For some reason, the fictional character of Violet Elizabeth Bott has inserted herself into my mind when I was considering the state of power dynamics within some parishes in Britain. For those who have not been reared on the antics of the William books by Richmal Crompton, from the 40s and 50s, Violet was a subsidiary character who was kept firmly on the outside of the boy-only group of William Brown and his friends. Although Violet was usually excluded from the male activities of the boy gang, she did possess one weapon which allowed her a small part in some of the escapades. She had a mantra which she was able to use every time she sought inclusion into the male world. She threatened the boys with the memorable words ‘I will scream and scream till I am sick. I can.’ The threat of being forced to listen to her screams produced a small amount of compromise on the part of the boys, but I cannot remember how this worked in practice as I no longer have any of these books. No doubt an adult reading Violet’s words might well comment that this was the action of a woman without power trying to take power for herself when being denied any part in the world dominated by the boys.
From thinking about Violet, I went on to recognise that there is another example of powerlessness using screaming in order to get noticed. The classic supermarket tantrum is an experience that most parents have had to negotiate when their child is around 3 years of age and is wheeled round the local Sainsburys. Watching his or her mother removing highly coloured packets and place them in a trolley is an action that looks rather fun, especially when the child sees that there are also aisles full of sweets and biscuits. The classic supermarket tantrum begins when the child is wheeled quickly past the biscuit aisle without stopping and the small person makes their protest. The battle that begins at this point is not only between the child and his/her mother, but it also rages inside the mother’s head. Should she turn back and include the desired item, thus pacifying the child? Alternatively, should she explain to the child how there are limits to the objects taken that form part of the weekly shop?
Supermarket tantrums and Violet’s attempted manipulations are both examples of attempts to exercise control by the use of emotion. Sometimes the emotion is gentle or understated, like a smile aimed at persuading someone to agree with us in a meeting. On other occasions the emotion demonstrated is disturbing or excessive, as in an outburst of anger or tears. But, in each case, there is a fundamental common factor. The expression of emotion is intended to make another person act in a particular way. A smile may be a means of persuading us that being part of a majority view is much more comfortable than being on the outside. Taking the opposite point of view to a leader who is skilled at emotional manipulation is, by contrast, highly awkward and uncomfortable. Making a principled stand against a proposal in a meeting is far more difficult to follow through when we are expecting that the proposer will display a strong emotional reaction. The sheer power of that reaction can be deeply traumatising as well as creating an atmosphere of real fear. Violet’s screams or the toddler’s meltdown in the supermarket are small fry compared with a key committee member not getting his/her own way. Sometimes merely the threat of an emotional outburst is able to bring a disagreeing party to heel. Even those not party to the divided decision can feel deeply shocked and wounded by the outburst.
There is nothing unusual in seeing strong emotions erupt in organisational life. In most cases tempers and passions subside and peace is found through some sort of compromise. The problem arises when an individual, possibly a leader or someone else in some sort of authority, becomes adept at the skills needed to manipulate and control a meeting or an entire organisation through the skilful use of what we are describing as ‘tantrum power’. On the surface everything seems smooth but there is in the dynamic of the meeting a subtle threat that if things do not go in a certain way, there will be an emotional outburst of some kind. Everyone wants to avoid a distressing ‘scene’ which is why tantrum power is so effective in an organisation. It may be the Vicar who tells his PCC that no one is allowed to follow any path but the one he/she suggests. To challenge his/her power will unleash anger on a massive scale. Power, in other words, is being exercised by emotional blackmail and the threat of violent, even terrifying, volcanic eruptions. If the congregation gets used to submitting to the threat of violent or frightening outbursts on the part of the one in charge, there will always be a miasma of genuine fear in that congregation. This will stifle growth and real flourishing. When the dynamic of surrender to the one who exercises tantrum power becomes stabilised, and an authoritarian peace is allowed to prevail in that congregation, things may appear to be peaceful and calm. It may be difficult for an archdeacon or a bishop to get the measure of the true dynamics of that particular church as free exchange of opinion and the possibility of new ideas being explored have ceased to take place. Everyone has got used to the faux stability of a church that follows a volatile narcissist in charge who cannot tolerate anyone else having ideas or opinions.
