A King Has Presence – and Affective Presence

In its fullest form, the archetype of the King, also known as the archetype of the Sovereign, has the quality of presence, which means the capacity to “be there” for someone without running a personal agenda.

This means choosing to let our guard down and allow our Safety Officer to take time off, so we can fully attune with the feelings of another person. Yet we do not lose ourselves in this process: we are aware of how we feel and what we are thinking, and we do not lose our boundaries and merge with the other person emotionally.

This level of attunement to another person makes them feel less alone, more connected to us, perhaps more appreciated, certainly more respected. It is the skill which a good therapist brings to their relationship with each client: offering full attention and empathy without distraction or self-absorption. It’s a quality of listening, appreciating, trying to understand another person’s point of view, and perhaps experiencing what they are experiencing, at least to some degree.

When a leader establishes a relationship of this kind with another person, that person feels an embodied sense of being affirmed and respected. This makes them feel worthy, increases their sense of self- worth, and allows them to open up to an experience of their own sovereign quality, one foundation stone of which is being seen, heard, respected and acknowledged.

In short, your full presence communicates to the people around you that you are there for them, attentive to them, and aware of their needs and emotional state (and indeed your own). The art of being fully present from moment to moment is known as mindfulness.

Closely related to the concept of presence is the quality of charisma. I remember the very first occasion when I entered an advanced training for psychotherapists, many years ago. The atmosphere in the room was tangibly different to anything I’d experienced before, simply because the people in the room, men and women alike, were fully present. They had charisma! They felt powerful.

When we started to introduce ourselves, I realized what was going on. Those men and women had been in deep personal therapy for long periods: 5 years, 10 years, 17 years, even 20 years. They had worked with dedication to heal the emotional wounds of childhood and reintegrate the energy held in their shadow unconscious. By doing so they had reintegrated into their consciousness much of the energy lost in emotional wounding. Not only this, but they had also freed up more energy because they were not using their psychic resources to constantly repress their unconscious material.

All of this energy was now supporting their sovereignty and projecting out into the world as charisma. But do we all need to undertake long-term psychotherapy or work on our shadow  to be effective Kings? No, I don’t believe so. But to me this does suggest that to develop a quality of presence, which as we’ve already seen is a quality that evokes people’s respect, loyalty, and willingness to follow a leader, you might need to do some emotional healing work.

I’m sure that very few people really understand how much psychic and emotional energy is absorbed when we hold the consequences of our emotional wounding in shadow. Enormous amounts of energy are required to repress material into shadow and keep it there: energy which isn’t then available to us in everyday life to support our kingship. This energy can be released through shadow work.

Affective Presence

This is a quality that you bring with you, a way of being in the world, if you like, that can impact the mood of the people around you. In other words, it’s about how you affect people emotionally and energetically. For example, do you see people calming down when you’re around, or do they seem to get more irate, anxious, or agitated moment by moment, no matter what you do? This is the consequence of the affective presence you bring to any encounter with others: and it can be positive or negative. And while it may not always be the same, most of us have a predominant type of affective presence.

The primary impact of positive affective presence on any group of people is to make them feel more at ease, less emotionally defended, and if they are anxious, to make them feel more relaxed as well. But it isn’t just the effect on other people that makes positive affective presence one of the Sovereign’s greatest qualities. It’s also a mechanism by which a Sovereign can combine his personal power and his position power.

By personal power we mean things like charisma, innate authority, and a sense of psychological strength. People see this as personal authority or personal power. But Kings also have position power. That power accrues from what they do, rather than who they are.

So, for example, all these roles have some position power attached to them: officer in a branch of the military, leader or co-leader of the family, father, teacher, chairman of the board, director of the company, manager of the department, owner of the shop, foreman in the workshop, leader of a men’s circle, trainer of recruits. And being the leader in your own life gives you some power, influence and control over your own world, both inner and outer! Other examples of power accrued by position include the power of police officers, security guards, army officers… you get the idea, no doubt.

People are not inherently respectful of a leader who exercises his position power in an arbitrary or discriminatory way. But when a leader, a King, is able to combine affective presence with justifiable and respectful use of his position power, then he becomes a leader that others look up to. He becomes a leader whom others will follow.

Before you read on, ponder for a moment how much presence and how much affective presence you bring to your world, and what impact this has on the people around you.

 If you wish to investigate shadow work, this directory of shadow work coaches and facilitators may be very useful in selecting the right practitioner for you.