7 ways need-responders equalize power relations

A bulk of overlooked needs in society result from professional power relations and their unresponsive institutions. Social power silences dissent with their oppositional systems. As distrust in our institutions hit all-time lows, our need-responders complement or competes with these failing systems—built into adversarial justice and polarizing politics—with a more engaging reconciling process anchored in mutual respect.

Which do you think is more likely?

All current helping professions sufficiently address and solve all of our current problems.

OR

We can solve our problems only when the helping professions address each affected need.

Do you view lawyers and psychotherapists as fully responsive to your needs? Or as a matter of professional design, do they limit the scope of how much they can actually help you to escape your pain? If yearning for a more responsive alternative, consider these seven ways need-responders could outperform lawyers, politicians and psychotherapists.

As need-responders, we aim to restore this ideal balance in a number of ways.

1. First, we identify power relations impacting your wellbeing.

2. We then unpack common phases in that power relation.

3. We replace the adversarial with a reconciling approach.

4. We replace arbitrary legitimacy with earned trust.

5. We support leaders to transform restrictive social structures.

6. We assert the greater power and authority of love.

7. We refer to available research on power dynamics.

1. First, we identify power relations impacting your wellbeing.

A power relation exists when one side holds more influence on the relation than the other. It may be called by other names.

• power relationship

• power differential

• power imbalance

• power imbalanced relationship

The typical power relation is between a powerholder and a relatively powerless person. The terms of the relationship tend to favor the powerholder, at the powerless one’s expense.

The relation can be brief, as between a banker denying a loan and the customer with poor credit. Or it can be long term, as between an employer and employee.

Such power dynamics even occur between romantic and married couples. That type of power differential falls outside the scope of this impact parity model (or IPM).

The less the powerholder personally knows the relatively powerless, the greater the risk for harm. Think of the damage an uninformed powerholder may cause in those who habitually avoid the risk of retribution by not speaking up.

• Cop over citizen. Coerced compliance to the cop’s will.

• Manager over line worker. Pleasing the boss over full throttled productivity.

• Teacher over student. Learning to appease more than learning the subject matter.

• Counselor over client. Withholding honest feelings that may risk rejection.

• Doctor over patient. Avoid admitting symptoms from poor health choices.

And so forth. As the second feels forced, the first loses reputational efficacy. Such unaddressed imbalances could be fueling our institutional decline.

The more humanity departs from its indigenous tribal roots, where everyone could personally know one another, the greater these power differentials present as a problem. We need a new type of profession to fill this gap, before modern society collapses from crushing alienation. That new profession is need-response.

To keep this simple, need-response identifies the powerholding side as the Ascribed Impactor (or AI), and the powerless side as the Reporting Impactee (or RI).

Chart: Impact Parity Model (IPM)

Let’s depict this to illustrate the greater weight of the AI’s influence over the RI. Despite many laws that prohibit outright taking advantage of the powerless, AIs tend to exact concessions from RIs in often less socially visible ways. We then blame the RI for much of the damaging results.

Left to its own devices, these power relations deprive each side the opportunity to fully resolve their needs. While the RI risks more unresolved needs than the AI, the impact parity model can help the AI to address more of their own overlooked needs in these distorting relations. First, need-responders help to unpack the common phases that throws both sides into mutual blind spots.

2. We then unpack common phases in that power relation.

​Research into power relations observe a kind of approach-and-avoidance dance. Put in another way, one side expresses a stance to fight when the other side seeks flight.

The tide may turn. When the RI cannot take anymore, their avoidance of AI pressures shifts into adversarial overdrive. They push back. Until the AI placates enough concern to maintain their grip on power. At least until the RI returns to vociferous complaining. Rince and repeat.

The more RIs under the AI’s influence, the harder for the AI to relate to each RI’s specific needs. The AI counts on trusted generalizes to keep RIs content. But the further these generalizations stray from RI’s specific needs, trouble erupts again in this predictable pattern.

Chart: power relation common phases

Each situation follows its own unique path. Sometimes the RI remains stuck in the avoidance phase. Sometimes the adversarial phase results in separation between the RI and AI.

Need-response offers a transition out of these debilitating patterns. Need-responders bring both sides in one of these power relations to identify and address each other’s affected needs. Using the power of love, need-responders leads all sides in a reconciling transition to

• resolve more needs,

• remove more pain, and

• unleash more potential.

One step or phase at a time.

Avoidance phase

Initially, avoidance typically prevails. Few impactees dare rock the boat. A little unfairness can be tolerated. The impactor can easily get the mistaken impression that their influence is only positive.

