Power Perversion

Ode to the Power Perverts, the Bullies

I've seen you. I have watched you for a long time, and I know you better than you know yourself.

I sent you to teach the children.

I saw you call on the same three students every day and leave the quiet girl standing at the board until she cried. I saw her stop raising her hand that year, and I saw her stop coming to school the next day. You told a whole room of young people they could only learn with your permission, in your building, on your schedule. I saw you in the faculty meeting, voting down the young professor's idea because it was not yours, and then presenting it as your own the next fall.

I sent you to heal the sick.

I saw you cut her off before she finished her first sentence. I saw you decide what was wrong with her before she sat down, because she was a woman, because of her weight, because of her race, because she had a mental health diagnosis on her chart. I saw you tell her the pain was in her head, walk out before she could ask a second question, and then bill her for the visit. She came back four times. Two years later, another doctor found the tumor. I saw you take a woman who knew her own body and teach her to doubt it. I saw you at the nurses' station, giving the hardest patients to the new nurse every single shift until she quit in her first year.

I sent you to help the poor.

You just sat there at the front desk, making a man prove he was poor enough to be helped. You made a mother bring the same birth certificate to three appointments. I saw you write "noncompliant" in her file because the bus was late. She lost her benefits for a month, and her children ate cereal for dinner. I saw you call her a client, count her as an outcome, and never once ask what she wanted. You built a whole career on her need, and I saw you dread the day she might stop needing you, because your salary depended on her staying poor.

I sent you to feed the hungry.

You put yourself in the middle of the photo shoot. You ran the food pantry for twenty years and refused to let anyone else touch the schedule. You expanded your service while taking away the agency of our neighbors. You, my child, make the people in line say thank you twice. You count every can for the grant report, and never ask a single family what they would cook.

I sent you to serve.

You bussed volunteers in from the suburbs to paint a fence that was already painted. I saw them take pictures with children whose names they never learned, post them online, and go home feeling good. I overheard you tell yourself that you cannot be evil, because you serve the poor. You are a poverty pimp. You use poor people so you could feel less guilty about how much you have.

I sent you to run the nonprofit.

I saw you tell your staff "we are a family here," and then pay them so little they qualified for the food pantry they ran. You forced them to work sixty hours a week, and called it passion when they cried in their cars. You call every resignation "a bad fit." I saw you hold a listening session in the neighborhood, write down every word, and then do exactly what you had planned before you came. You hand residents a twenty dollar gift card for two hours of their time while the consultant got a contract for eighty thousand dollars.

I sent you to raise money.

I saw you send canvassers, young people from vulnerable backgrounds, from another state to stand on our sidewalks and refuse cash but accept cards, because you wanted a stranger's name, address, and card number in your database more than you wanted their gift. You take the story of a family's worst year, put their child's photo in an appeal letter, and mail it to strangers without ever asking them because they signed a waiver three years ago.

I sent you to give.

But there you were, at the family foundation, making a grandmother explain her own neighborhood three times before you would fund her. Then I saw you put her picture in your annual report. I saw you ask a church basement that has fed people for forty years for a logic model, an outcomes framework, and a sustainability plan. Then you pay a university to study the neighborhood, and pay the neighbors nothing? I saw you decide whose racial repair was ready and whose would have to wait. I saw you hold the gala in a ballroom downtown, charge five hundred dollars a plate, and give the award to the donor.

I sent you to govern.

I saw you on the board, asking for one more report, one more meeting, one more chance to say no. I saw you as the board chair who meets with the director alone and then tells the rest of the board how to vote. You tokenize community leadership just as you do poor people.

I sent you to preach.

You stood in the pulpit and preached peace while determining who was holy enough to serve on your board of elders. I saw you at the church council, keeping the only keys to the building on your own ring, so nobody could hold a meeting without you. You told the parish the only way to heaven is through you.

I sent you to coach.

I saw you on the sideline, screaming at a boy of eleven for missing a catch. I saw you bench him for a month to teach him a lesson. You touch people illegally and talk about children unlawfully. I saw entire teams quit the sports they loved, and never returned.

