Helpless Situation Quotes

I've always wanted not to give a fuck. While crying helplessly into my pillow for no good reason, I would often fantasize that maybe someday I could be one of those stoic badasses whose emotions are mostly comprised of rock music and not being afraid of things.

...repeated trauma in childhood forms and deforms the personality. The child trapped in an abusive environment is faced with formidable tasks of adaptation. She must find a way to preserve a sense of trust in people who are untrustworthy, safety in a situation that is unsafe, control in a situation that is terrifyingly unpredictable, power in a situation of helplessness. Unable to care for or protect herself, she must compensate for the failures of adult care and protection with the only means at her disposal, an immature system of psychological defenses.

A carefully cultivated heart will, assisted by the grace of God, foresee, forestall, or transform most of the painful situations before which others stand like helpless children saying “Why?

I know how it feels to be completely alone and helpless, and the last thing you want to hear in that situation is, 'It's going to be OK.' "The only thing that seems to really help is that someone else who has felt that low expressing those feelings to you.

It is not the unloved who initiate disaffection, but those who cannot love because they love only themselves. It is not the helpless, subject to terror, who initiate terror, but the violent, who with their power create the concrete situation which begets the 'rejects of life.' It is not the tyrannized who initiate despotism, but the tyrants. It is not those whose humanity is denied them who negate humankind, but those who denied that humanity (thus negating their own as well). Force is used not by those who have become weak under the preponderance of the strong, but by the strong who have emasculated them.

Afsoos was the word in Urdu. There was no equivalent in English. It was a specific kind of regret - not wishing he had acted differently, but a helpless sadness at the situation as it was, a sense that it could not have been another way.

When discouraged some people will give up, give in or give out far too early. They blame their problems on difficult situations, unreasonable people or their own inabilities. When discouraged other people will push back that first impulse to quit, push down their initial fear, push through feelings of helplessness and push ahead. They’re less likely to find something to blame and more likely to find a way through.

Many codependents, at some time in their lives, were true victims—of someone’s abuse, neglect, abandonment, alcoholism, or any number of situations that can victimize people. We were, at some time, truly helpless to protect ourselves or solve our problems. Something came our way, something we didn’t ask for, and it hurt us terribly. That is sad, truly sad. But an even sadder fact is that many of us codependents began to see ourselves as victims. Our painful history repeats itself. As caretakers, we allow people to victimize us, and we participate in our victimization by perpetually rescuing people. Rescuing or caretaking is not an act of love.

I don't like when I can't control what reality is doing. Which is unfortunate because reality works independently of the things I want, and I have only a limited number of ways to influence it, none of which are guaranteed to work. I still want to keep tabs on reality, though. Just in case it tries to do anything sneaky. It makes me feel like I'm contributing. The illusion of control makes the helplessness seem more palatable. And when that illusion is taken away, I panic.

If you don't feel you have any choice in a situation, self-esteem and confidence plummet. But once you understand that you do have a choice, self-esteem will improve. You aren't a helpless victim anymore. You decide how you deal with a situation. You aren't just reacting to life; you're creating your life.

Thus I must contradict you when you go on to argue that men are completely unable to do without the consolation of the religious illusion, that without it they could not bear the troubles of life and the cruelties of reality. That is true, certainly, of the men into whom you have instilled the sweet -- or bitter-sweet -- poison from childhood onwards. But what of the other men, who have been sensibly brought up? Perhaps those who do not suffer from the neurosis will need no intoxicant to deaden it. They will, it is true, find themselves in a difficult situation. They will have to admit to themselves the full extent of their helplessness and their insignificance in the machinery of the universe; they can no longer be the centre of creation, no longer the object of tender care on the part of a beneficent Providence. They will be in the same position as a child who has left the parental house where he was so warm and comfortable. But surely infantilism is destined to be surmounted. Men cannot remain children for ever; they must in the end go out into 'hostile life'. We may call this 'education to reality. Need I confess to you that the whole purpose of my book is to point out the necessity for this forward step?

You think because you face situations not of your making that you exercise no choice? That you are helpless? To the contrary, child. Your whole life has been full of choices. Hiding from a hard truth is a choice. Surrender - even to the inevitable - is a choice. Even in death there is a choice. You may have no control over the time or manner of your death, but you can choose how you face it.

Because, deep down, I know how pointless and helpless I am, and it scares me. I am an animal trapped in a horrifying, lawless environment, and I have no idea what it's going to do to me. It just DOES it to me.

I no longer complain about taking too much cream. I have made so many errors that unless I forgive myself and forget I will be in a helpless purple situation of self recrimination. The scorpio tail comes round to sting.

They want to do something - anything - to help me. Anything to change my situation. But they are as powerless as I am. The two of them are in a lifeboat, together, but so alone. The boat leaks, and they must bail in tandem to keep themselves afloat. It must be exhausting. The terrible truth of their helplessness is almost too much to bear. I wish I would take them on board, but even if they could reach us, the captain would never allow it. Right now it sucks to be me - but until now, it never occurred to me that it also sucks to be them.

We had a kind of pity for each other; we were both afflicted permanently with a feeling of sad helplessness because we were unable to make each other happy in this way. But nothing stopped us from choosing other partners. We did not. That I did not, isn't surprising, because of that quality in me I call lethargy, or curiosity, which always keeps me in a situation long after I should leave it.

