ABSTRACT
Development - Power replays Ask the participant to look at their early training in submission/dominance modes of relating. Using sandplay miniatures, drawing or clay, ask the participant to depict relationships in their childhood or adolescence when they were in a submissive position and an adult in their life (e.g. teacher/parent/bully/relative) was adopting a ‘power over’ way of relating. Ask the participant to write what they would want to say to that person in their life who abused power in this way. Finally, ask them to look at how, unawares, they might be replaying ‘power over’ ways of relating now, either as victim or persecutor. You might like to explain the psychoanalytic term ‘identification with the aggressor’. This means that, even despite our best intentions, we can treat someone else in the negative ways we were treated. In other words, we bully as we have been bullied, control as we have been controlled. It is often only as a result of working through our feelings about the original ‘persecutor’, the shame, fear and humiliation, that we can stop doing this.