I sent you to lead.

You rolled your eyes at the new hire in the staff meeting until she stopped talking. Three weeks later, her idea came out of your mouth, in a meeting she was not invited to. On Thursday night, you wrote an email to the director that accused your coworker of something you knew was not true. You copied the people who would believe you. You left out the people who would ask questions. Then on Monday morning, there you were in HR, reporting the problem you had created. You called yourself a whistleblower. Your coworker lost her job, and you moved into her office. The text went out at 1 a.m., and another at 1:07. You checked your phone over and over to see if anyone answered. Your staff learned to sleep with their phones on their pillows. I know you were lonely. I know you were scared. You called it urgency.

I sent you to be a neighbor.

You showed up at the HOA meeting with a ruler to measure your neighbor's grass. You wrote the letter about her porch light, and the fine came the next week. Did you think I would not notice? As the landlord, you keep the deposit every single time, because you know the tenant cannot afford a lawyer.

I sent you home to love your family.

But at the kitchen table, you held all the money and handed out an allowance to the person you married. You checked their phone while they slept. When your mother needed care, you took it over, moved her into the facility you chose, and stopped letting her sisters visit. She is my child too.

I sent you into the town square.

You run the group chat, deciding who gets added and who gets quietly left out. At midnight, you go hunting for a stranger's worst sentence and share it with ten thousand people until she loses her job. You diagnose your friends from their social media posts, naming conditions that take a medical doctor years of careful observation to find. You called it concern. You used it so nobody would listen to them again.

Some of you I gave more than any people in history.

The Elon Musks of the world bought the place where millions of people talk to each other, and then fired most of the people who worked there. The "Karens" of the world ask for the manager, and then the manager's manager, until a cashier who is nineteen cries in the back room and loses her shift for the week. I saw every one of you.

I know all of that about you. I love you anyway.

I know your tricks, too. You keep people waiting. You keep people guessing. You keep the information to yourself. Every one of you does the same thing. I gave you something to share with other people, and you made them come through you to get it. You made people need you. You made sure food, care, money, and permission could only come from you. You turned every gift into a contract with rules and reports, so the people you claimed to serve had to obey you to eat. You create the problem, and then you get paid and praised for fixing it. You call punishment accountability. You call fear leadership. You call control care, and that one hurts me most.

I made all of you. I gave you air, water, and a body that works. I gave you mothers, grandmothers, and teachers who held you when you cried. I have fed you every day of your life. I have been patient with you. I am still patient. I am also done watching.

So this is an intervention. Sit down with me. Nobody is leaving this room, and nobody is getting yelled at. Put your phone face down on the table. I am going to tell you the truth about what you have been doing, and then I am going to tell you how to make it right.

You can stop now. You can let other people decide. You were never meant to make every decision alone, and the people around you have been ready to help for a long time.

I love you. I brought you into this world, and I can take you out of it. Today I would rather help you grow up.

Signed, Your Mother

A Note on the Name

I called these people power perverts on purpose. The name is rude, and I wanted your attention. I also spend the rest of this article asking you to stop labeling people. Both things are true. The name belongs to the pattern. When I say power pervert, I mean anyone who uses trust to control people, and that includes me on my worst days. Look for the pattern in your own work first. Nobody in this article is diagnosed. Everyone in this article can stop.

The ode is a composite. Every scene in it is a pattern I have seen many times, in many places, with many people. None of it is a charge against one person.

I Have Been Bullied by Power Perverts My Whole Life

I have spent three decades becoming an expert in working with power perverts. I have spent three decades in therapy because of their abuse. I grew up a fat, autistic kid who was bullied my entire life. I know what it looks like, and I'm calling it out, calling you in.

I am a social worker. I have led organizations for about thirty years. In all that time, I have never put a single person on a performance improvement plan. I have worked for power perverts. I have worked beside them. I have sat across the table from them in foundations, in state government, and in nonprofit board rooms. Some of them hurt me badly. I am still healing.

