--ratitor

The importance of building connections between women to create new understanding and new strategies of peacemaking is emphasized through the presentation and discussion of new research and theory on women's development. An example is a passage from Jean Baker Miller's Toward a New Psychology of Women (1976):

Humanity has been held to a limited and distorted view of itself, from its interpretation of the most intimate emotions to its grandest visions of human possibilities, by virtue of its subordination of women.

Until recently, "mankind's" understandings have been the only understandings generally available to us. As other perceptions arise--precisely those perceptions that men, because of their dominant position could not perceive--the total vision of human possibilities enlarges and is transformed.

In response to the urgency of the nuclear issue, women in this workshop learn to operate from the source of their own power, which is staying centered and connected with each other in what we see, feel, and think. Toward this end the concept of a "paradigm shift" is introduced. A paradigm is defined as a set of assumptions, a mental framework from which beliefs and opinions are constructed. Throughout this workshop, exercises are designed to illustrate and elicit a paradigm shift. The goal of the workshop is for women to help each other shift from the paradigm of passive, helpless victim to a new paradigm of empowered, "related," responsible person; from the giving over of authority to the political and military "experts" to the taking of responsibility by concerned and caring human beings; from the valuing of technical or objective ("separate") knowledge to the valuing of personal and connected knowledge; and, finally, a shift from the emphasis on "public speaking" and debate to the emphasis on finding one's own voice and staying in dialogue. . . .

Originally, WAND had followed the model of Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) in trying to develop a bureau of public speakers on the nuclear issue. PSR had trained medical doctors and other professionals to speak as "experts" on the facts and figures of the medical effects of nuclear war. It became clear that this "expert" training for public speaking was inappropriate for WAND. The "expert" model is based on an authoritarian model of power through debate, where the domain is scientific facts and numbers. WAND's evolving message is that it is precisely in questioning this model of authority that women reconnect to their own untapped power. Rather than becoming overinvolved with facts, figures, and technojargon, WAND offers the message that feeling and conviction are an appropriate and sufficient first response to this issue and form the most powerful basis for further education and action.

At the heart of the training is the recognition that it is insane to disconnect from feelings about the nuclear threat; rather, women must learn to speak out in an emotionally powerful and cogent manner. Women's power to empower others, and to use the power of their emotions effectively to move others to become involved and active, rests not on technical expertise but on personal authenticity and the energies released through emotional connection. The power of "listening" and "responding" from the heart is thus validated as forming a more valuable and lasting base for power than "speaking out" as an "expert." It is the building of relationship, the creation of the "conversation" that connects people, that is the core of women's powers and creative energies--and, potentially, men's as well.

The following is taken from Chapter 9, Relationship and Empowerment, by Janet L. Surrey, pp. 175-180, from the book Women's Growth in Connection, Writings from the Stone Center, by Judith V. Jordan, Alexandra G. Kaplan, Jean Baker Miller, Irene P. Stiver, Janet L. Surrey, © 1991, The Guildford Press and reprinted here with permission of Janet Surrey and Jean Baker Miller.

This book offers a sampling of the influential ideas emanating from the Stone Center, Wellesley College, about women's meaning systems, values, passions, organization of experiences, and ways of being in the world.

Over the past year, I have been involved in the collaborative evolution of a day-and-a-half workshop designed to empower women to speak out for nuclear disarmament. The workshop is sponsored by Women's Action for Nuclear Disarmament (WAND), an organization founded in 1980 by Helen Caldicott and others to empower women to work with a singular focus for nuclear disarmament. This empowerment workshop, entitled "Our Vision--Our Voices--How to Speak Out for Nuclear Disarmament," offers a beautiful example of building a relational context that empowers women. It illustrates many aspects of empowerment through connection. Although, in this case, personal growth is not the primary purpose of the empowerment process, the workshop in fact does mobilize the strengths and energies of connection, shared vision, and shared activity. The workshop captures the essence of relational empowerment, generating increased energy, clarity, and commitment to action for all participants. It may serve as a useful model for efforts to create and support empowering relational contexts in other settings.

The workshop, which usually includes two leaders and 20 to 30 participants, begins with a graphic audiovisual demonstration of the arsenal of nuclear weapons currently in existence. Thus the real threat of potential world destruction is brought right into the room, demanding urgent attention. The first few hours are spent creating an atmosphere for the sharing of intense feelings and responses to this threat, including awe, terror, anger, grief, and helplessness. I personally experienced a tremendous sense of relief to finally have the opportunity to focus my feelings about nuclear destruction and to join with others in doing this. This experience suggests the reversal of what Lifton (1979) has called psychic numbing and what Macy (1983) describes as despair in her "Despair and Empowerment" workshops.

