What do you do when you feel helpless over another’s choices? What is the result? Are you happy with how you manage this feeling?
Helplessness is a very difficult feeling. It can even feel like life or death to those of us who were left to cry for hours as babies, with no one coming to help us. Because we were so helpless over ourselves as babies and small children, it can trigger feelings of panic. It’s hard to remember, in these moments when fear is triggered, that as adults, we are not helpless over ourselves.
For many of us, the deep fear that got programmed into us as young children can trigger our wounded self’s desire to control, when we feel helpless over another’s choices.
I grew up with a very angry mother who would attack me out of the blue. As a highly sensitive only child, the fear and heartbreak of being treated so unlovingly was unbearable. So rather than feel the hurt, I numbed it out by learning to stay in my head rather than being present in my body, and by focusing on caretaking others’ feelings. The only way I could survive was to not know that I was being so hurt.
I had so deeply shut out knowing about my own pain that when I had children, I thought nothing about yelling at them. One day, as I was yelling at my son Josh, who was about 2 ½, he looked up at me with tears running down his cheeks and said, “Mommy, when you yell at me, I feel like I’m gonna die.” Continue reading When You Feel Hurt By Your Partner