This easily fuels avoidance culture. Avoidance culture is a set of norms for evading what feels too uncomfortable to face. Avoidance culture normalizes our behavior of avoiding important matters we'd rather overlook, dodging the reality of our many needs. Avoidance culture features…

• moralizing all pain as bad

• leaving own trauma unprocessed

• being dismissive of others

• expressing unrealistic expectations

• reinforcing isolation and alienation

• normalizing hyper-rationality

• evading meaningful discussions

• prioritizing privacy over social connections

• guarding all of one’s own vulnerabilities

• spreading mistrust and fear

These tend to advantage elites at our expense. They generally view us as lacking courage, and their interests tend to be served by keeping us trapped in fear and the pain of their own pressuring influences.

Need-responders have learned to reorient themselves from habitually avoiding discomfort to embracing more of life’s discomforts. That includes enduring the discomfort of speaking truth to power despite the risks.

We all present what anankelogy calls an “easement orientation”. Most of us feel oriented to avoid discomfort. We prioritize relieving pain over resolving needs that could remove the cause for pain.

In our first development program, need-responders learn to shift their easement orientation from a mostly relieve-over-resolve direction to a resolve-over-relieve direction. This equips them to help you endure the discomforts necessary along the path toward solving your problems of unresolved needs.

The more discomfort you can face, the more of life you can embrace.

Adversarial phase

As imbalance grows more painful, the impactee often reaches a breaking point. They resist further compromise. Which often takes the complacent impactor by surprise. Who understandably gets defensive.

This easily fuels oppo culture. Oppo (or opposition) culture is a set of norms pitting us against each other. Oppo culture normalizes the notion that every issue is a winner-take-all battle, dodging the reality of our inflexible needs. Oppo culture features…

• black-and-white thinking

• insisting others are wrong & oneself as right

• eagerness to fight

• little if any listening

• disregard for empathizing

• pursing a selfish agenda

• expressing self-righteous beliefs

• projecting own pain onto hated others

• provoking mutual defensiveness

• provoking outrage and hate

These tend to advantage elites at our expense. They generally view us as entrenched in conflicts, and their interests tend to be served by keeping us trapped in ongoing conflicts.

Need-responders have learned to reorient themselves from habitually taking oppositional sides to engaging the stubborn needs that keep us digging in our heels. That includes treating those in power as equals, whose needs are no more or less important than our own.

We all present what anankelogy calls a “conflict orientation”. Many of us react to disputes by either going to the extreme of arrogantly fighting when we could take the more proactive steps to solve the disputes by addressing the conflicting needs. To avoid discomfort, too many of us prioritize winning arguments for instant relief over resolving each other’s needs with the power of love.

In our next development program, need-responders learn to shift their conflict orientation from a mainly closed-and-guarded direction to an open-and-learning direction. This equips them to help you resolve conflicts by more effectively addressing the stubborn needs on all sides in a conflict.

What you reactively resist you reflexively reinforce. The problems then persist down a different course. After all, opposing what others need does not extinguish moral conflict, but enflames it.

Continually vacillating or finding balance

Alternatively, this impact parity model equips the impactee to speak truth to power of their impacted needs. This need-response process enables the AI to listen to other impacted RI without accepting fault. Unlike politics or the judiciary, this isn't adversarial. Unlike psycho-therapy, this does not stray into pain avoidance.

In contrast to other services, the need-response process aims for mutual support for resolving each other’s affected needs. The incentivized AI can then apply what they learn to others similarly situated, to improve their leadership effectiveness. All the while letting this proactive process attract more diverse resources toward resolving more and more needs.

The power relation equalizes as the AI's need to listen to those impacted (LTTI) sits on par with the RI's need to speak truth to power (STTP). Interdependence replaces the norms of avoidance and hostility.

The need-response process invites the RI to list possible sanctions against the unresponsive AI. This list of adversarial options dangles over the AI like a Damocles’ Sword, ready to fall if the AI fails to meet a minimal standard of ceasing any harm, legally privileged or not.

AI are also incentivized with positive rewards. When agreeing to our proactive reconciling process the waives all adversarial options, the RI agrees to respect the AI’s inflexible needs on condition the AI demonstrate adequate responsiveness to the RI’s inflexible needs.

A more flexible need of the AI is their professional reputation, or an institution’s brand. The more demonstrably responsive to the RI they directly or indirectly impact, the more legitimacy the AI earns. More on that below, under #4.

