Empowerment

"Empowerment is a process that challenges our assumptions about the way things are and can be. It challenges our basic assumptions about power, helping, achieving, and succeeding." ¹  We are challenged everyday.  Sometimes just doing "normal" activities is a challenge.  Do we really need something more that challenges us?  In this case, yes we do.  This challenge makes us stronger, helps us to achieve and to succeed.

As Page and Czuba point out in their article, our basic assumptions must be challenged.  Our understanding of power must change for us to be empowered.  Power cannot be inherent to a position, otherwise only those who hold that position can have power.  The established example is the doctor-patient relationship.  If the power in the relationship is solely belonging to whomever has the position of doctor, then the patient can never be empowered because he/she will never be the doctor in that relationship.  Each person in the relationship must have power. 

Power must also be capable of expanding.  This is essential so that when one begins to be empowered in a small way, that internal power can grow to effect more areas of one's life.  As one grows more confident, one is then able to take on more tasks which in turn increase one's confidence, and therefore one's internal power expands.  With these two concepts, we can see how empowerment works.

Page and Czuba state "empowerment is a multi-dimensional social process that helps people gain control over their own lives. It is a process that fosters power (that is, the capacity to implement) in people, for use in their own lives, their communities, and in their society, by acting on issues that they define as important."  Here at REACH, we use the WRAP program as part of that process.  It allows peers to take control over their symptoms and how those symptoms manifest in their lives.  We also support any process that helps peers to expand the power they have over their own circumstances.  This includes continued education and training, volunteering, and jobs. 

Some peers find that their Spirituality empowers them to have more control over their lives.  We also support that idea.  Finding one's place in the grander scheme also grants understanding of the place of other's in that scheme.  Relationships between peers and others in their lives can be empowering or can remove power.  Recognizing improper or damaging relationships and finding ways to change them to positive relationships.

References:

1. Journal of Extension, Nanette Page & Cheryl Czuba, http://www.joe.org/joe/1999october/comm1.html, accessed November 15, 2006.