tender child had hijacked.
It’s telling the truth about how the patterns of these defense mechanisms mirror each other in personal familial relationships, but also in a culture (the US) which is highly focused on dominance and POWER and the mythos of justice while injustice reigns. How could my parents and their parents escaped that? How has my own parenting shifted from that and with intention towards gentleness and non-coercion. How will my children’s path be different?
It starts with shining a light on shame and allowing there to be grace, and about speaking the truth about power. Seeing power and telling it, we aren’t going to do that same dance. Maybe power isn’t real at all, not like I’m thinking about it. Maybe it is just a primate built-in. Maybe it isn’t neutral, but always a tempting danger? Power and control are so built into our culture that I don’t often have different examples to feel from. Mutual aid comes to mind. The flow of improv at it’s best. Love. Compersion.
I think I’m just truly now at the beginning of journey I thought I started in my twenties, and in a way, it’s all a relief to see how tangled it’s been. I can maybe actually start to really live my actual values, instead of having them be manipulated by my own traumatized responses.
That is a start.
Wow, I didn’t expect such a gift when I decided to take a look at this one little article to learn what this was about. It has been a long time since I had read/seen/done something that was able to impact my intellect while bringing me to tears. Thank you.