As the AI becomes dependent on cooperative RI to provide valuable impact data these AI require to improve their leadership effectiveness, the power relation can more readily equalize. When each side needs the other to treat them as equal, without distorting the expertise of authority, both are freer to resolve more of their affected needs.

3. We replace the adversarial with a reconciling approach.

Need-responders invite AI to participate in our preferable process of mutual support. If faced with the alternative of adversarial options (legal or not), our reconciling approach will inevitably seem much preferred. Best to grant amicable recourse than be subjected to harsh recourse.

If you’re the AI, which would you prefer? To try this reconciling approach of mutual support, or face one or more of the RI’s legally available adversarial options?

• risk a publicly posted 1-out-of-5 rating

• risk a social media smear campaign

• risk bad press

• risk an ethics board review

• risk a government agency’s time-consuming investigation

• risk losing competitive advantage to others more demonstrably responsive

• risk damaging own professional reputation

• risk a lawsuit

Need-responders guard the integrity of this process. They must challenge any attempt by an RI to game this system. The more an RI uses an adversarial option to try to manipulate the process to serve their own interests at any AI’s expense, the less support they will find from the need-responder community.

Unlike lawyers or therapists who get paid for advocating for an individual or group at odds with others, need-responders only receive full compensation when the identified needs of both the RI and AIs are adequately addressed toward resolution. Favoring either the AI or the RI risks disincentivizing the need-responder’s committed aims, and bottom line. For the need-responder, it’s the reconciling approach or bust.

Once the AI enters into the need-response reconciling approach, the RI agrees to set aside all of their available adversarial options. The RI and AI agree to afford each other adequate space to mutually address each other’s affected needs. They spurn indulging in a fight in exchange for giving mutual understanding a supported try.

If politics and the judiciary serve as our only models, no wonder we believe fighting each other is better than understanding each other. Every court battle and election battle produce winners or losers. These adversarial institutions give lip service but little to any actual concern for our affected needs. Need-responds towers morally over them all with our reconciling approach.

Need-responders incentivize those in a judicial or political conflict to pursue a more loving route. Instead of presuming all sides are inextricably opposed to each other, need-response holds all sides accountable to identify and address the inflexible needs on all sides. No more privileging of hate.

The standard adversarial approach tends to trap you pain of unmet needs. At best, they offer pain relief for the winning side. The losing side get more pain, in the name of the law. “You’ve got a better approach?” they demand. Now you can reply with a resounding Yes!

If you compare the standard adversarial approach driving us all apart to the need-responsive alternative of this more reconciling approach, why would anyone prefer this litany of poor results?

Chart: contrasting the standard adversarial approach with the need-responsive reconciling approach

Can you see how this reconciliing approach effectively incentivizes both the AI and RI to not slip into the extremes of avoidance and conflict? The more needs can more freely resolve, there is less cause for pain, for conflict, for hate.

Like a rising tide, resolved needs lifts all boats. Incidents of violence would decrease. Rates of poor health would decline. Levels of enjoying life would naturally rise. What AI wouldn’t prefer being associated with such positive outcomes for us all?

4. We replace arbitrary legitimacy with earned trust.

Current legitimacy of authority relies on what anankelogy identifies as “ascribed legitimacy”. We don’t know if an authority figure of institution actually delivers on its purpose for being. If merely ascribed and not actually earned, politicians can persuade us they’re legit, even if they’re not.

We may rely on word-of-mouth, our own sketchy encounters, whatever we read or hear online from sources we trust, or from elsewhere. Rarely do we ever see authority point directly to reliable data demonstrating its effectiveness to help you and I fully resolve our needs.

That’s exactly what need-response provides. Instead of an arbitrary “ascribed legitimacy”, need-response generates empirical data to establish an authority’s “earned legitimacy”. The litmus test for earned legitimacy is the level of documented health challenges the vulnerable RI continue to suffer despite every good faith effort to overcome them.

It begins with rating how responsive is the AI to the RI's expressed affected need or needs. The more responsive in acknowledging their impact, the more those impacted can work with these impactors to improve results. The more reluctant to acknowledge their impact, the less room we can grant any further risk of damage. This falls along a range of possibilities.

Much as everyone using financial instruments gets a documented credit score, every person in a position of power gets a legitimacy score. The more the RI subjected to the AI exhibits failure to overcome addictions, or shows a rise or plateau in their anxiety or depression—with all other factors sufficiently ruled out—that authority gets rated downward. The more this RI exhibits improved wellness outcomes (i.e., fewer lapses in their addiction struggles, less measurable paralysis after processing trauma), the higher the AI’s legitimacy score.

