Power and Emotion in Human Learning Systems

 

Matt Bell and Andy Crosbie have been journeying together for a while. They met through the HLS Collaborative. They are both doing forms of Place work in Plymouth and Gateshead respectively, so gravitated together through that shared connection. A friendship has developed, reinforced by the fact that they have each done a lot of journeying inwards, questioning what it means to be a white man actively advocating for shifting power. After a number of heart-to-heart and head-to-head conversations, they decided to try to capture some of their dialogue through a free-flowing blog. The following is what happened when they did:

Matt

How we use our power directly impacts what can happen or what does happen. When we're working in teams, organisations and local systems trying to achieve change, this can have a major impact. A power we hold is the power to shape the agenda to meet either our sole needs, the needs of just our organisation, or the needs of the wider collaboration or system that we might be operating within. In being able to set the agenda, we then limit or expand the story of what happens depending on what agenda has been set. We can limit the story to the story of just our own organisations or we can expand the story to include the stories of others. The agenda setting and storytelling power is one of the biggest unseen controls that I see used across the system to marginalise.

To demonstrate this let's look at an example. Having recently been introduced by the Director of Public Health as the 'grit in the oyster,' I have spent some time wondering whether that was a positive story being told. The power held in the rank of Director of Public Health is significant so even if I wanted to change that story, I couldn't easily do so. Their ability to tell my story is more powerful than my ability to tell my own story. This dynamic exists everywhere. I’m lucky. As a white man I only have to contend with personal stories. I don’t have to contend with a narrative that has me negatively pigeonholed before I’ve even been introduced. In fact as a Scottish white man, I generally experience a very positive narrative. 

But if I experienced stories that were negative, that labeled me as angry, dangerous or unworthy AND then this impacted on something I cared deeply about, for example my son, then I would be much more likely to get emotional and angry - not just about the story being told about me, nor just about the real world impact, but also about my powerlessness. 

There is a balance to strike here. Everyone always has personal power. Whatever our position and power, we can always retain a personal power. I think the message is that to retain personal power takes a lot more effort if you are consistently in lower positions.

I think our best starting point within any situation is to reach inside ourselves and inquire into the power we are holding in that situation. Once aware we can start to use it wisely.

Andy

Matt likes to start these conversations with a focus on ‘power’. I prefer to start somewhere more personal, with questions of how we’re showing up and what we’re revealing of ourselves to other people - and how the system has taught us to show up. We have all been taught to ‘sever the heart’, to ‘take the emotions out of it’, to ‘leave our personal lives at home’. And I’ve inadvertently played this game for a long time. I have developed a very good poker face. Matt also told me recently how close to tears he feels most of the time these days. And I share that, I feel that too. I am hurting. We are hurting. But our system, our culture does not allow us to show up with this and share it. We are all encouraged - required even - to act as though we don’t feel. The system we live in rewards those who sever their heart and penalises those who show theirs.

I’m an educated, middle-class, white man. I’m the sort of person our current systems were built by and for. And while I’ve been working in social justice fields for a couple of decades, I’m only slowly coming to realise how much those systems of privilege have held me in their grip. It is very easy for me to set an agenda, to command a room, because I’m the sort of person we’re taught to listen to and I have subconsciously responded to this over my life by embodying the behaviours that the system rewards with power - primarily severing the heart, hiding emotion.

The truth is I’m hurting deeply. I feel overwhelmed by the state of the world, lost, deeply disheartened by the sheer number of people continuing to play the same old games. And I feel deeply separated from other people, from planet, in a way I don’t fully understand but I recognise is causing me pain. So I’m trying something new. I’m trying to show up differently. I’m trying to show up with my emotion, with my vulnerability, with my uncertainty - and inviting others to do the same, to build different kinds of connection to the ‘professionally distanced’ ones we’re normally encouraged to form.

Matt

Andy’s right. The way I tend to start is with the impersonal. The change I want to see. The bit of the world I see as ‘wrong’ and can feel justifiably angry at. Because I’m angry. I grew up not wanting to be like my Dad, someone who simultaneously was the source of huge hurt and huge inspiration. I had a mantra at Uni, “I will not be like Dad”. Inside me there’s a lot of unprocessed ‘stuff’ and the way it comes out is to seek to control and to be angry. Luckily it has never had a life-altering impact (on me or others) - but at times it has been close. 

At Christmas I met up with my Dad. I never know how it will go. We either get into deep philosophical discussions about ‘who is I’, the ego and letting go, or we clash and there’s a huge blow up. Lately it’s difficult to have the former discussion because I look at the evidence in front of me (my Dad) and see that despite all the words, there is simply no evidence it has shifted my Dad into any state of higher anything. Instead I see someone who has been broken by life. 