Over the years I have become privy to unfortunate dynamics in a number of parishes and congregations. Many of them are victims of what I have described as tantrum power, the threat of unleashing fear-inducing outbursts by someone in the church. It is of course not only vicars who exercise such power. Prominent laypeople can hold entire congregations under their control by the same implied threat of violent outbursts of destructive anger. Organists can be the centre of tantrum power, as can a churchwarden or Reader. In a recent case of an unhappy congregation who were subject to the authoritarian whims of a Vicar and churchwarden, the fear miasma spread beyond the church itself. Attempts by the local archdeacon to get the measure of the congregational unhappiness were stalled by the ability of the church leaders to intimidate these visiting senior clergy, by making it clear that those officially holding oversight had no power to change the dynamic of their church. The semi-autonomous role of a Vicar has, in the last resort, a great deal of power to intimidate archdeacons and even bishops who try to intervene in parish disputes. Many simply give up the struggle. Tantrum power seems to win the day, and congregations are left to their long-lasting disruption and unhappiness. The lay people in this case had researched the possibility of bringing in the police to intervene but having a fierce temper and the ability to spread slander is not against the law of the country.
Tantrum power, or emotional manipulation within a church congregation is a real cause of unhappiness in many places. It also exists within families, committees and organisations of every kind. Quite often it exists as a threat rather than as an actuality. It is however something that needs to be identified and named so that it can be dealt with. My experience of the Church of England suggests that far too many individuals live in a situation of genuine fear of emotional outbursts from some of the individuals they work with. Unlike the business world where relationships are defined and there is normally a clear code of behaviour being enforced by HR officials, the Church has less ability to ensure that members behave in a consistently correct manner. Without an enforceable code of conduct which can be policed, there are many situations in church life where things can go badly wrong. At present, access to a just hearing when something goes badly awry, is a hit and miss affair and depends almost entirely on the diocese you happen to find yourself in. Some dioceses have excellent fearless archdeacons and employ professional safeguarding personnel who take a pride in delivering a first-class service. Other dioceses have safeguarding officials who need to be important and enjoy the trappings of authority and power. Those who cross their path may be further humiliated and pushed down, finding their dignity battered and almost destroyed.
Safeguarding in the Church should be about making sure that power at every level is used responsibly and aimed at creating healthy flourishing spiritual institutions. Protecting the weak and the vulnerable is only one part of the work. A further task is to understand and critique the power structures of the church. The power I have been discussing in this blog is different from most of the other forms which are built into the structure of the institution. I have invited my reader to be alert to invisible power that exists in emotional manipulation, what I call tantrum power. Tantrum power has the potential for harm in the Church as much as many other forms. Its very invisibility makes it perhaps the most dangerous.
It’s amazing what people can get away with in the workplace, even in a church context. Particularly in a church context. Like the supermarket child tantrum, the behaviour is often rewarded by an over stressed parent, and then generally repeated, as it is found to be effective. When I look back at my own parenting mistakes, whether by omission or commission, I often wince.
Tantrum behaviour works and is ugly, but powerful. It shows the impoverishment of person’s development, but that can be not much help in dealing with it. I’ve found HR departments often (but not always) ineffective in dealing with tantrums, particularly in senior leaders, as often these are the ones who employed HR in the first place. Indeed most people I’ve met, myself included, aren’t particularly effective in dealing with this behaviour, because as a society, and in our various specialisms, we have no training in it. Generally people retreat away, cower, allow one person to bear the brunt or otherwise shrink from the task. If on the other hand we could act collectively against the tantrum holder, we might have a chance.
Violence is violence, physical or not. We just haven’t quite realised this yet.