The framework of "looking together" provides the structure for the creative empowerment process. The opportunity to join together in emotional connection in a situation where people respond in free flow to each other's feelings and perceptions generates desires to care for and support each other. From the expressions of helpless rage, despair, and confusion, the group builds together to a sense of urgency and shared responsibility: We must do something.

Negative affects of helplessness, anger, fear, and confusion become transformed into the energy of positive movement. To call this process "just talking" or "sharing feelings" would be to trivialize and misrepresent it. As the movement or vision of the whole group begins to emerge, each person feels a heightened sense of authenticity, validation, and response/ability. The "I" is enhanced as the "we" emerges. Through building the "we," that is, "seeing" together through creating an enlarged vision, participants transform their personal self-doubt and confusion into clarity and conviction. The sense of powerlessness of the individual is supplanted by the experience of relational power.

Most of the work takes place in small groups of six to eight people, which meet three times during the workshop to provide opportunities for people to share more personally, to give each other feedback, and to compose and deliver a practice "speech" to an imagined audience. In the afternoon of the first day, there is a plenary session entitled "Women's Voices and Visions of Peace," which explores women's current and historical strengths as potential peacemakers. In this session participants directly experience their power to empower others through a guided exercise, performed in dyads, that evokes the creative energy of connected interactions. Participants carefully and attentively ask each other a list of prepared questions: "Why do you care?" "Why are you here?" "Have you ever felt that you don't know enough to speak out?" "What do you know?" "Where has this message come from that you don't know enough?" "What has kept you from acting?" "What has allowed you to act on your reasons for caring?" "What do you need to keep going?" Session leaders direct attention to the relational context created through addressing these basic questions together and to the sense of mutual empowerment that emerges through shared focusing on highly personal issues. This process acknowledges that participants need such a context both to initiate and to sustain action.

Participants' sense of connection arises from the intensity of the dyadic experience and then is extended, throughout the workshop, to the group as a whole, to WAND as an organization, and to women throughout history. This experience of different levels of connection parallels WAND members' growing motivation to extend this protection and care for closely related individuals, such as one's own children, to the entire human community. One technique for evoking widening ranges of connectedness is through the reading of emotionally evocative quotations from the writings of women speaking about the nuclear issue. An example is from Sally Miller Gearhart (1982):

I believe we are at a great watershed in history, and that we hold in our hands a fragile thread, no more than that, that can lead us to our survival. I understand the rising up of women in this century to be the human race's response to the threat of its own self-annihilation and the destruction of the planet.

Quotations like this emphasize the ethic of care and responsibility, as well as the joy in courage and risk taking, in facing this threat together, and in creating a sense of safety and peace through awareness and experience of our connectedness.

The importance of building connections between women to create new understanding and new strategies of peacemaking is emphasized through the presentation and discussion of new research and theory on women's development. An example is a passage from Jean Baker Miller's Toward a New Psychology of Women (1976):

Humanity has been held to a limited and distorted view of itself, from its interpretation of the most intimate emotions to its grandest visions of human possibilities, by virtue of its subordination of women.

Until recently, "mankind's" understandings have been the only understandings generally available to us. As other perceptions arise--precisely those perceptions that men, because of their dominant position could not perceive--the total vision of human possibilities enlarges and is transformed.

In response to the urgency of the nuclear issue, women in this workshop learn to operate from the source of their own power, which is staying centered and connected with each other in what we see, feel, and think. Toward this end the concept of a "paradigm shift" is introduced. A paradigm is defined as a set of assumptions, a mental framework from which beliefs and opinions are constructed. Throughout this workshop, exercises are designed to illustrate and elicit a paradigm shift. The goal of the workshop is for women to help each other shift from the paradigm of passive, helpless victim to a new paradigm of empowered, "related," responsible person; from the giving over of authority to the political and military "experts" to the taking of responsibility by concerned and caring human beings; from the valuing of technical or objective ("separate") knowledge to the valuing of personal and connected knowledge; and, finally, a shift from the emphasis on "public speaking" and debate to the emphasis on finding one's own voice and staying in dialogue.

Most participants in the workshop experience these paradigm shifts and understand how they lose their sense of power as peacemakers when they shift back into old paradigms. They perceive the necessity of staying connected with each other, that is, sustaining the relational context, to maintain these shifts. Finally, they perceive the power inherent in evolving new ways of entering the arena of the "experts" without losing touch with the source of one's own power. This is accomplished through both experiential and educational processes that examine the sources of relational disempowerment as well as empowerment and highlight the necessity of building relational contexts that support and sustain empowerment. For example, we play a tape of Elissa Melamed, a well-known peace activist, speaking to participants at the 1984 Denver WAND Speaker Training Workshop, saying:

Basically, the barriers to being a good communicator are the fears that we feel and the ways that we disqualify ourselves and don't think we have a great deal to contribute as women. In addition to our own personal feelings of inadequacy that come from our own private histories there is a certain male norm of what makes for an effective speaker--and we are measuring ourselves by this norm and we are not stopping to ask how effective that model really is for what we are trying to do.

