You are not alone, as feeling helpless is such a common feeling in dealing with overwhelming anxiety. It is important to remember that even though you may feel helpless, you do not have to continue to feel that way. Making sense of the kind of helplessness you feel can better direct your recovery.
Patients often describe helplessness as a feeling of total misery—a stance of total vulnerability and inability to control the outcome of a given situation. At times referred to as impotent rage, feeling washed ashore by a tidal wave of anxiety, caught in a hurricane of demeaning demons, or grappling with death, the mental experience of helplessness is uncomfortable.
Patients will do any-thing to avoid it, accounting for the phenomenon of agoraphobia, or avoiding any setting in which this feeling might strike again. Helplessness might take on many meanings. It could be evolutionarily adaptive, much as a farmer might not plant crops in a scorched field or a businessman might not invest in a company that was bankrupt. It might be used as a way to gain the advantage of the sick role in order to obtain love and affection from others.
Helplessness might provide the medium in which to express powerful passive aggression, using our own impotent rage to hijack others into feeling helpless. Helplessness might serve in the spirit of beating ourselves, giving us the justification we need to call ourselves defective.
This despair might prompt us to resort to drugs and alcohol to feel some power. Other situations in life are so overwhelmingly destructive that feelings of helpless-ness and despair are completely realistic. In these situations (terrorism on September 11, 2001, for example), there really is nothing that anyone can do to fix a per-son’s pain.
We can only try to provide comfort, a listening, safe environment, medication and appropriate therapy as indicated, and to allow for wounds of this kind of helplessness to repair themselves, much as a physical wound scars eventually.