I started in evaluation more than twenty five years ago. That work taught me to ask for evidence before I reach a verdict. This article holds itself to the same rule. It defines the pattern first, then sets out how to recognize it, then shows the evidence, and only then offers a response.

What Power Perversion Is

Power perversion happens when someone is trusted to serve people and uses that trust to control them. The control is over four things: what people can get, what they can say, what they can choose, and what they own. The whole time, the person or institution calls it care, accountability, or mission.

Here is the full definition. Power perversion is a recurring pattern in which authority given to a person or institution for the benefit of others is used to control those people's access, voice, choices, or resources beyond what the stated purpose requires, while the control is justified as care, accountability, or mission.

Power is supposed to serve the people around you. In power perversion, the work becomes the excuse and the control becomes the reward. The person doing it often believes they are the only adult in the room. They believe they are protecting quality, or the mission, or the money. The people around them often believe it too. That is why the pattern is so hard to name.

Power perversion names a pattern of behavior. It describes what people and institutions do over time. It makes no claim about anyone's motives or mental health. I have watched too many communities diagnose people to do it myself. Every part of the definition can be seen, written down, and checked by someone else.

How to Recognize It

Six things have to be present before I call something power perversion. All six. Fewer than six may still be harmful, and it may still need fixing, but it is a different problem.

1. Someone was trusted to serve. A caseworker, a pastor, a program officer, a supervisor, a teacher, a doctor, or a board chair. Their role exists to help other people.

2. They used the role to control people more than the job requires. A caseworker needs one copy of a birth certificate. Asking for it at three appointments is control.

3. The people affected had less power and few ways to say no. The mother needs the benefits. The grantee needs the grant. The new hire needs the job. Saying no, complaining, or leaving costs them far more than it costs the person in charge.

4. The control was explained as care. "This is for your own good." "We have to be good stewards." "We hold everyone accountable." The words sound right. The actions do not match them.

5. It happened again and again. One bad day is a mistake. The same thing done to many people, or to one person for months, or written into a policy, is a pattern.

6. People were hurt, and the ways to fix it failed. The mother lost her benefits. The staff member who complained lost her job. The board never heard a word. Either there was no way to raise the problem, the way was blocked, or the people who used it were punished.

The criteria in detail

Other signs that make the pattern easier to see

None of these is required, and none of them proves anything alone. Together they make the pattern clearer.

One person controls the building, the budget, the passwords, or the relationship with the board.

Information is kept back, and messages are routed through one person.

Emergencies appear that nobody else saw coming, and the same person takes credit for fixing them.

People who object are suddenly described as unstable, difficult, or mentally ill.

Funding or status depends on people staying in need.

Photos, reports, and awards tell a happier story than the people inside tell.

The person who complained leaves, and the person they complained about stays.

Rules are strict for people at the bottom and loose for people at the top.

Three levels

An act. One action can be an act of power perversion. One act is not a pattern, and it does not make anyone a power pervert.

A pattern between people. All six criteria apply to one person's conduct over time or across many people.

A structure. Sometimes no single person is doing it. The policy does it. Card-only canvassing, appeal letters that reuse a three-year-old photo waiver, and logic-model requirements for a church basement can meet all six criteria no matter who carries them out. This level catches harm that has no single villain.

Questions to ask yourself

Do you feel better after someone has to ask you for permission?

Do you hold back information so people keep coming back to you?

Do you enjoy being the one who decides who is "ready"?

Do you send messages late at night and feel good when people answer fast?

Have you ever stirred up a problem so you could be the one to fix it?

Do you use the word "accountability" when you mean punishment?

When someone tells you that you hurt them, is your first move to explain why they are wrong?

Most of us can say yes to one or two of these on a bad day. If you said yes to most of them, check your own work against the six criteria.

What It Is Not

Some things look like power perversion and are different. Telling them apart protects good leaders, and it protects the word from losing its meaning.

A mistake. A supervisor snaps at someone in a meeting. When it is raised, she owns it, apologizes, and it does not happen again. That fails criterion 5. It was a bad day.

A disagreement. Two program directors argue about the budget. Both can go to the executive director. Either one could win. That fails criterion 3. Nobody had power over the other.

