Power Dynamics Quotes

“Was it my idea to have him hurt me, or did he just let me think it was?”
― Eliza Clark, Boy Parts

“Do you like it rough? I think so. I think I must. Men are rough, aren't they? Have I always had a taste for rough stuff, or did I acquire that? In the back of Lesley's car, on the floor of a friend's house, half-conscious with my underwear around my ankles? Was it my idea to have him hurt me, or did he just let me think it was?”
― Eliza Clark, Boy Parts

“(Talking about the movement to deny the prevalence and effects of adult sexual exploitation of children)
So what does this movement consist of? Who are the movers and shakers? Well molesters are in it, of course. There are web pages telling them how to defend themselves against accusations, to retain confidence about their ‘loving and natural’ feelings for children, with advice on what lawyers to approach, how to complain, how to harass those helping their children. Then there’s the Men’s Movements, their web pages throbbing with excitement if they find ‘proof’ of conspiracy between feminists, divorcing wives and therapists to victimise men, fathers and husbands.
Then there are journalists. A few have been vitally important in the US and Britain in establishing the fightback, using their power and influence to distort the work of child protection professionals and campaign against children’s testimony. Then there are other journalists who dance in and out of the debates waggling their columns behind them, rarely observing basic journalistic manners, but who use this debate to service something else – a crack at the welfare state, standards, feminism, ‘touchy, feely, post-Diana victimhood’. Then there is the academic voice, landing in the middle of court cases or inquiries, offering ‘rational authority’. Then there is the government. During the entire period of discovery and denial, not one Cabinet minister made a statement about the prevalence of sexual abuse or the harm it caused.
Finally there are the ‘retractors’. For this movement to take off, it had to have ‘human interest’ victims – the accused – and then a happy ending – the ‘retractors’. We are aware that those ‘retractors’ whose parents trail them to newspapers, television studios and conferences are struggling. Lest we forget, they recanted under palpable pressure.”
― Beatrix Campbell, Stolen Voices: The People and Politics Behind the Campaign to Discredit Childhood Testimony

“In this book we paint an unprecedented portrait of Britain’s first ‘false memory’ retraction and show that, like other ‘false memory’ cases which appeared in the public domain, memory itself was always a false trail – these women never forgot. We are not challenging people’s right to tell their own story and then to change it. But we do assert that the chance should be interpreted in the context that created it.
Thousands of accounts of sexual and physical abuse in childhood cannot be explained by a pseudo-scientific ‘syndrome’. We have been shifted to the wrong debate, a debate about the malignancy of survivors and their allies, rather than those who have hurt them. That’s why the arguments have become so elusive. […]”
― Beatrix Campbell, Stolen Voices: The People and Politics Behind the Campaign to Discredit Childhood Testimony

“The vanities of life:pleasure, possession, position and power.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!

“In the cult, the people in power dictate what cult members are to do. Children raised in cults are systematically stripped of their own autonomous power and forced to feel powerful only in the destructive context allowed by the cult, and always under the power of the leader. Ritual abuse survivors have had to learn to be outer oriented - to perceive what is expected of them and do that, whether it is healthy for them or not. When a therapist creates a context in which he or she is the leader, and the client is to listen, learn, and follow what the therapist says, the therapist has inadvertently replicated the power system of the cult.

That is not to say that the therapist has no power; the therapist has a lot of power, but the power the therapist has resides in authority based upon his or her expertise, knowledge, training and sensitivity. The point is to use this authority in a way in which the client can also begin to feel his or her own authority, and begin to develop a healthy feeling of power.

The word used quite often now is "empowerment." How do you empower a client?”
― Lynette S Danylchuk

“On the other hand, she happily kept him informed about plans she had with other people, providing a steady flow of information about excursions that were about to happen, details of dates or parties that were always this close to coming together. As long as he listened, without complaint, to an endless description of activities that were supposed to happen without him, there was a 30 percent chance, at least, that Anna would change her mind at the last minute, claim to be unable to handle the unbearable burden of whatever her social plans were supposed to be, and decide to hang out with him instead. She'd arrive at his house and collapse in exaggerated relief: "I am so glad we're doing this, I was so not in the mood for another party at Maria's." As though they were both equally at the mercy of circumstance, similarly oblivious to the power dynamic that governed their "friendship.”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This

“BDSM, in its nature, is a very intimate and intelligent therapy, if done properly.”
― Silver Vixxxen, Miss. A and Johnny's European Escapade LONDON: Femme Fatale Rescue Diaries

“We needed something to nurture, and they needed nurturing. Constant attention made you need it even more. The band never learned to be alone and neither did we. But if they were starved for attention and we were, too, didn't we make a perfect pair?”
― Sarah Priscus, Groupies

“Many professionals have to sign gagging clauses or face the sack if they speak out. The social worker and therapist was familiar with the scare that revelation brings to the survivor. […]

We are in this story. It isn't ours, but we are in it nonetheless, not least because of the viscous campaign which has followed us over the last ten years. Any organisation with which we work may receive correspondence from the accused adults’ and ‘false memory’ movements. Some of these propagandists are confidentially dominating the professional and political arguments using new information technology to spread what we consider to be smears, innuendo and misinformation. P8
(refers to authors Beatrix Campbell & Judith Jones – a journalist and a social worker/therapist)”
― Beatrix Campbell, Stolen Voices: The People and Politics Behind the Campaign to Discredit Childhood Testimony

“But that was the nature of relationships: there always seemed to be an imbalance of one sort or another.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“The problem, she's starting to understand, is that a man will never let you fall completely into hell. He will scoop you up right before you drop the final inch so that you cannot blame him for sending you there. He keeps you in a dinerlike purgatory instead, waiting and hoping and taking orders.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“Questions about the validity of violence should have been directed to those institutions that held and continue to hold a monopoly on violence: the police, the prisons, the military.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle

“There should be a better way to offer something, anything, to people who need it. And yet no transaction is uncomplicated, no relationship is without a power dynamic, and “help” isn’t always what we think it is.”
― Ada Limon

“rotted down from manhood by their hopeless misery on the isle; wonted to cringe in all things to their lord, himself the worst of slaves; these wretches were now become wholly corrupted to his hands. He used them as creatures of an interior race; in short, he gaffles his four animals, and makes murderers of them; out of cowards fitly manufacturing bravoes.”
― Herman Melville , The Encantadas and Other Stories

“Employing relatives changes power dynamics.”
― Enock Maregesi

“Equality of condition and equality of opportunity must provide the foundation of an interdependent nation with building blocks found in dignity and respect given to every American, regardless of socioeconomic status.”
― Julie Banks Lewis, Critical Masses: Who Wins, Who Loses, Who Decides

“But I think mostly I just wanted her to … make me real, the way you’re real when the beautiful people look at you, and talk to you, and let you fuck them.”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“A toxic system represents a malevolent force that leads to the death of the invisible.”
― William Castano-Bedoya, We the Other People: The Beggars of the Mercury Lights

“You do not eat these carnivorous animals, you imitate them; you hunger only for the innocent and gentle beast who do no harm to anyone, who are attached to you, who serve you,and that you devour as a reward for their servicers.”
― Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I

“Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five

“So many things that never should have belonged to him had become his.”
― Genevieve Wheeler, Adelaide