In 1965, a psychologist named Martin Seligman started shocking dogs. He was trying to expand on the research of Pavlov--the guy who could make dogs salivate when they heard a bell ring. Seligman wanted to head in the other direction, and when he rang his bell, instead of providing food, he zapped the dogs with electricity. To keep them still, he restrained them in a harness during the experiment. After they were conditioned, he put these dogs in a big box with a little fence dividing it into two halves. He figured if the dog rang the bell, it would hop over the fence to escape, but it didn't. It just sat there and braced itself. They decided to try shocking the dog after the bell. The dog still just sat there and took it. When they put a dog in the box that had never been shocked before or had previously been allowed to escape and tried to zap it--it jumped the fence. You are just like these dogs. If, over the course of your life, you have experienced crushing defeat or pummeling abuse or loss of control, you convince yourself over time that there is no escape, and if escape is offered, you will not act--you become a nihilist who trusts futility above optimism. Studies of the clinically depressed show that they often give in to defeat and stop trying. . . Any extended period of negative emotions can lead to you giving in to despair and accepting your fate. If you remain alone for a long time, you will decide loneliness is a fact of life and pass up opportunities to hang out with people. The loss of control in any situation can lead to this state. . . Choices, even small ones, can hold back the crushing weight of helplessness, but you can't stop there. You must fight back your behavior and learn to fail with pride. Failing often is the only way to ever get the things you want out of life. Besides death, your destiny is not inescapable.

close my eyes—I can do nothing in this situation. I’m helpless.

Never in your life have you been helpless—under somebody’s heel. You never lived where your enemies held power over you, power to run your life or wipe it out. You can’t understand. That’s how come you stand there feeding me empty slogans!” Luciente bowed her head. “You crit me justly, Connie. Forgive me. I’ll try to see your situation more clearly and make less loud noises in your ears.

My mother's suffering grew into a symbol in my mind, gathering to itself all the poverty, the ignorance, the helplessness; the painful, baffling, hunger-ridden days and hours; the restless moving, the futile seeking, the uncertainty, the fear, the dread; the meaningless pain and the endless suffering. Her life set the emotional tone of my life, colored the men and women I was to meet in the future, conditioned my relation to events that had not yet happened, determined my attitude to situations and circumstances I had yet to face. A somberness of spirit that I was never to lose settled over me during the slow years of my mother's unrelieved suffering, a somberness that was to make me stand apart and look upon excessive joy with suspicion, that was to make me keep forever on the move, as though to escape a nameless fate seeking to overtake me. At the age of twelve, before I had one year of formal schooling, I had a conception of life that no experience would ever erase, a predilection for what was real that no argument could ever gainsay, a sense of the world that was mine and mine alone, a notion as to what life meant that no education could ever alter, a conviction that the meaning of living came only when one was struggling to wring a meaning out of meaningless suffering. At the age of twelve I had an attitude toward life that was to endure, that was to make me seek those areas of living that would keep it alive, that was to make me skeptical of everything while seeking everything, tolerant of all and yet critical. The spirit I had caught gave me insight into the sufferings of others, made me gravitate toward those whose feelings were like my own, made me sit for hours while others told me of their lives, made me strangely tender and cruel, violent and peaceful. It made me want to drive coldly to the heart of every question and it open to the core of suffering I knew I would find there. It made me love burrowing into psychology, into realistic and naturalistic fiction and art, into those whirlpools of politics that had the power to claim the whole of men's souls. It directed my loyalties to the side of men in rebellion; it made me love talk that sought answers to questions that could help nobody, that could only keep alive in me that enthralling sense of wonder and awe in the face of the drama of human feeling which is hidden by the external drama of life.

Masochism is more widespread than we realize because it takes an attenuated form. The basic dynamism is as follows: a human being sees something bad which is coming as inevitable. There is no way he can halt the process; he is helpess. This sense of helplessness generates a need to gain some control over the impending pain -- any kind of control will do. This makes sense; the subjective feeling of helplessness is more painful than the impending misery. So the person seizes control over the situation in the only way open to him: he connives to bring on the impending misery; he hastens it. This activity on his part promotes the false impression that he enjoys pain. Not so. It is simply that he cannot any longer endure the helplessness or the supposed helplessness. But in the process of gaining control over the inevitable misery he becomes, automatically, anhedonic. Anhedonia sets in stealthily. Over the years it takes control of him. For example, he learns to defer gratification; this is a step in the dismal process of anhedonia. In learning to defer he gratification he experiences a sense of self-mastery; he has become stoic, disciplined; he does not give way to impulse. He has "control". Control over himself in terms of his impulses and control over the external situation. He is a controlled and controlling person. Pretty soon he has branched out and is controlling other people, as part of the situation. He becomes a manipulator. Of course, he is not conciousily aware of this; all he intends to do is lessen his own sense of impotence. But in his task of lessening this sense, he insidiously overpowers the freedom of others. Yet, he dervies no pleasure from this, no positive psychological gain; all his gains are essential negative.

What can you do?" he asked. It took me a few seconds to catch up to Daddy's question. He was asking about my snazzy new vampire powers, not expressing helplessness about my being turned by a guy with "shoves trees on people" tendencies. "Oh, um, a lot of stuff, except, you know, eat solid food and go outside during the day, " I said. "Even my pot pie?" Mama cried. Yes, because in this situation, pot pie was what we should be focusing on.

When you are free of the world, you can do something about it. As long as you are a prisoner of it, you are helpless to change it. On the contrary, whatever you do will aggravate the situation.

We have complete choice as individuals: the only decisions we can take are our own. And yet so many species use the state of being an individual as an excuse for inaction, helplessness and irresponsibility.No situation is so overwhelming that action is pointless. Targassat of Surang.

The only thing I wanted was for her to understand. Somebody to let out a big sigh and say, You poor thing, I know how you feel. Given a choice, I preferred someone to understand my situation, even though she was helpless to fix it, rather than the other way around. But that’s just me. Right

People who suffer from learned helplessness think they have no control over their situations, so even if their suffering is great, they won’t take the smallest action to change matters because they figure, What’s the point?

He'd [Cork] delivered tragic news before. It had been part of the job, but he'd never become immune to he effect tragedy had on those who had to hear of it, and he'd never become used to his own feeling of helplessness in those situations.

even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond himself, and by so doing change himself.