Good supervision. A manager sets clear standards, explains them before they apply, uses them for everyone, and lets people appeal. Even when the standards are hard, that fails criteria 2 and 6. The control matches the job, and the way to fix mistakes works.

Real accountability. The rules are public. They apply to the director as much as the front desk. Feedback goes up as well as down. That fails criterion 4, because the reason given matches what happens.

A real emergency. After a flood, a director makes fast decisions alone for a week. She explains each one, reviews them with the board afterward, and hands decisions back to the team. That is leadership. The pattern starts only when the emergency never ends.

An organization with no money. A pantry cuts its hours because a grant ended, and it says so openly. Staff are paid poorly because the funding is poor. That is a structural problem, and it is a serious one. It becomes power perversion when leaders protect their own control while cutting everyone else's voice, when scarcity is used as a reason only for some people, or when staff who ask for fair pay are punished for asking.

Power perversion shows up when the control lasts longer than the reason given for it.

Where It Fits

Other researchers have named parts of this pattern. Power perversion borrows from their work and adds one thing they leave out.

Workplace bullying. Researchers such as Ståle Einarsen in Norway and Gary and Ruth Namie at the Workplace Bullying Institute define bullying as repeated mistreatment of a person who has trouble defending themselves. Power perversion shares the repetition and the imbalance of power. It reaches beyond the workplace, to clients, grantees, congregants, tenants, and patients. It also includes control that looks kind.

Abusive supervision. Bennett Tepper's 2000 research described bosses who keep up hostile behavior toward the people they supervise. Power perversion includes control that never raises its voice, such as gatekeeping, paperwork demands, and help that keeps people dependent.

Abuse of authority. In law and public administration, this means using an official position improperly. It usually refers to one act, and it often requires breaking a rule. Power perversion requires a pattern, and most of what it describes is perfectly legal.

Coercive control. Evan Stark's 2007 book described how abusive partners isolate people, watch them, and regulate their daily lives until they lose their freedom. The overlap is strong: controlling money, checking phones, deciding who can visit. Power perversion moves that idea out of the home and into service relationships and institutions.

Institutional betrayal. Carly Parnitzke Smith and Jennifer Freyd, writing in 2014, described institutions that fail to prevent harm by their members, or respond badly when people report it. That is criterion 6. Power perversion includes both the original harm and the betrayal that follows.

Organizational injustice. Jason Colquitt and others measure fairness at work in four parts: fair outcomes, fair processes, respectful treatment, and honest information. Their survey tools could help measure power perversion. In their terms, power perversion is unfair process and dishonest information, explained as care.

Disabling professions. Ivan Illich argued in the 1970s that professions built to help people can make them dependent and take away their own abilities. Power perversion is the closest thing to Illich's idea that can be observed and checked, one case at a time.

What power perversion adds to all of these is the care. The control comes with a kind explanation, and the ways to correct it fail. That combination is why the harm is so hard to name. The person doing it, and often everyone around them, sincerely calls it help.

The Evidence

No national survey measures power perversion yet. Several large studies measure its parts. I have sorted what they found by the criteria above.

Control from people with power (criteria 2 and 3)

In its 2024 national survey, the Workplace Bullying Institute counted 52.2 million American workers who had been bullied directly at work, and 22.6 million more who had seen it happen. In that survey, African American workers were the most bullied. The survey used a representative national sample of 1,024 adults, polled by Zogby Analytics in September 2024.

In WBI's 2021 survey, 65% of bullies were bosses. In 2024, 29% were peers of the same rank, the highest share WBI has measured in six surveys, and 75% of targets said the bully acted alone. Power does not only run from the top down. Boards and staff can also bully executives. Some nonprofits hire a new leader to bring change, and then the board or staff push back hard once the change actually comes.

Fixes that fail (criterion 6)

According to WBI, bullying most often ends with the target leaving, through firing, being pushed out, quitting, or transferring. That happened in 62% of cases. In 2021, 60% of employers reacted badly when bullying was reported, and they tended to defend, explain away, or deny it. In most cases, the workplace keeps the person who did the harm and loses the person who was harmed.

