Hope for the Demoralized
The hidden power is already inside
I've been thinking a lot about power and powerlessness lately.
In October, I'm giving a talk with my colleague Erin Finkelstein at the Team Luke Hope for Minds conference in Austin. We’re calling it "Empowering Kids and Parents Through the Quality of Human Touch," and it's got me reflecting on what empowerment actually means - especially for children with disabilities and their families.
Usually when parents and kids first come to see us, there’s some flavor of powerlessness in the mix: "We've tried everything, and it’s just hard to know if anything is really helping." I can usually hear undertones of exhaustion, worry, and demoralization with regard to the child’s challenges.
In our talk, we want to share our understanding, coming from our experience as practitioners, that the power is already inside the child. The power to learn, the power to have more choices. Our job is to help the kid and the parents uncover and experience that power within. One thing we Feldenkrais practitioners love to say is that our job isn't to "fix" anything, but we are definitely interested in empowerment!
Here are six points I’m working on for the talk:
Every child (and parent) has untapped potential, but anxiety gets in the way - In the 1960s, a researcher named Jerome Frank studied what makes different therapies work. After a wide survey1, he concluded that the most important thing any therapy does is help people stop feeling powerless to change. When someone - whether it's a parent or a child - starts to see and feel that new choices are possible, new behaviors can start to show up spontaneously.
Sometimes the potential IS the power - The writer MC Richards makes an interesting point about the Latin word potentia: “Potentia, like so many other words, has had its meanings separated out, and has come, in our day, to be both potency and potentiality, but in Latin these are the same word. And this is a wisdom. [There is] possibility in persons and things, not yet visible in force but present in seed."2 A child may not be walking yet, or talking yet, or sitting independently - but the seeds of those abilities are already there, waiting for the right conditions to grow.
The Soil is More Important than the Seeds - I love this maxim from a chapbook by the artist/activist Ricardo Levins Morales: “…the soil is more important than the seeds. Almost anything will grow in rich, nutritious soil, whereas it’s hard to get anything to grow if the soil is barren, toxic and won’t hold moisture.” For a lot of kids with disabilities, the seeds we want to help grow are specific skills and milestones, like putting sentences together or getting down off the bed by themselves. But if we take it seriously that the soil is more important than the seeds, what we really want is for skills to grow out of “the compost of beliefs, ideas, values, and narratives that create the environment in which we’re working.” As Feldenkrais practitioners, we make a certain kind of “compost” out of movement—slow, simple movements done with attunement and attention. We find that Awareness Through Movement really makes a potent environment for power to grow.
Something Smarter Than You Are - one quote I always remember from my Feldenkrais training is a teacher saying, “your brain is smarter than you are.” What a paradox! It sounds funny (and it’s not really accurate) to separate you from your brain, but it’s something we can experience in concrete ways in Feldenkrais lessons, when we do a movement in a number of ways and find that the movement gets easier by itself, automatically.
When a Feldenkrais practitioner says, “your brain is smarter than you are,” other methods have different ways of talking about it. In depth psychology they say “the unconscious” is smarter than you are. In religious philosophies, people understand a God to be smarter or more powerful.
I guess I’m just trying to point out that all these perspectives offer people ways to relate to something smarter than them. Whether it’s the brain or the unconscious or a God, when kids and parents start to have first hand experiences of this inner intelligence, it usually lets them relax a little bit and start to feel some hope that something powerful and benevolent is actually on their side.
Will Power vs. Skill Power - I have a dorky distinction I think is really helpful, between will power and skill power. Skills are really interesting to me, because when a skill is being formed, it needs to be created or learned on purpose. Think about learning to ride a bike. At first there so many things to think about! Hands on the handle bars, pushing the pedals, balancing. Developing a skill takes will power, courage, concentration, deliberation, and more, but then at some point, the skills become automatic, and they don’t require conscious thought.
You can tell when somebody is really highly skilled at something because they make it look effortless, and at a sufficiently high skill level in any given domain, automaticity leaves room for intuition to come in. Gut feelings, intuitions, hunches, inspirations, spontaneity, creativity.
This kind of skill power is the goal of the work we do. We are looking to help kids develop skill power. Willpower is an important piece of the puzzle, but not the end goal, because we’re looking for effortless, spontaneous, organic skill power that comes through the kid in an intuitive, personal way.
Individual Power Comes Through Relationship - We think skill empowerment happens best through IRL, personal, interactive movement relationships. We believe that high quality human touch and presence can’t be replicated through programs or protocols. When we connect with a child through our hands to explore movement together, we’re offering our personal skill-powers as an environment for them to learn inside. When a kid feels held, literally and figuratively, in a way that allows their own power to emerge, it’s super exciting for us and for them. That’s why Erin and I feel strongly about the ‘quality of human touch’ in our talk title. Our take is that high touch relationship is the soil where empowerment grows, and mass industrial approaches, however well-intentioned, can’t offer this kind of personal, highly attuned connection. We think real empowerment happens person to person.
These are some of the ideas we’ll be exploring in Austin in October. We’re gonna mix in some movement experiences, too, so folks have an immediate experience of what we’re talking about. If any of you reading this email might be at the conference, please come say hi! Otherwise, I’d love to hear your thoughts about any of these points.
- Ethan
The Jerome Frank book is Persuasion and Healing.
I love all of this, but especially the soil being more important than the seed....
beautifully put!