• exemplary responsive: 75% to 100% - eagerly enable RI needs to fully resolve

• improving responsive: 25% to 75% - support as much resolution as they can

• minimally responsive: -25%% to 25% - neither benefiting nor harming RIs

• substandard unresponsive: -75% to -25% - presenting continual risk of harm

• violently reactive: -100% to -75% - demonstrated damage to RI

Power isn’t really ‘power’ unless resulting in resolved needs. Otherwise, it’s merely coercion. The power of nature drives our experience of needs. Without this deeper power of nature, there is no such thing as human social power. Authority earns its so-called power to impact our lives the more it serves our more powerful needs.

5. We support leaders to transform restrictive social structures.

When those in “power” lack the power to enable us to resolve needs, or to remove pain, or reduce suffering, or decrease rates of depression and anxiety, or lessen addictions, or lower rates of suicide, then what good is such power? Need-responders seek leaders who can tap into the greater power of nature to solve all of these problems.

Many leaders try. Many leaders hit a wall. Social structures often stand in their way of fostering real change. Need-responders offer a way to transcend the limits of social structure.

Shared authority can also hold back the best-intentioned leader. Anyone in a position of authority has to answer to higher authorities and to the constraints of legislated, case and administrative law. Authority can also be constrained when delegated to others downstream, or shared by committee.

Need-responders work with their client RI to inspire leaders ready to transform social norms. They build a team that can break through the limits of social systems. Together, the team can solve problems by addressing the needs overlooked by those systems. That’s exactly what Dr. King did in the 1950s to the 1960s. As have many others.

Anankelogy recognizes four levels of human problems. Need-responders addresses the last two.

1. Personal problems we can solve on our own.

2. Interpersonal problems we can solve with cooperation with others.

3. Power problems we can solve with those in positions of power.

4. Structural problems that require social transformations to solve.

Now let’s put this in context with the three levels of service offered by need-responders.

1. Case. Need-responders typically begin helping a lone RI client to address a problem they personally have with one or a few AIs.

2. Project. This is where a case could evolve into helping RI lead a support team seeking to pursue the cause of helping similarly situated RIs.

3. Movement. This occurs if a project emerges with widespread support to transform intractable social structures, with a totally onboard inspirational AI leader.

A movement could evolve into a revolution of love. There can be no greater revolution than to revolve back to love, back to honoring the needs of others as we would have others honor our own. Transformative leaders would know how to prioritize need-responsive love over any impersonal law or any unresponsive authority. There can be no greater human authority than resolving needs with love.

6. We assert the greater power and authority of love.

Need-response raises the bar. Need-responders hold us all accountable to the high standard of love. They evaluate if the AI and the RI demonstrably respond to the needs of each other. They track and keep score who is doing more to support the need of the other side in ways they would have the other side support their affected needs.

Now isn’t that a “fight” worth supporting? Instead of rooting for one side to tear down the other, we root for the side that demonstrates the most respect for your needs. Need-responders incentivize AI to compete each other to earn the legitimacy to impact you and your needs.

Need-response grants no quarter to the current norms of opposition culture or avoidance culture because they correlate highly with provoking outrage and hate. Instead, need-responders cultivate the higher standard of mutual support. Which requires the discipline of honestly relating to each other’s inflexible needs, in a way proven not to provoke animosity.

To this end, need-responders utilize the tested “praise sandwich” to bracket good news around a lest pleasant piece of bad news. Perhaps you’ve seen this at work when getting a late payment notice. The bad news alerting you to your delinquent payment gets couched between a positive opener and positive closing affirmation of your value to them.

Chart: demonstrating the effective "praise sandwich" communication format, nullifying mutual defensiveness

Need-responders employ this same professional communication format. Couching the unpleasant bad news in between opening and closing good news properly addresses unresponsive power relations, without needlessly provoking defensiveness. Conflicts can then be turned into opportunities to relate better to each side’s needs. Conveying respect for each other’s inflexible needs effectively nullifies cause for any vacillating power struggle.

The AI and RI can remain open and unguarded as they more freely engage each other’s needs.

1. Good news – positively affirm the inflexible needs of the other side

2. Bad news – address how the actions of the other side affect one’s own needs

3. Good news – invite continual engagement for how to support each other’s needs in ways that respect one’s own need

Consider how this can melt the power struggles fueling political polarization. Elsewhere, I discuss how political differences point to an objective inflexible priority of needs. Instead of hoping in vain that debating will somehow convince them to change their inflexible priority of needs, need-responders unpack the priority of each side behind each politicized issue.