Voice cut short (criterion 2)

In a study of 112 recorded doctor visits, patients got to set the agenda only 36% of the time. Even then they were usually interrupted, after a median of 11 seconds. The researchers pointed to time pressure as much as to the doctors themselves. This is a structural example. Many doctors say they are given too many patients and too little time with each one.

A study of the entire population of Denmark found that women were diagnosed later than men across 770 kinds of disease, by about four years on average, and about two and a half years later for cancer. For ADHD, boys were diagnosed at about 14 and girls at about 20. Women and neurodivergent people are diagnosed years later. The researchers say they do not yet know all the reasons. Part of the gap may come from whose reports get taken seriously.

Diagnosis by the community (supporting sign)

When researchers studied the top 100 TikTok videos tagged #adhd in 2021, 52 were misleading. A 2025 study in PLOS One found that about half of the creators of popular ADHD videos were selling products or services, and none were licensed mental health professionals. This matters because the same habits of quick, untrained diagnosis are used against people who disagree with someone in power.

Pressure built into the structure (level three)

Three quarters of more than 1,600 nonprofits surveyed in 2023 had job vacancies. They named salary competition, budget limits, and stress and burnout as the top reasons they could not hire or keep staff. In 2024, 95% of nonprofit leaders surveyed by the Center for Effective Philanthropy named burnout as a concern. Independent Sector found that 20% of the nonprofit workforce lives paycheck to paycheck. One leader told CEP that the organization could not pay its own staff the living wage it was trying to win for its clients.

These numbers show the conditions where power perversion grows. They do not prove that any one organization is doing it. That proof comes from the six criteria, applied to real records, one case at a time.

Why It Keeps Happening

Power perversion grows under certain conditions. I can name the conditions without guessing at anyone's motives.

One person controls the money, the hiring, and the information. When every decision runs through one desk, nobody else can check it.

Funding depends on need. When an organization is paid by the number of people it serves, it has a reason to keep people needing it. Nobody has to plan that for it to happen.

Money is short. Scarcity gives leaders a ready reason to say no, and it makes staff afraid to push back.

The people who feel the results are far from the people who decide. A program officer in a downtown office never sees the church basement. A board never talks to the front desk. When the people living with a decision have no way to reach the people making it, mistakes go uncorrected for years.

Reports reward the story. Annual reports, award dinners, and grant reports reward photos and outcomes. Nobody gets an award for asking a family what they would cook.

People learn it from the people who did it to them. Many people who control others were controlled first, by a boss, a teacher, or a parent. It was the only kind of power anyone ever showed them.

Control works like sugar. The win feels good for a day, and then you need another one. The 1 a.m. text gets an answer, and you feel calm until 2 a.m. The person who manufactured a crisis gets thanked, and then needs a new crisis to stay important. Control can make people obey you. It can never make them love you. Domination is the opposite of love.

Most workplaces either do nothing about the pattern or punish the person doing it. The data shows that doing nothing is far more common. The target leaves, and the person who caused the harm stays. When punishment does come, it teaches that power wins, and the person often goes looking for someone with even less power somewhere else. The people who were hurt deserve protection first, every time. Then the person who hurt them deserves a way back.

Is This a Diagnosis?

No. Power perversion is not in any diagnostic manual, and I am not proposing that it should be. It is still worth asking where it would fit if a clinician had to write it down, because the answer shows what kind of problem it is.

The American Psychiatric Association's manual, the DSM-5-TR, has a section called "Other Conditions That May Be a Focus of Clinical Attention." The conditions in that section are not mental disorders. They are problems in a person's life that can affect their mental health or their treatment. The section includes abuse and neglect, relational problems, educational and occupational problems, housing and economic problems, and problems related to the social environment. Under occupational problems, it includes "Other Problem Related to Employment." Reference lists for the manual also include discord with a social service provider, such as a probation officer, case manager, or social services worker. The medical coding system used in the United States has related codes, including discord with boss and workmates.

