Helplessness
Introduction
Feeling helpless and out of control can cause secondary feelings such as stress and depression. This is a common behavior that can make you feel powerless to change and progress. With a lack of control over your feelings or emotions it can be difficult to feel anything other than depression and anxiety. There are ways for you to learn how to take control and overcome the helplessness using coping mechanisms.
The cause of learned helplessness and victimization cannot always be determined. While there are some undeniable patterns such as suffering from emotional issues like depression, there are diverse symptoms with each diagnosis. As humans we feel a need to have some level of control over our lives and if we feel that we do not it can create these negative feelings. Fortunately, what you are experiencing as a result of this can be changed. Negative thinking has a lot to do with negative results that occur. When you work with a therapist you'll understand how you can change your perception by forming a new response to the things that happen to you.
When Helplessness / Victimhood Becomes Unhealthy
Whenever you are exposed to negative emotions for a prolonged period of time it can cause some despair in life. If there is a loss of control within any given situation it can lead to an uncomfortable mental and emotional state. Learned helplessness and victimhood can become unhealthy as it tends to make you feel incapable of accomplishing things and makes it feel harder to succeed in some of the smallest tasks. Every day we are faced with problems that we will either choose to overcome or allow to control us. When choosing not to fight back it increases this weight and damages our self esteem. Assuming that we are unable to overcome something because we fear failure will prevent us from taking risks or doing new things that would be beneficial to our health and future. Allowing this behavior to continue can cause us to believe that we are more powerless than we actually are. By choosing to get help from a therapist you can learn how to make better choices and end up in desirable situations instead of allowing a cycle of depression to repeat.
Helplessness / Victimhood and External Relationships
Suffering from this can change the relationships that you have with other people. If you continue to feel disappointment and discomfort toward situations that occur it's likely that the people around you will also be feeling the same disappointments. Being that you are the only one in control of your behavior it can make it hard on others who are attempting to help you move forward and find control in the way that you feel and react. Victimhood can cause you to experience a series of negative events that also change the way that your loved ones feel about themselves and their relationship with you. As you put all of your effort into improving your situation, you might assume that bad things are going to continue happening. Negative energy attracts more negative energy. Expressing that hopelessness toward others can bring the relationship down and change their outlooks completely. It can damage the self esteem of others as well being that a lot of their own time and focus may be spent on the person who does not feel in control of their own happiness. Changing this feeling is important to understand if you want to reverse it. By working with a therapist you can learn the contagious effect of victimhood and how it will keep you stuck in an uncomfortable and vulnerable position.
How Therapy Can Help
Therapy can assist you by showing you that you have control and influence in regards to your own behavior. Although you may not have control over another person you can shift this focus and center it toward your own decisions. As you work with a counselor they will show you how to stay mentally healthy and act independently. Just because you hold certain beliefs it doesn't make them true. Therapy will show you that false beliefs can limit your ability in getting to the root of a problem. If the beliefs are taking over your resiliency a counselor will help you dispute them. When you learn how to identify with the usefulness of your belief you will then see to which extent a negative perception is correlating your health. A counselor will provide you with strategies that help you make affirmative decisions instead of accepting negative circumstances. If you cling to cynical thoughts it might keep you from changing things that you are in control of. As you work with a therapist you'll learn how to use tools that challenge your actions and help you sort through your feelings as they might be getting in the way of your positive decisions.
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