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”
A line from Oscar Wilde reminds us of the gulf between-‘human depravity’-and the divine glory of creation.
A lethal mix, often missed when one is younger, and frequently hard to spot even when marginally older or wiser, occurs across various groups: public, private, church or charity.
You get a ‘tantrum’ person, acting as a dependable fixer for the upper elite, who metaphorically ‘gets away with murder’: bullying, abuse, harassment. It often takes multiple episodes before fate fixes up someone to confront the bully.
A great article and very insightful. Is unrestrained sadism, sarcasm, exploitation, bullying, abuse and harassment a major driver of institutional church collapse within Anglicanism?
Fletcher, Smyth, Pilavachi figures grab the headlines. But the insidious more minor ill-treatment of people, by authoritarian clerics, possibly drives away far more people.
If anyone rages at me, which happens very rarely, I instinctively feel a calmness until they have finished when I take over in a calm and reasonable way. It is not a technique but a sincere feeling of stillness. I attribute this attitude to my mother who, in her youth rode horses even bareback.
As a child I grew up with the story that one day she was riding in this way near a market place situated at the top of a very long high hill. Suddenly, without warning the horse ran away with her. When I asked my mother what she did, she told me that her efforts were in staying on the horse. She said she knew the horse would have to stop eventually which of course it did as it lost power and steam.
When John, under strict conditions returned to the Cathedral on Easter Sunday 2022 I was there. I misunderstood the detail of an arrangement and in conversation with the Dean about this he started shouting violently at me. When he eventually stopped, in order to calm him down I apologised and explained my mistake whereupon he started shouting at me again.
If he could behave like that with me in the Cathedral in front of members of the congregation on Easter Sunday, one worries what he was like in meetings with people who actually disagreed with him (I only misunderstood the detail of an arrangement).
Surely this is what is meant by ‘tantrum power’ as described by Stephen in the blog; like a horse running away with its rider.
Sorry to hear of your experience. I rather naively previously thought that ordained priests publicly shouting at one of their flock was a one off. Makes you wonder how often they do so. Does the fact they appear to get away with it reflect the standard of behaviour now expected from the clergy?
To have emotion is to be human. To repress emotion is to do harm, either to oneself or others. So how are we to handle emotions?
My personal upbringing was to experience loud aggressive anger, usually (but not always) directed at me, sometimes accompanied by hitting, but the sense of unbridled hatred was the most impactful.
Conversely, as children, our own emotions were disapproved of, and actively suppressed. This was reinforced at both church and school. In a bizarre twist, if we looked too glum, demands were made to “snap out of it” or “for goodness sake cheer up”. Obviously in retrospect this looks both ridiculous and cruel.
So how are we to treat emotions? Anger, when we feel it, or are tempted to act it out, contains information; important information. Personally, if we can access what underlies it for ourselves, it can energise our response most effectively, if for example we are fighting for the rights of someone we love. Fighting doesn’t have to involve damaging others, but when directed more subtly to our purpose can greatly increase its likely achievement, whereas as acting out with fists (actual or verbal) can lead to jail time and the reverse of what we intended.
Emotions have their root in a pre verbal infant unable to specify exactly what they want. A perceptive parent “reads” the uncomfortable child, and learns to respond appropriately.
With at least several millennia of human development, those primitive emotions still have equal importance but their correct interpretation and response needs to be handled more carefully than ever, both in ourselves and others, whether online, on the street or in a church meeting. Current practice seems to be to ignore them, pretend they don’t count, punish them, or some other variant of the counterproductive.
When I was at medical school, it was still fashionable to diss the professions who studied these matters, such as (then) psychology and sociology. Many decades on, such foolishness persists, notwithstanding those and related professions don’t always help themselves.
‘Sulky silence’ is another form of passive Church aggression. Following wild Church tantrum escapades, which would not be tolerated in almost any other part of modern UK society, do our bishops and archbishops sometimes go into ‘sulky silence’ mode, while branding victims-witnesses- whistleblowers as troublemakers?