Power perversion fits there. It is a condition in someone's relationships, work, or community that a therapist might need to understand to help them. It belongs in the life of the person being harmed.

It does not fit as a mental disorder in the person doing it. Labeling the person would repeat the very harm this article describes, where people diagnose someone they disagree with and stop listening to them. The criteria describe what happened. They leave the question of what is wrong with anyone's mind to the person's own doctor, with the person's consent.

The Power of the Bullied: We Are the Bullied, and We Are Stronger Than Them

This is for the people they hurt. This is for us, The Bullied. I have been one of you my entire life. Loving a power pervert and removing one from power are both acts of care. The order matters. We protect the people being harmed first. Then we offer the power pervert a way back.

Find each other. Power perverts depend on everyone feeling alone. The new hire thinks it only happens to her. The nurse thinks she is too sensitive. The board member thinks he is the only one who noticed. An Ethiopian proverb says that when spider webs unite, they can tie up a lion. It means that many people with little power can stop one person with a lot of power, if they act together. For example, three staff members meet for coffee and find out the same director has screamed at each of them. Each one writes down what happened, with dates. Then they ask for a meeting with the board chair, and they walk in together. One complaint gets explained away as a personality conflict. Five people telling the same story, on the same day, with the same kind of details, are much harder to ignore.

Name their lack of personal boundaries. Power perverts love to make you a monster and tell your friends and family about how evil you are. Ignoring confidentiality and professional ethics, they will secretly text your spouse, your children, and your mentors, and dismiss your personhood because of a perceived and unethical diagnosis. If exposed, they will say, "Oh, I only did it because I care." Whenever someone tells you, "I think so and so is mentally unstable," or worse, "I think so and so has bipolar disorder," or is "narcissistic," or "borderline," we should say this phrase: "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but diagnosis without consent is wrong." We must stop tolerating unprofessional and unethical "community" diagnosis. I have had a team of expert therapists monitoring my diagnoses and recovery while my community wrongfully proclaimed I had conditions never even close to being observed clinically. Institutional gaslighting can contribute to serious harm, including thoughts of suicide. Community leaders must stop diagnosing people.

The same rule applies to us. It is tempting to call a power pervert a narcissist or a sociopath. That is their trick, and we should not use it. Say what they did. "She reassigned the hardest patients to the newest nurse for six months." "He sent forty messages after midnight in one month." When you name a diagnosis, people argue about the diagnosis. When you list what the person did, people look into what happened.

Write it down as it happens. Keep dates, times, exact words, screenshots of the 1 a.m. texts, and the names of people who were in the room. Write what happened, and leave out what you think it means about them. Power perverts are skilled at turning your feelings into evidence against you. Facts are much harder to twist. Use the six criteria as your checklist.

Go around the gate. Every power pervert is a gatekeeper. They control narratives, and they alone control access to leadership and to approval processes. Go to the people who sit above them, beside them, and outside them. Talk to the full board. Talk to other funders. Talk to the people the organization claims to serve. Talk to the staff who already left. Power perverts keep people apart because they know what happens when everyone compares notes. For example, if the executive director controls every message that reaches the board, a staff member can email the whole board directly, or ask one board member to coffee. If a program officer at a foundation keeps saying no to a neighborhood group, the group can write to that foundation's president, or talk with other funders who know the neighborhood.

Protect the most vulnerable first. The youngest staff member, the newest nurse, the family that depends on the pantry, and the person on a visa all have the most to lose. Plan around their safety. Let the people with the most security take the most risk. For example, the senior staff member with savings and a strong reputation can put her name on the complaint, so the new hire who is still on probation does not have to.

Take away the power, and keep the person. Removing a power pervert means changing what they control. They stop supervising people. They stop signing checks. They give up the passwords, the building keys, and the final say on hiring. In a church, that might mean the pastor no longer chairs the elder board. In a nonprofit, the director might keep working on one project while someone else supervises the staff. Public shaming, a viral post, or a campaign against their family adds nothing to anyone's safety. The goal is safety for the people they hurt.