She wouldn't be helpless, not ever, not if she could see a way out. She wouldn't allow that to happen. She could see that being helpless in a situation like this was dangerously close to becoming just plain less

It’s funny, how for an entire lifetime we keep thinking ‘How’ will our life-partner look like, how will he be? How will he react to a particular situation? How will he get angry, and how will we love and pamper him? We have so many questions like if he will accept me the way I am? Or if I have to change for him? We all have made plans for our future, subconsciously. We don’t exactly plan out everything with a pen and paper, it’s something that happens automatically, just like an involuntary action. Whenever we are alone and our mood is good, we usually think about our life with our partner. The days and nights in his arms, and the time that we will reserve for him. But when all that turns into reality, it’s strikingly different. Everything that you thought, seems to be a joke, and life laughs at you from a distance! You are helpless and can’t do anything about it, but have to accept it the way it is. You are totally caught into a web of dilemmas and problems before you realize that this is the time you waited for, and that this is the time you dreamt about! You have to make efforts, compromises, sacrifices and you have to change yourselves too sometimes to make things work. You can never expect to get a partner exactly the way you thought or dreamt about. It’s always different in reality and it’s always tough to make both ends meet for a relationship to work, but you have to! It’s your relationship, if you won’t work for it, who else will?

One thing this night taught her beyond all doubt - all males were lunkheads, all of them. She recognized that protect the poor helpless girl and don’t worry her little wee head tone. “I’m not stupid. I’m not going to run into a situation I have no business being in to show no one can boss me around. I’m not a warrior and tonight made that clear in large neon signage. But I deserve to know about events that concern me and help make the decisions on how to handle them.

As logotherapy teaches, there are three main avenues on which one arrives at meaning in life. The first is by creating a work or by doing a deed. The second is by experiencing something or encountering someone; in other words, meaning can be found not only in work but also in love. Edith Weisskopf-Joelson observed in this context that the logotherapeutic “notion that experiencing can be as valuable as achieving is therapeutic because it compensates for our one-sided emphasis on the external world of achievement at the expense of the internal world of experience.”6 Most important, however, is the third avenue to meaning in life: even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond himself, and by so doing change himself. He may turn a personal tragedy into a triumph.

Hannah expected this to make her sob even more, but instead she found her tears drying up and her tummy growing warm. How dare they? How dare they do this to little girls? She understood now why her parents go so angry when they saw the result of bombers in the white hot streets of the Middle East, why men and women wailed in anger as well as grief as they lifted the limp bodies of children from the rubble. How dare they? No, she wasn't going to die like this, wrapped up like some helpless baby.

Staring ahead, I felt my body clutched and clawed at. Strong words of desperation were cried into my ears. I felt a deep responsibility for the people and the situations that they found themselves in. I also felt helpless to prevent the Emperor from causing any more harm.

But here’s the thing about self-comparison: In addition to making you vacate your own experience, your own soul, your own life, in its extreme it breeds resignation. If we constantly feel that there is something more to be had — something that’s available to those with a certain advantage in life, but which remains out of reach for us — we come to feel helpless. And the most toxic byproduct of this helpless resignation is cynicism — that terrible habit of mind and orientation of spirit in which, out of hopelessness for our own situation, we grow embittered about how things are and about what’s possible in the world. Cynicism is a poverty of curiosity and imagination and ambition.

The Dialectical Dilemma for the Patient The borderline individual is faced with an apparently irreconcilable dilemma. On the one hand, she has tremendous difficulties with self-regulation of affect and subsequent behavioral competence. She frequently but somewhat unpredictably needs a great deal of assistance, often feels helpless and hopeless, and is afraid of being left alone to fend for herself in a world where she has failed over and over again. Without the ability to predict and control her own well-being, she depends on her social environment to regulate her affect and behavior. On the other hand, she experiences intense shame at behaving dependently in a society that cannot tolerate dependency, and has learned to inhibit expressions of negative affect and helplessness whenever the affect is within controllable limits. Indeed, when in a positive mood, she may be exceptionally competent across a variety of situations. However, in the positive mood state she has difficulty predicting her own behavioral capabilities in a different mood, and thus communicates to others an ability to cope beyond her capabilities. Thus, the borderline individual, even though at times desperate for help, has great difficulty asking for help appropriately or communicating her needs. The inability to integrate or synthesize the notions of helplessness and competence, of noncontrol and control, and of needing and not needing help can lead to further emotional distress and dysfunctional behaviors. Believing that she is competent to “succeed,” the person may experience intense guilt about her presumed lack of motivation when she falls short of objectives. At other times, she experiences extreme anger at others for their lack of understanding and unrealistic expectations. Both the intense guilt and the intense anger can lead to dysfunctional behaviors, including suicide and parasuicide, aimed at reducing the painful emotional states. For the apparently competent person, suicidal behavior is sometimes the only means of communicating to others that she really can’t cope and needs help; that is, suicidal behavior is a cry for help. The behavior may also function as a means to get others to alter their unrealistic expectations—to “prove” to the world that she really cannot do what is expected.

Individuals blind to the sexual opposite within them, be they men or women, never realise that the partner they choose is chosen because he or she bears some resemblance to the anima or animus. The anger and hurt felt at the 'true discovery' of the partner's failings is really anger and hurt directed at oneself; and this would become apparent, were one to see the dark figure within one's own unconscious impelling one into a particular relationship. Like always attracts like; rather than railing at the partner, one should take a long, close look at one's own psychic makeup. But it is easier to complain bitterly --- to analysts, marriage counsellors, and also astrologers --- that yet another relationship has collapsed and yet another partner has proved to be a bad choice. It is also fashionable to blame this on the failures of the parent of the opposite sex; but the past continues to live within a person not only because in some way it is part of his own substance, but also because he permits it to do so. When a disastrous relationship occurs once, we may fool ourselves into believing it is chance; when it occurs twice, it has become a pattern, and a pattern is an unmistakable indication that the anima or animus is at work in the unconscious, propelling the helpless ego into relationships or situations which are baffling, painful, and frighteningly repetitive. Again, it is much wiser to look within oneself for the source of the pattern, rather than at the inherent failure of the opposite sex. For these destructive patterns are the psyche's way of making itself known, although great effort is often required to fulfil its demand for transformation. And great sacrifices also are required - of such precious commodities as one's pride, one's self-image, one's self-righteousness.

