Drowning in powerlessness?

These days, powerlessness seems to be everywhere. Technology threatens to take away our livelihood or leave us unskilled, and a worsening environmental crisis can leave us feeling powerless as heatwaves become the norm, sea levels rise, and air quality deteriorates. When we feel powerless, there is a danger that we will feel helpless and hopeless, and any mental health practitioner knows that hopelessness is a red flag for a person’s mental health.
 
But we shouldn’t slip into a cognitive distortion about this; there is no black-and-white about life. We are not completely powerless in every aspect of our lives, just as we are not completely powerful. We have varying degrees of autonomy over varying aspects of our lives, and it changes with time and knowledge. I often think of it like the ebb and flow of the sea, where we drown if we go too rigid and try to fight it. Instead, we must stay calm and loosen up a little, so we can move with the ebb and flow of it all. One day we may experience a great deal of power and control, and the next day we have less of it.
 
Flexibility is helpful in response to powerlessness, but it can also help with many other challenges to our mental health. The trouble is that our brains are hard-wired to seek out certainty. We look for patterns, and that can end up limiting us. So you grew up believing the world was less uncertain, so you believed that if you worked hard and kept your head down, everything would be okay. Letting go of that assumption can be liberating, loosening you up to the times when you slip into moments of limited power and control.
 
Trying new ways to live and challenging assumptions can be hard to do on your own, so that’s when a therapist might help you. After all, sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know. You need an experienced, trustworthy professional to point out the unseen parts of your story, so you can weigh that up with the rest of what you have known about the situation.
 
Take, for example, someone I worked with recently, who had spent years with their head down in a career they loved but could not progress in. They tried everything to make it work, but something was missing. No matter how they tried to win over the executive team, nothing seemed to work. They believed they were powerless to make a change and they were close to quitting, even when they had no other job to go to.
 
As they explored this in therapy, they realized that their assumption that they had about power and control over everything, that if they worked hard then everything would go their way, applied to their own life but also their expectations of others. In short, this makes them seem like an insufferable perfectionist who is unwilling to embrace aspects of powerlessness and learn from those moments.
 
It took a little time to accept this, with a lot of mindful breathing exercises to manage the nervousness, but slowly they were less hard on themselves but also less hard on others. In the end, they got the promotion they had been waiting for, because the executive team finally saw how they might be able to manage a team.
 
I am not sure whether any of this is resonating with you but, if it is, I would love to explore this more with you.
You can make contact using this link, so we can set up a time and day to explore this in more detail.

Chris Warren-Dickins
Psychotherapist & Author