What does this have to do with anything outside my slightly dysfunctional family? The fact is that I carry a proportion of my Dad’s and Mum’s hurt, plus my own. It impacts on how well I operate at work, how well I form the bonds of friendship and how well I manage to self-soothe when everything is getting a bit too much. Quite a lot of the time, I do it just well enough not to crash. And if I’m carrying this weight from a white middle class upbringing as a cis male (read less income stress with no significant, systematic discrimination), I’m guessing there are a lot of people carrying a lot more - actually, I know there are people carrying a lot more. And their weight results in crashes. And those crashes, in turn, add more weight. 

One of the weird things that has happened over the last year or two is that, at times, I sometimes feel I’m feeling more than just my pain, tears coming readily when I hear about injustice and other people’s harsher experiences - or maybe it’s just tapping into my pain more directly?  Maybe it’s a midlife crisis?? Whatever is happening, as I do more at work to support open, listening cultures, ready to learn, disagree and act, this emotional exposure becomes greater - I do not believe that you can build incredible places to work without a significant level of personal vulnerability. And vulnerability brings emotions. And emotions come from many sources, not just work. And all of this requires processing. 

And my hope comes from here. Whilst I have experienced badly managed emotional situations and I have had a glimpse of how hurt can be locked into you from a young age, I have also experienced the release you can get when people genuinely connect into this way of working and levels of trust are at their highest. This is why I feel so strongly about the topic of power, rank and privilege - because if we carry on using it like children in a playground we won’t be able to unlock the incredible humanity in us. 

Andy

I’m working with my coach on paying much more attention to how I’m feeling, tuning into the wisdom of my body, being curious about what my emotions and my physical sensations are showing me. This is all new to me. I’ve always been a so-called ‘high achiever’, able to work at a phenomenal pace, juggle multiple things simultaneously, generally get a lot done to a very high standard. I am slowly coming to recognise that I have only been able to operate like that by suppressing parts of myself. I have gotten very good at ignoring my body, giving no space to my emotions. And then I was bewildered by how I would hit a wall every few years and just crash. I thought this was about the world, about how other people were treating me. I didn’t realise it was about how I was treating myself.

I was having a conversation with my mum last week that somehow or other got us onto the topic of intergenerational trauma. I told my mum how I see the behavioural patterns that started in the parental neglect she experienced as a child (if not much, much earlier) are playing out in me in 2025 and in my siblings, even though I did not experience that neglect. My need to look after others, to always put others first. My disregard for and struggles to articulate my own needs. I drive my wife, Georgi, mad with some of this stuff because it literally does not make sense. And yet it’s in all of us, and yet it goes unacknowledged and ignored.

We did an amazing workshop, run by Tim Malnick, a few years ago called The Money Workshop. In this workshop, we explored people’s personal relationship to money. In Tim’s framework, money is ‘a substance onto which we project those parts of ourselves from which we have become disassociated.’ To explain that by way of examples, one colleague of mine experiences money as ‘abuse’, as this was a feature of a previous relationship of theirs. As a result, they try to push money away, to not engage with it. Another experiences money as ‘having options or choices’, so they like to spend it. For me, money is ‘selfishness’. I struggle to spend it on myself (see: stuff above about disregarding my own needs), but am much more comfortable spending it on others. My point in this example is that this sort of stuff sits beneath the surface in all of us. It’s not just about money, but money is a great example. Commissioners routinely make decisions about where to deploy vast sums of money. These decisions are intended to be reasoned and impartial, but beneath the surface, every single commissioner (read: human) is being pushed by these formative, emotional, often inter-generational forces THAT WE NEVER TALK ABOUT AND ACT LIKE THEY DON’T EXIST.

We are all driven by our emotions, but we’re operating in a culture that requires us to pretend that we’re not, requires us to conceal our emotions, and act as though they don’t exist. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that commissioners would make ‘better’ decisions about money if they understood their own personal relationship with money better, and if this was part of an open dialogue with the people with whom they work. I also suspect that they would experience healthier, happier, more whole lives if they did so. There is a deep, deep connection between emotions and power that I am only now, in my mid-40s, starting to see and understand.

Matt

I've really enjoyed this exchange. The way Andy and I did it was very loose. I started and we went from there, reacting and responding. We've talked about the interplay of emotion, decision making and power in various different, hopefully very human, ways. And Andy brought in the fascinating insight and invitation for us to think about one of those most emotive subjects - our relationship to money. Thank you Andy, it's been a pleasure! 

If you’d like to join us for more of this sort of thing, we’ll be holding a dialogue webinar on June 18th, 9:30-11. You can register for that session on the events page.

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Format: Blogs

Tags: Culture , Values , Purpose , Accountability , Responsibility , Rehumanising Work , Empathy , Identity

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