The reason for which Picasso was compelled to resort to signs and allegories should now be clear enough: his utter political helplessness in the face of a historical situation which he set out to record; his titanic effort to confront a particular historical event with an allegedly eternal truth; his desire to give hope and comfort and to provide a happy ending, to compensate for the terror, the destruction, and inhumanity of the event. Picasso did not see what Goya had already seen, namely, that the course of history can be changed only by historical means and only if men shape their own history instead of acting as the automaton of an earthly power or an allegedly eternal idea.

There was absolutely no peace. I wanted freedom, breakthrough and most of all I wanted to be rid of the situation.

even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond himself, and by so doing change himself

Charles never felt more helpless. To hear a cop calling for help and not be able to respond in what may very well be a life and death situation, drove him insane with anger and frustration.

Since the values of the market were the highest criteria, persons also became valued as commodities which could be bought and sold. A person's worth is then his salable market value, whether it is skill or 'personality' that is up for sale. [...] The market value, then, becomes the individual's valuation of himself, so that self-confidence and 'self-feeling' (ones experience of identity with one's self) are largely reflections of what others think of one, in this case the 'others' being those who represent the market. Thus contemporary economic processes have contributed not only to an alienation of man from man, but likewise to 'self-alienation' - an alienation of the individual from himself. As Fromm very well summarizes the point: Since modern man experiences himself both as the seller and as the commodity to be sold on the market, his self-esteem depends on conditions beyond his control. If he is 'successful,' he is valuable; if he is not, he is worthless. The degree of insecurity which results from this orientation can hardly be overestimated. If one feels that one's own value is not constituted primarily by the human qualities one possesses, but by one's succes on a competitive market with ever-changing conditions, one's self-esteem is bound to be shaky and in constant need of confirmation by others. [Erich Fromm, Man for himself] In such a situation one is driven to strive relentlessly for 'succes'; this is the chief way to validate ones self and to allay anxiety. And any failure in the competitive struggle is a threat to the quasi-esteem for one's self - which, quasi though it be, is all one has in such a situation. This obviously leads to powerful feelings of helplessness and inferiority. [p.169f]

YOU ASKED ME once when I knew that he was for me, and I told you that I had always known. But that wasn’t true, and I knew it even as I said it—I said it because it sounded pretty, like something someone might say in a book or a movie, and because we were both feeling so wretched, and helpless, and because I thought if I said it, we both might feel better about the situation before us,

Most important, however, is the third avenue to meaning in life: even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond himself, and by so doing change himself.

They were petty and selfish." "They were miserable and hungry and helpless. I don't think I've ever met anyone who was miserable, hungry and helpless who was not also petty and selfish. The situation brings out the worst in everyone.

You asked me once when I knew that he was for me, and I told you that I had always known. But that wasn't true, and I knew it even as I said it - I said it because it sounded pretty, like something someone might say in a book or a movie, and because we were both feeling so wretched, and helpless, and because I thought if I said it, we both might feel better about the situation before us, he situation we perhaps had been capable of preventing - perhaps not - but at any rate hadn't.

And that made him wonder if a person who is forced into bad situations over and over again when they’re too weak or helpless to do anything about it will eventually make bad choices of their own simply because they’ve become habituated to them.

Avdotya Romanovna's beauty and education had impressed him; her helpless situation had excited him beyond all measure. Here there was even more than he had dreamed of: the girl who had appeared was proud, full of character, virtuous, superior to him in education and upbringing (he sensed this), and yet this creature would view him with servile gratitude all her life for his noble deed, reverentially effacing herself before him, and he would have unlimited and exclusive power over her!

All these aspects of the anima have the same tendency that we have observed in the shadow: That is, they can be projected so that they appear to the man to be the qualities of some particular woman. It is the presence of the anima that causes a man to fall suddenly in love when he sees a woman for the first time and knows at once that this is “she.” In this situation, the man feels as if he has known this woman intimately for all time; he falls for her so helplessly that it looks to outsiders like complete madness. Women who are of “fairy-like” character especially attract such anima projections, because men can attribute almost anything to a creature who is so fascinatingly vague, and can thus proceed to weave fantasies around her.

Realizing you're powerless is a powerful moment. The violent act bolts you to the ground, crushing you. You're nothing but a bug beneath the heel of fate, the universe, a shitty situation. I suppose it depends on what you believe in. It's helplessness.

Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail to recognize others as people - not by those who are oppressed, exploited, and unrecognized. It is not the unloved who initiate disaffection, but those who cannot love because they love only themselves. It is not the helpless, subject to terror, who initiate terror, but the violent, who with their power create the concrete situation which begets the 'rejects of life.' It is not the tyrannized who initiate despotism, but the tyrants. It is not those whose humanity is denied them who negate humankind, but those who denied that humanity (thus negating their own as well). Force is used not by those who have become weak under the preponderance of the strong, but by the strong who have emasculated them.

When confronted with situations for which such routine procedures did not exist, he [Eichmann] was helpless, and his cliché-ridden language produced on the stand, as it had evidently done in his official life, a kind of macabre comedy. Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.

