Power and Violence: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
If you haven’t yet, please read our previous post, Power and Violence (it’s not what you think).
In our last post, we talked about power on an individual level and what it means to be either in your power, or to cause violence: power is moving towards your goal, and violence is having your goal delayed or derailed by your own inability to control your movements.
This may feel conceptual or abstract, so let’s use ice skating as an example. A powerful ice skater moves gracefully across the ice, jumping and spinning at will without falling. A violent ice skater is unable to control their movements; they are imbalanced and unpredictable, and the feats they attempt usually result in a crash or fall.
But what do power and violence look like beyond just the self, when there are other people involved?
Since power is the ability to move towards your goal, power in the context of interpersonal dynamics is the ability to motivate and work with others to achieve a common goal. We call this leadership (Erna has a whole book about it). In ice skating, this might be represented by the captain of a hockey team calling plays on the ice, or a smoothly synchronized figure skating duo.
Violence against others can manifest in two ways: you can derail people because of your own inability to control your movements (imagine a partner in a figure skating pair who accidentally drops his other half); or, you can derail people from being in their power because you forcibly try to control their behavior (the jerk at the public ice skating rink who pushes between two skaters holding hands).
These three things – (1) the ability to move people towards achieving shared goals; (2) the inadvertent derailment of people from completing their goals; and (3) the control of people against their will – we call the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
The Good
The Good includes all interpersonal interactions that are functional. We consider interactions functional when people can coexist harmoniously, and everyone is able to act of their own volition. For example, when a group of people volunteer to pick up litter from the beach together, or neighbors participate in a block party potluck, everyone is there because they want to be there.
When people interact in a functional way, they are – by definition – non-violent. They may work together towards a shared goal, or each have their individual goals, but no one is impeding others from pursuing what they’ve set their sights on. In Good interactions, people can have tight-knit relationships or only be peripherally connected; as long as their actions do not encroach on someone else’s power, we consider this Good.
Some examples of Good high-touch interactions include:
Working together as a team to achieve a larger goal
Providing someone with counseling, advice, guidance or mentorship
Sharing knowledge with someone (only if they are receptive! No unwanted brain dumps here!)
Motivating someone to pursue their goal
Other Good interactions that are light-touch – but are still Good – include:
Being polite or courteous during interactions
Encouraging and expressing support for someone
It’s even possible to have Good interactions when not everyone fully gets their way. When we make compromises with someone, there is an agreement that each of us is giving up something willingly for the benefit of maintaining the relationship. For example, because I want to enjoy a vacation with my friend, I may willingly agree to stay at the hotel she chooses even if it wouldn’t have been my top choice; there is no force or pressure applied, just a discussion and agreement.
The defining characteristic of (capital-G) Good interactions is that everyone is allowed to maintain their autonomy; no one’s power – including the power of choice – is taken away from them.
The Bad
The Bad describes relationships where someone’s ability to move towards their goal is impeded, usually because of another person’s “unskilled” behavior. This might include:
Being inconsiderate or not thinking that one’s behavior might have an impact others
Making an error, misjudgment, or mistake that impedes someone else from pursuing their goals
Because one or more people in the interaction are knocked off course from moving towards their goal, Bad behavior is dysfunctional. When an interaction is dysfunctional, it simply doesn’t work. It is maladjusted or faulty and produces poor outcomes that cause harm or injuries, whether or not those injuries were intentional.
For example, while we’re on vacation, my friend might be relaxing in a long bath while I’m starving and would like to leave for dinner soon. Either she has to cut her relaxation time short, or I have to stay hungry for longer, or we eat dinner separately (which defeats the purpose of being on vacation together). One way or another, someone is going to end up unhappy because they feel forced into doing something they don’t want, which makes this a Bad interaction.
(Capital-B) Bad interactions are often characterized by the lack of awareness or concern of the actor that their behavior could have an impact on someone else.
It’s also possible that a person who means to work in cooperation with other people simply makes a mistake, causing a bad outcome for everyone. For example, booking a dinner reservation for 2/8/2025, thinking you’re going on February 8th. However, you’ve forgotten the fact that because the reservation is for your vacation in Paris, you’ve inadvertently booked your reservation for August 2nd. This is less dysfunction and more malfunction (when something fails to work as expected), but it’s still Bad.
The Ugly
The Ugly is where the worst type of dysfunction occurs: control and abuse. While everyone can safely agree that abuse is a horrible thing, there’s a lot less agreement when it comes to the idea of control.
People often use the words power and control synonymously; when someone says, “I am in my power,” most people hear, “I am in control,” but these two things are not the same. For someone to be in their power, they need three things: (1) a goal, target, or destination that they’re aiming for; (2) some means of moving from their current position towards their goal, such as abilities and resources; and (3) situational awareness and the skill to react non-violently to their environment. It’s this third attribute that we call self-control. Self-control is what keeps people from behaving (capital-B) Badly and is a necessary component to being in one’s power.
When it comes to interpersonal dynamics, though, the difference between power and control is stark; it is the difference between function and dysfunction, non-violence and violence. When someone is in their power within a group, they are a leader who is able to motivate or incentivize people to work towards a common goal. As a leader, they still need situational awareness and the ability to direct people to act in a non-violent way, but people follow their lead voluntarily, not because they were forced to.
When someone is in control of other people, the person in control can force others to do what he or she decides, stripping others of their ability to decide how to act, or whether acting is even in their best interest. The person in control sets the goal – there is no shared goal, and the people being controlled are merely tools used to get what this person wants. When people are controlled, they are stripped of their own self-control, and must subsume their will to their controller.
The key difference between power and control in interpersonal relationships is whether a person is able to maintain their autonomy. Power is given to someone willingly, while control is taken from someone who then has no choice in the matter.
When someone no longer has any autonomy, they become vulnerable to abuse because they cannot say no to the person with control over them. When the person in control forces them to do things they would otherwise object to, this is abuse – the worst kind of Ugly.
Examples of Ugly behavior designed to take away someone’s autonomy include:
Coercing, manipulating, or guilt-tripping someone into doing something they don’t want to do
Intimidating, frightening, threatening, or punishing someone for refusing a request
Humiliating, embarrassing, shaming, blaming, or degrading someone for something they did, to prevent them from acting of their own volition in the future
Isolating and withholding care from someone so that they become disconnected and have no one to turn to
Gaslighting and undermining someone’s perception of reality such that they no longer trust their own judgment
“Good” Control?
“But wait,” you might be thinking, “isn’t it possible for someone to demand good things? To be controlling in a good way? My parents demanded I get straight A’s in school, and it helped me to get into a good college.”
This is why control is a very slippery slope: yes, someone can achieve great heights because they’ve been pushed to succeed, but when that drive does not come from within (i.e., they do not share the same goal as the person controlling them), their success may not bring them happiness. When someone is forced to achieve, they often feel that their value to the person controlling them comes only from what they accomplish; if they stop achieving, they lose not just their value in the eyes of that person, they also lose their own self-worth. This commonly leads to long-term and persistent anxiety and depression.
When people who feel they lack autonomy end up with harmful physical, emotional, and behavioral symptoms consistent with abuse, it doesn’t matter what the person who exerted control over them intended – the damage has been done. For this reason, we evaluate (capital-U) Ugly interactions by the resulting damage caused by the controlling behavior, and not by the intent behind why the control was exerted.
