Powerlessness
A child unloved by his mother has learned to live in an atmosphere of this unloving. Has adapted to functional treatment. Has built up defenses. It’s unbearable to feel everything with your heart. You need the armor of insensitivity…
One girl slipped away and hid, sat in her room, feeling invisible, and drowned in hopelessness. And the other girl kept trying and deserving and getting angry when she couldn’t crack her mother. She fiercely beat at her mother’s psyche, and it turned out that she only attacked her powerlessness. And another boy from the impossibility of being loved turned away at once. And there was one more frozen person in the world….
Then they came to therapy. They had a long journey of wandering and denial. The defenses hid from them the reality of their own powerlessness and their mother’s inability to love. Layer after layer beneath the bustle of anger, fighting and fussing, they discovered their shame, fear and pain of being unloved by their mothers. They faltered at the stops of despair. They walked away into the desert of sadness. But there was no turning back. The pain of the unfulfilled first childhood hope of love and the first choice to interrupt their need for it pushed them forward….
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Their psyche awaits healing. And it is only possible by replaying the wounding situation. Life will surely answer their call. Not in fantasy, but in physical reality, people will come to them and give them “accidental” point blows right in the heart. Just to be sure. So that it would be impossible to deny the reality of dislike. To confront grown-up people with unloving. To make them realize: yes, it happens, accept it. To make it impossible to ignore the reality, neither one’s own nor another’s… Only then were there defenses. In therapy, they fall away, the spell dissipates. Clarity emerges through the veil of childhood hope and expectations that never had any basis in reality. “Mom doesn’t know how to love. Whatever I’m paying back…”
At that moment, that same girl breaks through into the soul of a grown woman. Or the same boy enters the soul of a grown man. They try to save themselves in their usual ways: not to feel, to freeze. Or attack their abusers with all the fury they can muster. Habitually deny the importance of a mother’s love. To be ashamed of forbidden tears.
It is important for the therapist to be there at this moment. Holding their hand. Not to let the familiar scenario play out. To turn vitality into the ability to grieve, not to interrupt one’s grief. “How painful you’ve been… And now we’ll endure.”
Unfortunately, a lot of encapsulated trauma has this replay moment. Because there is no other way to “unpack” the psychic energy. You have to live again the situations that brutally wounded and interrupted something in your soul. But there is good news. So the psyche is ready to go down a different road. Neural connections are blazing new trails….
Your clients will go over and over again through that dreaded abyss of powerlessness for the narcissist, where he will fall into his terror of humiliation and the unbearability of his limitations. In therapy, we will look for a reliance on the power of powerlessness.
A paradox, it would seem: what strength can we derive from recognizing our limitations? It is not what I am coping with or have coped with. Not what I am achieving or have achieved. Not achievements, successes, records…..
It’s what we haven’t been able to do. AND WE NEVER WILL.
It’s what we haven’t gotten. AND WE NEVER WILL.
It’s what we haven’t endured. AND WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO ENDURE…
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Following some people, it seems to me that at some point in our lives, development is not only promoted through achievements and raising the bar of personal records. It is the recognition and appropriation of one’s losses and limitations that plays an equally important role in maturity. As long as a person is not ready to face, or rather, to meet his inevitable powerlessness in something with his heart, he remains a “child” with the belief in his omnipotence. He will long for exactly the love of his parents that he did not receive. To suffer for the opportunities he missed as a child. Worry about the choices he made earlier…..
An inordinate amount of energy is expended to hold on to these needs and stay feeling about various “old” facts. It’s like a bottomless hole: “I thought this topic was already worked out. But my mom calls, and I fall back into this black hole of resentment. The pain overwhelms me.” Or, “No matter how much I do for Dad, he still doesn’t appreciate or recognize me…”
At some point in therapy, for example, or in personal progression, sometimes we are able to come to a point where a “new countdown” begins.
Mom will NEVER EVER again give me what I dream of.
Dad will NEVER EVER tell me what I am working so hard to achieve.
My brother will NEVER EVER give me the place of my parents’ favorite.
I will NEVER be able to save my parents.
I will NEVER be their mom, no matter how much I sacrifice myself…..
