I felt helpless this morning. Woke up at 5:30 and immediately had a feeling that seemed like sadness, but that didn’t seem quite right. The more I thought about it, the more I decided to talk to Deb about the feeling. Then the word “helpless” came to mind and it seemed right. I’d like to discuss the matter of feeling helpless and see if I can be of any help, especially to the men who might choose to read this blog because I think we men often feel helpless but dare not admit to it, much less speak it, much less have someone who could really understood. Deb really understood. I am blessed.

I want to talk about a few things related to feeling helpless:

• What does it mean to feel helpless
• Normal feelings of helplessness
• Dangerous feelings of helplessness
• Accommodations that erupt from feeling helpless
• Profiting from feeling helpless

First, let me tell you about this morning’s experience. As I noted, I didn’t really know that I was actually feeling helpless. I thought this was a “mood” or something, but frankly, I never use the term “mood” or “bad mood” when expressing how I feel. So when I found this the right word, it began to make sense to me. The feeling of helplessness clearly came from the responsibility that I have today, and for that matter the responsibility I have every day. I immediately thought of a task that I needed to do today if at all possible. I need to find an electrical problem that exists somewhere in the electric system that I put together 30 years ago. Importantly, I really didn’t want to do this project, had only vague ideas of how I could solve the problem, much less any kind of excitement to jump right into circuits, switches, and junction boxes having no idea where the short was. Added to this were a couple of other things: I have some kind of minor scrape on my leg that can’t seem to heal. I had some minor thoughts about a neuropsychological evaluation that I started recently and had some residue of this individual feeling helpless in life. Finally, and possibly most importantly, we watched a Masterpiece special called “The Duchess” last night that really affected us negatively because of the genuinely helpless situation the duchess character felt. Enough about me. Let me discuss helplessness.

The nature of helplessness

The nature of helplessness is that the individual feels unable to do something. This “something” might be a bit complicated but important like an electrical problem or a math problem if you’re in school. It might be something nearly trivial, like how to paint the old chairs that are on your patio. It might be something terribly important, like salvaging a damaged relationship or coping with some kind of financial or person loss.

The essence of helplessness in the feeling that you can’t do what seems to in front of you and seemingly needs to be done. Consider the time or times you have felt this when confronted with something that seemed daunting, or even seemingly impossible. I felt helpless when I was in advanced math classes having done quite well in algebra and calculus but thoroughly beyond my ability to understand a math class that had no numbers, which means that it was nearly completely abstract. I often felt sad because I couldn’t understand abstract math, or perhaps just didn’t like it. Whatever the cause of my feeling helpless, it was quite real to me. Sadness, in fact, is what is really happening when you feel helpless. You are sad because you don’t know what to do, when to do, or even to do it at all. Most times of feeling helpless are quite natural and unavoidable.

The natural feeling of helplessness

When I woke up this morning, this feeling of helplessness came to me without my bidding. I tend to an optimist, often to a fault, so my feeling unable to do the tasks of the day did not fit with my normal feeling of optimism. But there it was and I had to deal with it. The most important thing in “dealing with it” meant, what would I feel, what would I think, and what would I do.

Consider the times in your life that you have felt helpless. Some of these were trivial like I noted above; perhaps when you couldn’t seem to finish a Sudoku puzzle. Maybe it was something serious, like having received a cancer diagnosis. Maybe you had several things in your day that made you feel helpless.

My point here is that it is normal to feel helpless sometimes, perhaps often as we progress through our days or our lives. Helpless is not a bad thing. I have to help the people I see in my office, almost entirely men, that it is normal to feel helpless and help them admit to the feeling rather than denying the feeling, running away from it, or accommodating to it. Helplessness has got a bad name, often for good reasons, but properly understood, accepted, and selectively communicated, it can prevent problems associated with the feeling.

Importantly, I feel helpless when I can’t do something, but I also feel helpless when I feel emotionally hurt, when I make a mistake, or when someone criticizes something that I said or did. If I don’t have a psychological mechanism to feel helpless and find what I must ultimately do, I will end up compensating in a less than profitable way.

The dangers of feeling helplessness

The biggest danger is not admitting to feeling it. For us men it is a real task to admit that we can’t do something because it seems to strike against our innate feeling that we can do anything. We haven’t been taught that feeling is normal, necessary, and ultimately good for us, and we certainly haven’t been taught that feeling helpless is manly. Unfortunately, women have often been taught the opposite, namely that it is normal to feel helpless.

Feeling helpless, if not addressed and felt, people feel anxious or depressed. These feelings can cause even more difficult problems in life. When people, and mostly I’m thinking of men, feel helpless, they accommodate.

Accommodations erupting from helplessness

What does that mean? It means that they feel something, think something, or do something to keep away from feeling helpless. These accommodations tend to be three: anger, avoidance, or addiction. Importantly, all three of these accommodations are due to the anxiety or depression that occurs when a person feels helpless. Most common among men is feeling anger. The second most common is avoidance, and the third most common is addiction in some form. Consider how you might get angry when you can’t do something, have to do something, or are told to do something. You might do the second thing we men tend to do: avoid it. This would be pretending that you don’t have to face something or do something, so you just go about your day (or your life) avoiding doing what you really should do. Rarely, do men avoid addiction in some way, for some being alcohol or street drugs, for many screen time primarily on the cell phone, and some men find some other behavioral addiction like gambling or masturbation. As I said, all of these ways of accommodating to feeling helpless are based on the natural anxiety that we feel when we have to do something that we don’t know how to do or don’t want to do.

There are other more dangerous things that people do when they feel helpless: they made it worse by truly being helpless. Why would they do that? They make things worse so that they can complain that they are truly unable to do what needs to be done. One of the most common means of accommodations is to develop physical symptoms or medical conditions. I see many men who have one or more medical conditions, many of them caused by their failure to admit that they feel helpless, and ultimately unable to do something. In a previous blog I described parapraxes in life, many of them physical symptoms or genuine medical conditions. Many of these allegedly medical conditions are psychiatric in nature, like depression or anxiety, but also ADHD, bipolar disorder, and other mental health diagnoses. If I am sick in some way, I have an excuse not to do what I need to do, whatever that might be. Then I can say that I “have” depression or ADHD and am unable to do something. I may even feel that I can’t to “anything.”

Instead of falling into accommodations, I need to profit from the feeling of helplessness. What does that mean?

Profiting from feeling helpless

1. Admit that you feel helpless. Don’t tell anyone. Find a way to feel this difficult feeling without a judgment. You might think that you can’t do something or don’t want to do something, but instead of thinking, just allow the feeling to be there.
2. If you admit to feeling helpless, it will run its course. Helplessness is a form of sadness, somewhat about the present but also about the past and the future. Allow this feeling of sadness to run its course, and it will end. Sandess ends; anger, avoidance, and addiction don’t end.
3. If you have a good person in your life, you might dare to tell this person how you feel. But be very careful about who you tell and how you express yourself. You don’t need correction or advice. You don’t even need encouragement. You need a bit of comfort. I felt that this morning and found a good way to go about the day as the feeling of helplessness ended and was replaced with meaningful work.
4. After you have given yourself a period of helplessness, which then becomes a period of sadness and possibly a period of talking about it to someone, you will find that you have a renewed energy to go about your day,,,or your life with accommodations and with a proper amount of energy,