Most people have no understanding of the psychological changes of captivity. Social judgment of chronically traumatized people therefore tends to be extremely harsh. The chronically abused person's apparent helplessness and passivity, her entrapment in the past, her intractable depression and somatic complaints, and her smoldering anger often frustrate the people closest to her. Moreover, if she has been coerced into betrayal of relationships, community loyalties, or moral values, she is frequently subjected to furious condemnation. Observers who have never experienced prolonged terror and who have no understanding of coercive methods of control presume that they would show greater courage and resistance than the victim in similar circumstances. Hence the common tendency to account for the victim's behavior by seeking flaws in her personality or moral character. ... The propensity to fault the character of the victim can be seen even in the case of politically organized mass murder. The aftermath of the Holocaust witnessed a protracted debate regarding the 'passivity' of the Jews and their 'complicity' in their fate. But the historian Lucy Dawidowicz points out that 'complicity' and 'cooperation' are terms that apply to situations of free choice. They do not have the same meaning in situations of captivity.

Most important, however, is the third avenue to meaning in life: even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond himself, and by so doing change himself. He may turn a personal tragedy into a triumph.

I said, somewhat confused, “What’s the problem?” [Kristy] rolled her eyes. Beside her, Monica said, “Donneven.” “Kristy.” Delia shook her head. “This isn’t the time or the place, okay?” “The time or the place for what?” Caroline asked. “There is never,” Kristy said adamantly, “a time or place for true love. It happens accidentally, in a heartbeat, in a single flashing, throbbing moment.” “Throbbing?” my mother said, leaning forward and looking at me. “Who’s throbbing?” “Macy and Wes,” Kristy told her. “We are not,” I said indignantly. “Kristy,” Delia said helplessly. “Please God I’m begging you, not now.” “Wait a second, wait a second.” Caroline held her hands up. “Kristy. Explain.” “Yes, Kristy,” my mother said, but she was looking at me. Not really mad as much as confused. Join the club, I thought. “Explain.” Bert said, “This ought to be good.” Kristy ignored him, tucking a piece of hair behind her ear. “Wes wants to be with Macy. And Macy, whether she’ll admit it or not, wants to be with Wes. And yet they’re not together, which is not only unjust, but really, when you think about it, tragical.” “That’s not a word,” Bert pointed out. “It is now,” she said. “How else can you explain a situation where Wes, a truly extraordinary boy, would be sent packing in favor of some brainiac loser…” “Why,” I said, feeling embarrassed, “do we have to keep talking about this?” “Because it’s tragical!” Kristy said….”I’ll tell you what it is. It’s wrong. You should be with Wes, Macy. The whole time you guys were hanging out, talking about how you were both with other people, it was so obvious to everyone. It was even obvious to Wes. You were the only one who couldn’t see it, just like you can’t see it now.” “Mmm-hmm,” Monica said aloud.

It is a matter of no small importance that one be able to explain and order the events in our lives into some coherent and predictable pattern. To name something, to locate its place in a causal sequence, is to begin to experience it as under our control. No longer, then, is our internal experience or behavior frightening, alien or out of control; instead, we behave (or have a particular inner experience) because of something we can name or identify. The "because" offers one mastery (or a sense of mastery that phenomenologically is tantamount to mastery). I believe that the sense of potency that flows from understanding occurs even in the matter of our basic existential situation: each of us feels less futile, less helpless, and less alone, even when, ironically, what we come to understand is the fact that each of us is basically helpless and alone in the face of cosmic indifference.

anxiety, with its concomitant feelings of helplessness, isolation, and conflict, is an exceedingly painful experience. One tends to be angry and resentful toward those responsible for placing him in such a situation of pain. Clinical experience yields many examples like the following: A dependent person, finding himself in a situation of responsibility with which he feels he cannot cope, reacts with hostility both toward those who have placed him in the situation and toward those (usually parents) who caused him to be unable to cope with it. Or he feels hostility toward his therapist, whom he believes should bail him out

Even more essential, however, is the identification of the individuals in the masses with the "führer." The more helpless the "mass-individual" has become, owing to his upbringing, the more pronounced is his identification with the führer, and the more the childish need for protection is disguised in the form of a feeling at one with the führer. This inclination to identify is the psychological basis of national narcissism, i.e., of the self-confidence that individual man derives from the "greatness of the nation." The reactionary lower middle-class man perceives himself in the führer, in the authoritarian state. On the basis of this identification he feels himself to be a defender of the "national heritage," of the "nation," which does not prevent him, likewise on the basis of this identification, from simultaneously despising "the masses" and confronting them as an individual. The wretchedness of his material and sexual situation is so overshadowed by the exalting idea of belonging to a master race and having a brilliant führer that, as time goes on, he ceases to realize how completely he has sunk to a position of insignificant, blind allegiance. The worker who is conscious of his skills—he, in short, who has rid himself of his submissive structure, who identifies with his work and not with the führer, with the international working masses and not with the national homeland—represents the opposite of this. He feels himself to be a leader, not on the basis of his identification with the führer, but on the basis of his consciousness of performing work that is vitally necessary for society's existence.

Look at young people today in the presence of death...the first thing they do is call a funeral company. They act like helpless children. Such an embarrassing situation never arose in the past. The truly shocking part...is that young people today don't seem to be embarrassed about it either. So not only do the young have zero death literacy, they don't seem to mind.

As soon as two people have resolved to give up their togetherness, the resulting pain with its heaviness or particularity is already so completely part of the life of each individual that the other has to sternly deny himself to become sentimental and feel pity. The beginning of the agreed-upon separation is marked precisely by this pain, and its first challenge will be that this pain already belongs separately to each of the two individuals. This pain is an essential condition of what the now solitary and most lonely individual will have to create in the future out of his reclaimed life. If two people managed not to get stuck in hatred during their honest struggles with each other, that is, in the edges of their passion that became ragged and sharp when it cooled and set, if they could stay fluid, active, flexible, and changeable in all of their interactions and relations, and, in a word, if a mutually human and friendly consideration remained available to them, then their decision to separate cannot easily conjure disaster and terror. When it is a matter of a separation, pain should already belong in its entirety to that other life from which you wish to separate. Otherwise the two individuals will continually become soft toward each other, causing helpless and unproductive suffering. In the process of a firmly agreed-upon separation, however, the pain itself constitutes an important investment in the renewal and fresh start that is to be achieved on both sides. People in your situation might have to communicate as friends. But then these two separated lives should remain without any knowledge of the other for a period and exist as far apart and as detached from the other as possible. This is necessary for each life to base itself firmly on its new requirements and circumstances. Any subsequent contact (which may then be truly new and perhaps very happy) has to remain a matter of unpredictable design and direction. If you find that you scare yourself.