Change the structure they used. If one person controlled the building, the budget, or the passwords, give that access to at least two other people. If the board chair met with the director alone, end private meetings and make them all public. If supervisors controlled every review, move to peer mentorship and presentations of learning. If pay was secret, make it open. A power pervert removed from a broken structure gets replaced by the next one.

Heal on purpose. Therapy, rest, friendship, and time away all count as part of the strategy. Many of us carry what they did for years. I have spent three decades in therapy. Our healing keeps us from becoming power perverts ourselves.

Leave the chair pulled out. Once everyone is safe, we keep a way back open. In practice, the person can return if they do the work. They admit what they did. They repair with the people they hurt, on those people's terms. They accept shared decision making. A manager who bullied her team might come back a year later as a member of the team, supervising no one, after she has apologized to each person she hurt and they have agreed she can return. The way back runs through the twelve steps below. If they walk through it, we welcome them home.

Some harm belongs somewhere else first. When a coach, a pastor, or anyone else touches people illegally or harms a child, that is a crime. Report it to the police and to child protective services. The steps in this article come after safety and the law, and never in place of them.

The Twelve Steps for Power Perverts and Bullies

These steps are written in the voice of "we," because nobody does this work alone.

1. We admitted it. We admitted that we used our power to make other people feel small, scared, or stuck, so we could feel important. We admitted that the people who worked with us, lived with us, or depended on us were hurting because of what we did.

2. We came to believe the community has the power. We came to believe that a group of people deciding together makes better decisions than one person deciding alone. We came to believe that our staff, our neighbors, and our families knew things we did not know.

3. We came out. Coming out takes courage, but it is the only way to repair. We told one person we trust exactly what we had been doing, in plain words, such as "I yell at my staff so they will be afraid of me." Then we told the next person, and the next.

4. We looked at why we did it. We asked ourselves what we were afraid of when we first started controlling people. We looked at what happened to us growing up and early in our careers. We learned that we wanted to feel safe, seen, or important, and that controlling people was how we tried to get those feelings.

5. We stopped rushing to judge people. In the Book of Job, Job's friends decided he must have done something wrong, and then they treated everything he said as more proof. We did the same thing to our coworkers, our neighbors, and our families. We learned that one mistake or one bad day does not tell us who a person is. When someone hurts us once, that does not give us permission to hurt them back.

6. We stopped creating false emergencies. We stopped sending messages at 1 a.m. and demanding answers right away. We learned the difference between a real deadline and pressure we made up. Before we call something urgent, we ask the people who will do the work whether they agree, and we let them help set the timeline or say no.

7. We stopped making ourselves the hero. We stopped creating problems so we could get credit for solving them. We learned that a person who always needs to be the hero needs someone else to be in trouble. Now we let other people solve problems, and we let them get the credit.

8. We made a list of the people we harmed. We wrote down every name we could remember. We included the people who quit, the people who stayed but stopped speaking up, and the people we never noticed because we were not paying attention.

9. We repaired on their terms. We asked each person what they needed from us. For some it was an apology. For others it was a public correction, a reference letter, back pay, or to be left alone. We did it when it was safe for them. The people we harmed decided when it was enough.

10. We gave power away on purpose. We let the people affected by our decisions help make them. We let our teams set the meeting agendas. We let neighborhood residents decide how grant money gets spent. We replaced performance improvement plans with peer mentoring, annual reviews with presentations of learning, and secret salaries with published salaries.

11. We learned to step back. In the Gospels, Jesus often left a town or a crowd, and new leaders and new communities grew in the places he left. We learned that sometimes the best thing a powerful person can do is step out of the top job, or out of the room, so other people can lead.

12. We help other power perverts, with love. We reach out to people who are doing what we used to do. We tell them honestly what they are doing and how they can stop. We do not shame them or cut them off. We offer to walk through these steps with them. We survive together, or not at all.

Every power pervert chose to control people. Every one of them can choose to stop today.

Your mother is still at the table. She is still patient. The chair is still pulled out for you.

Power perverts need love too. That includes you.

GA