Powerlessness is probably one of the most unpleasant feelings out there! It not only causes discomfort but in the long run it is also dangerous. It has been proved that people who often feel powerless about the important things in their lives get sick more often and it is more difficult for them to recover. Dr. Joan Borysenko, one of the pioneers of holistic medicine, says that patients who feel that they have at least some control over their lives and health get better much faster and suffer illnesses much more lightly compared to patients who think of themselves as powerless.
The good news is that powerlessness is almost always a false feeling, i.e. we have much more power and control over the situation than we realize. If you are feeling powerless, it means that an emotional wound from your childhood has been activated and you have started seeing life through the eyes of a 5-year-old. Children are often powerless – they must put up with the attitude of their parents, the circumstances, the environment, even if they are a nightmare. They really have no choice! However, if we as adults feel powerless, this is just a learned response of our nervous system. As humans, we are made in such a way that all our responses are learned and get repeated throughout our lives. This serves our survival by saving energy and time – while we are thinking how act, the predator around might eat us, or the fire might burn us! Learned responses also protect us from unwanted scenarios which have happened before – if we sense the “danger”, we are already on the alert and reacting.
However, there is some more good news – everything that has been learned can be UNLEARNED, if it is no longer serving us. How can we help ourselves and deal with our feeling of powerlessness?
Let’s first ask ourselves: Which part of our past is this situation reminding us of? As I mentioned before, feeling powerless always leads us to a childhood wound. We may even not remember what exactly happened in our past but for sure we will remember that we have felt the same way before, probably in a very similar situation. Meaning that someone or something has pushed a button, put some salt in an old wound! If we mentally track our history – the similar situations in our past, we will probably see very clearly how we interpret the external situation through the twisted prism of our own negative experience. Exactly this twisting makes us feel powerless.
Second, let’s have an honest answer, at least to ourselves: Do I really have no choice? Let’s say that my child is so mischievous that I feel powerless and desperate. I cannot keep it still, it doesn’t hear me, it doesn’t listen to me. What choice do I have? All kinds of things – from letting it do what it wants and just making sure that it wouldn’t fall or hurt itself, to speaking firmly and even punishing it … Here our values and beliefs will come into play in the form of resistance: “It will make a mess of everything, it cannot be like this,” “If I let it now, it will think that anything is allowed,” “If I punish it, it will cause a childhood trauma,” “I don’t know how to be tough with children …” We think that this is the absolute truth, but these are just our views on life based on past experiences. In fact, we have a choice – we can question and even prove all our beliefs wrong, for example: “Who says that it should be clean all the time? This is not even possible with kids!” “In fact why am I saying no, the kid is just having fun in its own way because I am busy,” “I am always nice to the kid but sometimes one needs strong boundaries and a firm voice, and one of those times is now!”
The sense of power comes from reminding ourselves that everything we do is a choice. I choose to not raise my voice with my child and to tolerate how it acts. I choose to let it play and make a mess. I choose to do all things possible to keep the house clean all the time! Regardless of the reason why you make one choice or another, this doesn’t change the fact that there is a choice! Even when somebody is forcing us to do something, we choose to obey rather than to rebel.
The next step is to examine our resistance – why are we so attached to the result? Why does this situation take so much effort? Feeling powerless is often related to lots of control – we feel powerless because we control the way the situation develops, and we are strongly attached to a specific result. It might stem from our perfectionism, idealism, our expectations from ourselves, from other people, from life in general. It might be that we are so stubborn, and we don’t give up our viewpoints – the more we stick to our opinions and principles, the less flexible we are and the more powerless we feel. As Marianne Williamson says, changing your viewpoint is a true miracle!
Our last step is to give up things that we cannot control and to focus on our inner world where everything depends on us. For sure we have no control over other people – the more we want to control what they do and say and how they behave, the more powerless we feel! We cannot control external events and situations either. As to our inner world though, it is all in our hands! We are completely capable of controlling our thoughts, reactions, and even our feelings.
Here are some tips on dealing with powerlessness by Anodea Judith, a therapist and expert in chakras:
- Avoid any people and situations that drain you up from your power, such as people who criticize you for example.
- Take good care of yourselves – provide yourselves with what you need, on your own.
- If there is an action that has not yielded results for a long time, if something is not happening despite all your effort, just stop investing your energy in it!
- Focus your energy – who and what are you investing it in?
- Ground yourselves – be present in the moment, stop your mind from wandering in the past or in the future.
- Laugh more!
- Ask yourselves if there is a person whom you are blaming for the way your life is. How much power do you put in that blaming? Write the name of this person on a sheet of paper and then burn it, saying: “With this I set you free from any responsibility for my life! From now on, I take my own responsibility for it!”
Taking more responsibility increases our sense of empowerment!
If you apply these tips and do it regularly, you will find yourselves feeling powerless less and less often. Do not forget that our minds are trained just like muscles – a little every day, for weeks and even months, so that you see some results. Yielding to the sense of powerlessness is a voluntary surrender of our personal power!
Yours truly,
Irina