As logotherapy teaches, there are three main avenues on which one arrives at meaning in life. The first is by creating a work or by doing a deed. The second is by experiencing something or encountering someone; in other words, meaning can be found not only in work but also in love. Edith Weisskopf-Joelson observed in this context that the logotherapeutic “notion that experiencing can be as valuable as achieving is therapeutic because it compensates for our one-sided emphasis on the external world of achievement at the expense of the internal world of experience.”6 Most important, however, is the third avenue to meaning in life: even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond himself, and by so doing change himself. He may turn a personal tragedy into a triumph. Again it was Edith Weisskopf-Joelson who, as mentioned, once expressed the hope that logotherapy “may help counteract certain unhealthy trends in the present-day culture of the United States, where the incurable sufferer is given very little opportunity to be proud of his suffering and to consider it ennobling rather than degrading” so that “he is not only unhappy, but also ashamed of being unhappy.

Once we embrace Christ, we are instantly made righteous because of his righteousness, and not because of anything we have done or could do. So our good works do not earn us God’s favor. That favor we already possess, even though we are sinners who sin and cannot help sinning. By turning to God in faith—as sinners who understand that we are sinners—and by crying out for God’s help, we do all we can by acknowledging our helplessness. At this point—in which our faith acknowledges the truth of our situation—we are instantly clothed with the righteousness of God. And it is now our gratitude to God for this free gift of his righteousness and salvation that makes us want to please him with our good works. We do them not out of grievous and legalistic duty or out of a hope to earn his favor but out of sheer gratitude for the favor we already have. Our service to him is redeemed and transmuted into a free servitude. That is the power of faith in Christ. All that is base and dead can be redeemed by faith unto glory and life. Luther summed it up in this typically colorful image. “Is this not a joyous exchange,” he asks, “the rich, noble, pious bridegroom Christ takes this poor, despised wicked little whore in marriage, redeems her of all evil, and adorns her with all his goods?

God does not hate you, Draupadi. But you are responsible for rejecting Karna on the grounds of caste. A great warrior, he would never have gambled you in a game of dice. You chose a priest instead, who turned out to be a prince, who shared you with his four brothers, but who could not protect you. And so here you are—helpless, humiliated, and alone, in a situation that you inadvertently helped create. Take responsibility for it.

My mother’s suffering grew into a symbol in my mind, gathering to itself all the poverty, the ignorance, the helplessness; the painful, baffling, hunger-ridden days and hours; the restless moving, the futile seeking, the uncertainty, the fear, the dread; the meaningless pain and the endless suffering. Her life set the emotional tone of my life, colored the men and women I was to meet in the future, conditioned my relation to events that had not yet happened, determined my attitude to situations and circumstances I had yet to face. A somberness of spirit that I was never to lose settled over me during the slow years of my mother’s unrelieved suffering, a somberness that was to make me stand apart and look upon excessive joy with suspicion, that was to make me self-conscious, that was to make me keep forever on the move, as though to escape a nameless fate seeking to overtake me.

My mother's suffering grew into as symbol in my mind, gathering to itself all the poverty, the ignorance, the helplessness; the painful, baffling, hunger-ridden days and hours; the restless moving, the futile seeking, the uncertainty, the fear, the dread; the meaningless pain and the endless suffering. Her life set the emotional tone of my life, colored the men and women I was to meet in the future, conditioned my relation to events that had not yet happened, determined my attitude to situations and circumstances I had yet to face. A somberness of spirit that I was never to lose settled over me during the slow years of my mother's unrelieved suffering, a somberness that was to make me stand apart and look upon excessive joy with suspicion, that was to make me self-conscious, that was to make me keep forever on the move, as though to escape a nameless fate seeking to overtake me.

There are times in every life when we find ourselves in situations of trial and difficulty, either affecting us or someone we love. We can do nothing. However much we turn things over and examine them from every angle, there is no solution. The feeling of being helpless and powerless is a painful trial, especially when it concerns someone close to us: to see someone we love in difficulties without being able to help is one of the bitterest sufferings there is.

Jabez would have continued to lament in sorrow until he died with no hope of amend, if he was unwilling to change that predicaments through prayer. A person is helpless until he prays. Your situation remains when you don’t pray and disappear when you pray aright. Cancers can break off by prayers, HIV and AIDS can be handled in prayers. The horrors of abusive relationship can be dissolved by prayer. Every challenges of your life can be arrested by prayers. No condition is permanent when prayer is invoked.

Other victims of neurotic dependency are battered wives. The fact that they are so often financially dependent upon the men who beat them makes for a vicious kind of entrapment. It's emotional dependency, though that puts a double lock on the trap. "There's a kind of panic that many women have about being able to make it in any way other than being dependent on their husbands (...) They've been taught their whole lives that they can't. It's a conditioning process." In situations in which they have no effect on their environments, animals begin to give up. (...) the same thing happens to humans. Stay long enough in a situation in which you feel you have no control, and you will simply stop responding. It's called learned helplessness. (...) Having been "shaped" to believe there is nothing she can do about the situation, the battered wife goes on being battered.Only after she begins to disengage from her belief in her own helplessness can she break out of the vicious cycle of dependency and its brutal effect on her life.

