Authority

I became interested in the word authority before I understood why.

Most of us know where authority lives. It lives in parents, teachers, doctors, experts, institutions, people with credentials, people who seem to know what they’re doing. The word points outward.

Authority is who is in charge. Authority is whose version counts. Authority is who gets believed.

When I brought the word into therapy sessions, I discovered that many people had the same reaction I did. Authority felt external. Not a quality. Not a relationship. A location.

Out there.

I noticed that the word seemed to belong to a larger family. Authorship. Authenticity. Authorization. The resemblance felt too close to ignore.

An author originates something. An authentic thing comes from its true source. To authorize is to grant permission.

I looked up the origin and found the Latin auctor,, meaning master, leader, or author.

Authority, suddenly, began to feel less like power and more like a question.

What gives a person permission to trust their own experience?

I don’t mean confidence. Confidence seems to get all the attention, but I have met plenty of confident people who are not especially interested in listening to themselves. What I am describing feels different.

For a long time, I thought the work was understanding.

Not only understanding myself. Understanding was the whole instrument. It was what I did for a living and what I was good at: analyzing, explaining, interpreting, tracking, revising. I was very interested in why I felt what I felt and where it came from and what it meant. I was at least as interested in the same questions about everyone else.

Understanding was my competence.

Which is part of why what shifted felt so disorienting.

I became interested in listening.

The distinction sounds small. It did not feel small. Understanding is often an activity performed upon experience. Listening is a relationship with it. One is trying to reach a conclusion. The other is trying to make contact.

Around that time, I began practicing Focusing, a method built around paying attention to something felt but not yet fully known. I was struck by the discipline of staying close to a person’s description long enough for it to become more accurate.

This was surprisingly difficult for me.

I had spent much of my life around interpretations. Helpful ones. Loving ones. Intelligent ones. I had also been raised around a very top-down kind of psychiatric intelligence. The world I knew was very good at meeting experience with knowledge: identifying it, classifying it, explaining it by what was already understood.

So I was allergic, at first, to the language of the body:

Where do you feel that?

What happens if you stay with it?

What does it want you to know?

These questions provoked in me something like a reflexive repulsion. They seemed to ask for something impossible and something embarrassing at the same time. I had trusted language, analysis, pattern recognition, explanation. Now I was being asked to listen from somewhere else.

What was unfamiliar was not the idea that the body had feelings. What was unfamiliar was the possibility that my experience contained information before anyone explained it.

That sounds obvious now.

It did not feel obvious then.

I wondered what has to happen for someone to feel ease in claiming such a thing. I thought about how authority may be less a trait than a history: a history of taking your own experience seriously enough to discover that it contains information.

Some histories teach this early. A child says this is what I see, this is what I want, this is what happened to me, and is met, believed, or at least taken seriously. Over time, the child learns that originating is safe.

Other histories teach the opposite. That to originate is to overstep. That the authority was always going to be someone else’s. That the safest thing was to become an accurate instrument for reading what other people needed.

You can spend a long time being very good at that before it occurs to you that your own experience was a source the whole time.