In the final session of the workshop, the whole group focuses on planning different modes of future action. People are asked to make specific commitments to concrete activities. Despite the overwhelming issue at hand, an enormous amount of energy, excitement, and joy are generated in this workshop. This is the "zest" or vitality experienced in feeling related, connected, and empowered together to work for what is truly important. This process can be acknowledged and built into strategies for initiating and maintaining activities of all kinds.

Inherent in the workshop is a respect for relational empowerment and for action at all levels, from the smallest personal change to the largest life commitment. Joining the group, sharing in the growing awareness, seeing and listening to others speaking about the issues are all important actions, as are movement and action in larger political arenas. Such a definition of action and activism is based on the understanding that individual and relational power are interconnected, grow simultaneously, and work synergistically.

Some people are moved by the workshop experience to change their lives dramatically, others in small ways. Some work collaboratively, while others work in solitude. Individual creativity or risk taking can be experienced as part of the larger relational context, just as can collaborative group work. For women especially, this sense of personal expression in action is often most meaningful when it is experienced as both intensely personal and related to the larger connection, the shared vision and commitment. This is what we mean by "action in a relational context."

Originally, WAND had followed the model of Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) in trying to develop a bureau of public speakers on the nuclear issue. PSR had trained medical doctors and other professionals to speak as "experts" on the facts and figures of the medical effects of nuclear war. It became clear that this "expert" training for public speaking was inappropriate for WAND. The "expert" model is based on an authoritarian model of power through debate, where the domain is scientific facts and numbers. WAND's evolving message is that it is precisely in questioning this model of authority that women reconnect to their own untapped power. Rather than becoming overinvolved with facts, figures, and technojargon, WAND offers the message that feeling and conviction are an appropriate and sufficient first response to this issue and form the most powerful basis for further education and action.

At the heart of the training is the recognition that it is insane to disconnect from feelings about the nuclear threat; rather, women must learn to speak out in an emotionally powerful and cogent manner. Women's power to empower others, and to use the power of their emotions effectively to move others to become involved and active, rests not on technical expertise but on personal authenticity and the energies released through emotional connection. The power of "listening" and "responding" from the heart is thus validated as forming a more valuable and lasting base for power than "speaking out" as an "expert." It is the building of relationship, the creation of the "conversation" that connects people, that is the core of women's powers and creative energies--and, potentially, men's as well. Accordingly, the workshop encourages connections with men. However, it also recognizes and addresses the ways that women can become disempowered when connections with men are fragmenting, that is, maintained at the expense of the deepest connections to self and other women. Thus women's connections with each other are seen as the first step in evolving a new relational structure for mobilizing, sustaining, and organizing information and activity. Men are welcome to work within this structure. Put another way, the workshop creates a more "realistic" and more total basis from which to gain and use our knowledge about the nuclear threat.

The workshop creates the initial setting for experiencing and validating relational power and for training in speaking out both formally and informally. It also provides information and structure for channeling this energy through individual, small-group, or organizational action on local, national, and international levels. The workshop helps participants move from positions of isolation, doubt, and confusion to a sense of connection, knowledge, and positive action together. This movement reflects a crucial aspect of women's moral development, described by Carol Gilligan (1982) as the development of an ethic of care, whereby the negative injunction against "selfishness" or hurting others can be transformed into the energy of positive responsibility for our mutual security, survival, and well-being.

The workshop experience has strengthened my own conviction that relational empowerment strategies are essential and relevant to women's empowerment in all arenas. We need to learn more about the tremendous creative power of moving and acting in relationship in order to better describe and facilitate it. Perhaps we ought to substitute "empowerment" training for assertiveness training. Further, this model of empowering the relationship may be the most fruitful way to study the process of growth and development in all of life--including psychotherapy. We will be exploring this proposal further in the Colloquium Series.

Humanity has been held to a limited and distorted view of itself, from its interpretation of the most intimate emotions to its grandest visions of human possibilities, by virtue of its subordination of women.

Until recently, "mankind's" understandings have been the only understandings generally available to us. As other perceptions arise--precisely those perceptions that men, because of their dominant position could not perceive--the total vision of human possibilities enlarges and is transformed.
-- Jean Baker Miller, Toward a New Psychology of Women (1976)