An author named David Emerald did just that after he studied Karpman’s work. He developed a kind of anti-triangle, which he called the “empowerment dynamic.” In this pattern, people who were once seen as persecutors become “challengers.” They force others to rise to new levels of strength and competency. Rescuers become “coaches.” Instead of jumping in to soothe and fix (“Poor you! Let me do that for you!”), they say, “Wow, that’s an awful situation. What are you going to do about it?” And in the most empowering shift of all, Emerald suggests that victims become “creators.” Where victims believe “This situation is unbearable and I’m helpless,” creators ask themselves, “This situation is messed up. What can I make from it?” Remember, creativity is the opposite of violence, which is pure destruction. If we can find any way to see ourselves as creators, no matter what our situation, we can turn drama triangles into empowerment dynamics. Instead of getting trapped in violence and hatred, we can use relationship dynamics to reach higher and higher levels of integrity.

YOU ASKED ME once when I knew that he was for me, and I told you that I had always known. But that wasn’t true, and I knew it even as I said it—I said it because it sounded pretty, like something someone might say in a book or a movie, and because we were both feeling so wretched, and helpless, and because I thought if I said it, we both might feel better about the situation before us, the situation that we perhaps had been capable of preventing—perhaps not—but at any rate hadn’t. This was in the hospital: the first time, I should say.

There is nothing that I, personally, can do, except be there. At my family's suggestion I begin taking my little six-pound electronic typewriter with me so that I can write while Hugh is napping. This helps. For, like most of us, I feel frustrated when a situation arises where I am totally helpless, where there is nothing I can do to make anything better. I can, I hope, help Hugh a little by my presence, by the touch of my hand. But there is nothing specifically for me to do. And I think of a friend who has a coffee mug with the inscription: DON'T JUST DO SOMETHING. STAND THERE.

It's no coincidence that people who had angry parents often end up choosing angry partners, that those with alcoholic parents are frequently drawn to partners who drink quite a bit, or that those who had withdrawn or critical parents find themselves married to spouses who are withdrawn or critical. Why people do this to themselves? Because we pull towards that feeling of "home" makes what they want as adults hard to disentangle from what they experienced as children. They have an uncanny attraction to people who share the characteristics of a parents who in some way hurt them. In the beginning, these characteristics will be barely perceptible, but the unconscious has a finely tuned radar system inaccessible to the conscious mind. It's not that people want to get hurt again. It's that they want to master a situation in which they felt helpless as children. Freud called this "repetition compulsion." Maybe this time, the unconscious imagines, I can go back and heal that wound from long ago by engaging with somebody familiar - but new. The only problem is, by choosing familiar partners, people guarantee the opposite result: they reopen the wounds and feel even more inadequate and unlovable.

important, however, is the third avenue to meaning in life: even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond himself, and by so doing change himself. He may turn a personal tragedy into a triumph. Again it was Edith Weisskopf-Joelson who, as mentioned on p. 118, once expressed the hope that logotherapy “may help counteract certain unhealthy trends in the present-day culture of the United States, where the incurable sufferer is given very little opportunity to be proud of his suffering and to consider it ennobling rather than degrading” so that “he is not only unhappy, but also ashamed of being unhappy.

The Lord is my rock…. —Psalm 18:2 (KJV) Even though my father retired as minister of the church where my sister, Keri, and I grew up, we were committed to staying and raising our own families there. Neither of us anticipated just how difficult this was going to be. All those years my father faithfully led the congregation, he had a knack for bringing peace to the most stressful situations. When an interim minister was hired, we watched helplessly as the church became divided. Keri and I often met for lunch, just to comfort each other. One day a realization suddenly appeared: “This isn’t about where we are with the church. It’s about where we are with God.” While it was a painful time of change, our hearts needed to be aligned with God. The same God Who had been with us every moment of our lives was still here, and His house was still our true home. Finally the Sunday came when my family joined Keri’s to hear our new pastor’s first sermon. He exuded a peaceful presence, and his message was strong and confident. Already he embraced our beloved church and its congregation as if he had known us forever. “God is surely the rock of this church,” he was saying. I caught Keri’s eyes and smiled. Pastor Chris was saying what we already knew, but we certainly didn’t mind hearing it again. Father, let us look past every difficulty and see You ever as our rock. —Brock Kidd Digging Deeper: Ps 18; Is 44:8

The dissociative response is used when there is inescapable, unavoidable distress or pain. Your mind and body protect you. Because you cannot physically flee, and fighting is futile, you psychologically flee to your inner world. So going back to the infant with the disengaged parent, the infant’s fight or flight response is to cry. But if no one comes-or they come and are angry-the helpless infant will dissociative to survive this inescapable distressing situation. The same if true for children, youth, and adults faced with any inescapable, unavoidable pain and distress-they dissociate. And a whole set of neurophysiological changes helps you do that, including the release of your body’s own opiates.

To those readers who have found the moral strength to overcome the darkness and suffering of the first two volumes, the third volume will disclose a space of freedom and struggle. The secret of this struggle is kept by the Soviet regime even more zealously than that of the torments and annihilation it inflicted upon millions of its victims. More than anything else, the Communist regime fears the revelation of the fight which is conducted against it with a spiritual force unheard of and unknown to many countries in many periods of their history. The fighters' spiritual strength rises to the greatest height and to a supreme degree of tension when their situation is most helpless and the state system most ruthlessly destructive.

All these aspects of the anima have the same tendency that we have observed in the shadow: That is, they can be projected so that they appear to the man to be the qualities of some particular woman. It is the presence of the anima that causes a man to fall suddenly in love when he sees a woman for the first time and knows at once that this is "she." In this situation, the man feels as if he has known this woman intimately for all time; he falls for her so helplessly that it looks to outsiders like complete madness. Women who are of "fairy-like" character especially attract such anima projections, because men can attribute almost anything to a creature who is so fascinatingly vague, and can thus proceed to weave fantasies around her.