I can think of two different experiences in church when I have seen, and been on the receiving end, of a church leader having an anger tantrum. The first was years ago and had devastating consequences for the church and myself – I am still working through the hurt now. In that case, the pastor used anger and intimidation as a relational technique, much like the drill instructor in the film Full Metal Jacket.
From what I understand, as events concluded somewhat after I left the church, issues in his private life caused him to have a public tantrum and resign.
The other, though lesser, was a church leader unhappy with the church people’s response to a group he was leading. He couldn’t cope with disagreement and questions and ended up leaving a rather curt message on a WhatsApp group and then exiting the group – it really did feel more like a child throwing its toys out of the pram than intimidation. This was fortunately rescued by other people in the church who talked to him about it and he apologised.
It’s left me with the sense that church and theological training, especially in charismatic evangelical churches, which these were, places little to no emphasis on emotional maturity.
Tantrum power and sulky silence are all too familiar to me. Some men – and also some women – are more likely to try tantrum power on women than on men. Ironically, some of those same men accuse women of being ‘too emotional’. Apparently they don’t regard their own anger as an emotion.
Readers of SC may want to be aware that Chris Brain’s retrial on 5 charges of sexual abuse begins tomorrow and is due to last 5 weeks. Here is an announcement from Sheffield Diocese: https://www.sheffield.anglican.org/support/safeguarding/victim-and-survivor-support/nine-oclock-service/
Brain’s trial last year (he was convicted on 15 counts) received a lot of news coverage and I think that this one might too.
One worship pastor I knew, whom I still respect, called a monthly meeting of worship bods, and at this particular meeting asked for ideas. Overwhelmed and irritated by the large response, and people talking over each other (and him?) he “lost it”. Instead of anger though, he burst into tears. No one said anything, but that day after the awkward silence, he also “lost the room”, and subsequent meetings had much lower attendance. In a sense his credibility was diminished because he cried as a way to attempt to control the room.
Which outpourings of emotion do we allow? If he’d been a woman and cried like this, would our response have been different?
My experience of shouting at people in anger, shows it irrevocably damages intimate relationships. Whether it was me or the other person.
We also do grumpy, sulky, withdrawn, ghosting and less overt but nevertheless emotionally driven behaviours.
Looking back a my pastor friend, no one I knew at the church, myself included, addressed his behaviour, and enabled him to improve his effectiveness. I’m guessing he probably continued it in future roles, but our paths diverged and I’ll never know. Typically, particularly in the church, “problem” behaviours are moved to another parish, or diocese, often with a promotion.
That’s a sad story. Do you think the pastor was engaging in emotional manipulation, or were his tears genuine. If manipulative, I’m not surprised he lost the room. If genuine, it’s a shame no one seems to have got alongside him and asked the reason for his tears.
Female clergy of my generation were very wary of showing emotion in public, fearing it would just give our opponents another excuse to dismiss us as ‘too emotional’ to be priests. I don’t know how it is for women ordained more recently.
I’m not sure. He wasn’t always honest, and therefore I suspect he probably wasn’t honest with himself. To some extent habitual outbursts aren’t always completely conscious. What I’m trying to say is that sometimes the emotion takes over before the rational thinking brain can intervene. The outburst is then rationalised afterwards to justify it: “people were really inconsiderate, they deserved it” etc.
I’ve rarely encountered any emotional behaviour in women I’ve worked for or with. One time I was called down by the senior partner to the interview rooms. ‘Doc’, he said, ‘I’ve one in tears, can you give me a hand?’ The poor lass, an aspiring trainee, had broken down in her interview with him, over a traumatic experience in another interview with a different firm. We recruited her. The thing is, she turned out to be one of the brightest people I’ve ever met, and went on to be a prize winner.
In retrospect I don’t think she was being manipulative, she clearly didn’t need to have been. There can be an honesty in showing emotion, but generally I’ve avoided showing it overtly, when in a professional capacity with others.