After a lecture on power, human rights and ethics, a social work student said: “social workers have no power!” He said it as an unequivocal truth and many other students agreed with him. This came as a surprise to me and we had a discussion about it then and there in class. This podcast explores power as an idea and practice, mainly in a professional context.

It identifies the various ways social workers and other helping professionals can feel powerless, in their personal lives and in their professional roles. For example, a workplace culture that is toxic, unsupportive and possibly where social workers are subjected to bullying, can undercut their resilience and ability to exercise their power as is required in fulfilling their role. Power tends to be thought of as “someone has all the power and I have none!” and variations on this theme. And this way of thinking in itself can make a lot of sense when someone is feeling powerless.

At the same time if we think of power as being constituted in a myriad of ways along a continuum this can give us more room to move and seek ways of being empowered. On one end of the power continuum is love as power – eg acts of gentle loving kindness as a type of power at the heart of all helping professions’ caring mandate. At the other end of the continuum is violence as power – eg assault, wars, harassment, coercive control. Legal use of power as per legislation such as the Mental Health Act, falls on the continuum along the violence end of the continuum. This is the case even though it is professionally and legally sanctioned to force a person to have a mental health assessment and possibly treatment against their will, in some very specific circumstances.

These kinds of reflections bring the conversation to the main point that no matter how dire the situation, or how powerless we can feel in our professional work, we can always act (ie use power) to be kind, respectful and caring. This always matters and is perhaps even the most important aspect of professional use of power that isn’t given enough credence. We may not be able to help in the way the person wants for a range of reasons, but we can always validate, acknowledge, listen, and be kind. This is love as power at work. At the same time we shouldn’t use acts of kindness to avoid our responsibility to be competent and of substance in what we offer to people.

You can read more on this topic in my book, Broken-heartedness: towards love in professional practice, published by Revolutionaries.

Let me know what you think and thank you for supporting my work, Dyann

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