And if earlier such powerlessness covered the rage of a small child who didn’t get something or, on the contrary, didn’t get it, then after recognizing these limitations and lamenting lost opportunities, lost feelings and other things, there is first an emptiness. But it is already better than a “funnel”, where a lot of energy was spent before. Then gradually, after recognizing one’s powerlessness to influence it, there comes a time of resignation to the losses that are irretrievable….
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It is a kind of funeral for what it is time to die…..
Powerlessness has another very close synonym: futility. Gordon Newfeld* writes about it this way in his book Keys to the Well-Being of Children and Adolescents: “The key to understanding this process is in what happens when a child encounters futility, that is, something over which he or she has no control. There are dozens of such experiences a day in a young child’s life, the most common being a parent’s ‘no.’ Other everyday experiences of futility include situations where something doesn’t go the way one wants it to; you can’t be the best at everything; you can’t be first all the time; you can’t have sole command of mom’s attention all the time. Once futility is registered emotionally, the energy to change the situation or to make things the way one wants them to be calms down… As a result of these experiences, psychological resilience and adaptability increase.
* Gordon Newfeld, PhD, is a Canadian developmental psychologist and author of Don’t Miss Your Children, co-written with physician Gabor Mate. To date, the book has been translated into 10 languages, including Russian. Newfeld’s approach is based on John Bowlby’s attachment theory.
The encounter with futility should be a very deeply affecting experience that brings about changes within us when we are unable to change the circumstances that are causing us frustration.
It is always necessary to let go of some desire in order for the brain to discover that by not getting our own, we can survive. Naturally, in order to adapt to great frustrations.
It takes a lot of tears. For example, the loss of a loved one, the inevitability of death, the impossibility of turning back time. The Greeks called these types of futility tragedies and put on performances to induce tears. They saw this as the key to a civilized society…..
In traditional societies, tears have always been part of child-rearing. I’m sure our ancestors didn’t consider that the encounter with futility was truly lived until the tears of futility came. We have lost the wisdom of our tears, and with them the ability to adapt to what we cannot control…”
For me, this text is not just about children and teens. Many adults have lost the wisdom of their tears, driving them back and being under the illusion of omnipotence. Many really live in pursuit of acquiring means, ways, methods to influence the world in such a way that “everything works and can be done”. Many are stressed out by what doesn’t work and feel guilty about it. We all miss those important tears of futility. Not helplessness or weakness. But specifically the futility that gives us back the ability to experience the loss of hope in infinite power.
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The helplessness we look for in therapy is the adult’s response to understanding limitations.
It is full of sadness and even grief instead of fierce despair and shame. It is the experience of losing hope that it is possible to “grow up and deal with everything.” To heal and make it right. And so on… Powerlessness grows out of murdered hope, it’s true. But on that grave grow the flowers of real strength, not false might tormented by the shame of some unfortunate infirmity. In powerlessness there is much release from the continuous expenditure of energy channeled into the impossible. Powerlessness is a very sober and clear bearing on reality. It confronts fantasies of grandiosity in which one is angry with oneself and falls into the shame of not being able to take control and power over everything….
Eric Smudge* writes: “In reality, man is forced to realize all too soon that he is powerless and that this powerlessness is the normal human condition. But man does not want to accept this: the maintenance of the natural illusion of omnipotence seems to him a matter far more important than the satisfaction of urges, and he tries to maintain the illusion in any way he can. The restoration of narcissistic integrity becomes the most important task…”
Omnipotence is the most important defense of the narcissist’s fragile self. And it is lived and ended through powerlessness. And there it is a short walk to ordinary human life with all its joys instead of fantasies of power over the whole world, which are never destined to come true.
Powerlessness is a healthy, albeit very difficult response to the inability to get the most important things. I can’t help but depend on other people. But I can’t control them. Not their love, not their affection, not their opportunities, not their death. I have a body, and it will not obey me. I will grow old. And I, too, am finite…
*Eric Smadja is a psychoanalyst, clinical psychologist, and anthropologist. He is a member of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society and the creator of a training program for psychoanalysts to work with couples.
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