Remember Olaf’s simple definition of love?

“Love is putting someone else's needs before yours.”

Need-responders incentivize each side in a political conflict to relate first to the needs of the other, to earn the other side’s trust to respect your own needs.

Need-responders waste no energy opposing inflexible needs. That energy can be spent better on opposing the norms of selfishness and self-righteousness corrupting us all. Better to oppose

• the polarizing of our politics,

• the distortions in our economy,

• the erosion of trust in the media,

• the spoiling of confidence in academia,

and any detraction from other once-trusted institutions.

Politics runs thick with self-serving generalizations, and these competing generalizations fuel political polarization. Disrespect begets disrespect. That standard applied sets the standard replied, so we can hardly feel surprised when others denounce our priorities after denouncing theirs. Why polarize into opposing views when you can empathize and never morally lose? Yes, realize what you are free to choose—love!

Politicians understandably avoid specifics that could compromise their fragile coalitions. They hope to apply, to generalize to us all, what they see as missing in our public policies. You need not follow their example of overgeneralizing. Best to rely on the generalization that the needs of others matters just as much (if not more) than your own. Your safest generalization is to love.

Adversarial systems produce impersonal laws, impersonally. Adversarial systems interpret impersonal laws, impersonally. Adversarial systems enforce impersonal laws, impersonally. Adversarial systems, and those who directly serve them, do not know what they do not know, and that compromises the legitimacy of their authority.

Their imperfect laws sit as a lower level of authority than needs fully resolved with love. Once fully resolved with respect for the needs of others, and you can fully function, you no longer require the role of impersonal laws. You can independently serve the purpose of laws without the imposition of impersonal laws.

The more you personally honor the needs of others with the power of love, you trump the lesser power of impersonal authority. Need-responders ultimately enforce this higher authority of love. If citing authority of some law, the need-responder holds the AI accountable to the needs all such laws exist to serve.

No more appealing to authority to defy the greater authority or mutually respected needs. No more denying without evidence that power relations easily damage RI wellbeing. No more excuses. Let love rule over laws. Yes, love overrules rules.

7. We refer to available research on power dynamics.

The academic literature in psychology addresses power relations in ways complementing this anankelogical need-responsive approach. Anankelogy currently sits a long way from producing its own research findings. For now, we refer to available academic findings around power dynamics. Here is a list of academic articles offering deep insights into how power relations function. Click the left arrow to read that article's abstract.

Key article: Power, approach, and inhibition.

Too long, didn't read? Dacher Keltner is one of the leading experts in this area. With his colleagues, he contrasts the powerful and powerless. They propose twelve propositions, six for the dynamics of elevated power and six for dynamics of reduced power.

Proposition 1: Elevated Power Increases the Experience and Expression of Positive Affect

Proposition 2: Reduced Power Increases the Experience and Expression of Negative Affect

Proposition 3: Elevated Power Increases the Sensitivity to Rewards

Proposition 4: Reduced Power Increases the Sensitivity to Threat and Punishment

Proposition 5: Elevated Power Increases the Tendency to Construe Others as a Means to One’s Own Ends

Proposition 6: Reduced Power Increases the Tendency to View the Self as a Means to Others’ Ends

Proposition 7: Elevated Power Increases the Automaticity of Social Cognition

Proposition 8: Reduced Power Increases Controlled Social Cognition

Proposition 9: Elevated Power Increases the Likelihood of Approach-Related Behavior

Proposition 10: Reduced Power Increases Behavioral Inhibition

Proposition 11: Elevated Power Increases the Consistency and Coherence of Social Behavior

Proposition 12: Elevated Power Increases the Likelihood of Socially Inappropriate Behavior

Research summarized and presented by researcher Amy Cuddy

In anankelogical terms, power easily enables refunction, while powerlessness risks defunction.

Your responsiveness to these equalizers to power relations

Your turn. Consider one or more of these options to respond to this need-responsive content.

• Check our Engaging Forum to FOLLOW discussions on this post and others. JOIN us as a site member to interact with others and to create your own forum comments.

• Explore similar content by clicking on the tags below. Find similar content under this anankelogy category.

• Share this content with others on social media. Share the link to share the love.

• Check out recent posts of interest to you.

• Add a rating below to let others know how much of a good read this was for you.

• Write a comment below to give others an independent perspective on this content.

• Recommend this on Facebook. Introduce anankelogy to your social media contacts.

• Lastly, support us in building this new love-nurturing alternative to our hate-enabling institutions. You can help us spread some love.