A-Actually, the flower that sprang up would have been the iris or larkspur, not the modern hyacinth, but that is how it earned its name.” “Fascinating.” His unfathomable eyes locked onto hers. Elizabeth knew he was referring to her and not the history of the hyacinth, and though she commanded herself to move out of his reach, her legs refused to budge. “Absolutely fascinating,” he murmured again, and in slow motion she watched his hands reach out and gently grasp her shoulders, rubbing lightly. “Last night you were ready to do battle with a roomful of men because they dared believe I’d cheated, yet now you’re afraid. Is it me you fear, sweetheart? Or something else?” The endearment spoken in his rich baritone voice had the same stirring effect on her as the touch of his lips. “I’m afraid of the things you make me feel,” she admitted desperately, trying to get control of herself and the situation. “I realize that this is merely a-a little weekend dalliance-“ “Liar,” he teased, and he took her lips in a sweet, swift kiss. Her mind reeled from the brief touch, but the moment he lifted his mouth from hers she rushed into frightened speech. “Thank you,” she blurted inanely. “H-Hyacinths are not the only flower with an interesting history. There are lilies, too, which are also part of the genus-“ A lazy, seductive grin swept across his handsome face, and, to Elizabeth’s helpless horror, her gaze fastened on his mouth. She couldn’t still the shiver of anticipation as he bent his head.

We see the same thing in what psychologists have defined as battered woman syndrome, a form of PTSD where women (or children) who live under the constant threat of fear and violence may develop “learned helplessness”—a state in which they resign themselves to a fate that seems inescapable. This makes it very hard for them to get themselves out of a bad situation. We’ve also seen this with kidnapped children who don’t flee their captors even when they have a chance because they’ve lost the sense of having any control over their lives. This state has even been created in animals during experiments with electric shock. When the animal comes to believe shock is inescapable, it stops doing anything to avoid it, even when given the opportunity to do so.

The situation, then, which it regards as a ‘danger’ and against which it wants to be safeguarded is that of non-satisfaction, of a growing tension due to need, against which it is helpless. I think that if we adopt this view all the facts fall into place. The situation of non-satisfaction in which the amounts of stimulation rise to an unpleasurable height without its being possible for them to be mastered psychically or discharged must for the infant be analogous to the experience of being born—must be a repetition of the situation of danger. What both situations have in common is the economic disturbance caused by an accumulation of amounts of stimulation which require to be disposed of. It is this factor, then, which is the real essence of the ‘danger’.

William sees it all happen again. The pain is not in the event. The subjection to it and his powerless state each time is where his anguish lies. He is unable to influence the situation, despite his desire. He sees the nest outside his house. He sees the baby bird that fell. The mother bird cries frantically for her lost chick. William knows as he approaches the chick that if he touches it his scent will linger, and the mother will reject it. Circling around the fallen creature William hopes it will flee from him, back toward the tree from which it had fallen. His presence only intensifies the creature’s fear. It speeds to his left, heading for the street. Again William tries to flank the bird, but it is too frightened to return to the nest. The chick’s mother wails vainly. William walks into the street trying to herd the bird to safety. The stop light a block away has just turned green. The driver accelerates. William moves from the car’s path and it runs over the bird. The momentum from its wake lifts the bird to the underside of the car, breaking its neck, but not killing it. William watches the bird roll helplessly. It is silent for a second, before it begins to whimper. Its contorted head dangles limply from its body. The noise is tragic. The bird’s mother hears the chick’s pain, but nothing can be done. She laments. A second speeder crushes the chick, leaving only a wet feathered spot in the street. As the cars continue to pass, only one bird is heard. A mother’s grief falls deafly on an unconcerned world.

A trauma is a place where it becomes impossible to remain connected in and to the present moment. Trauma is a part of the human condition! Healing is also a part of the human condition, and we have the capacity to transform difficult experiences into a wellspring of personal and spiritual power. Trauma occurs when there is a rupture in our boundary system and our capacity to metabolize an experience is compromised. Every single human being on earth has trauma. It's an interruption of our ability to stay in the present moment, anything that lags or is not harmonized on the layers of body/mind/spirit/soul/psyche. Rachael Maddox has called it an" embodied interpersonal violation hangover." Ale Duarte called it "an open loop." Lately, many people have been telling me their stories and then telling me how they are "lucky," that "it's not that bad" compared to other people's situations. All of those statements happen in the mind, and they are largely attempts to keep ourselves from feeling the depth of our pain or sorrow. We may have white privilege, we may have class privilege, we may have had homebirth privilege—the animals of our bodies don't actually understand mental and philosophical constructs like privilege. What those constructs contribute to on an individual healing level is a lot of confusion, shame and guilt, that in spite of everything we "have," we may have still experienced helplessness, hurt, anger, or outrage or collapse, or whatever it is that our system felt. We actually cannot control those responses.

More than once, while staring at the wall, I’d thought of Our Lady. I wanted to talk to her, to say, Where do I go from here? But when I’d seen her earlier, when August and I had first come in, she didn’t look like she could be of service to anybody, bound up with all that chain around her. You want the one you’re praying to at least to look capable. I dragged myself out of bed and went to see her anyway. I decided that even Mary did not need to be one hundred percent capable all the time. The only thing I wanted was for her to understand. Somebody to let out a big sigh and say, You poor thing, I know how you feel. Given a choice, I preferred someone to understand my situation, even though she was helpless to fix it, rather than the other way around. But that’s just me. Right

It's not really negativity or sadness anymore, it’s more just this detached, meaningless fog where you can’t feel anything about anythingeven the things you love, even fun things—and you’re horribly bored and lonely, but since you’ve lost your ability to connect with any of the things that would normally make you feel less bored and lonely, you’re stuck in the boring, lonely, meaningless void with-out anything to distract you from how boring, lonely, and meaningless it is. ...I noticed myself wishing that nothing loved me so I wouldn’t feel obligated to keep existing. The absurdity of working so hard to continue doing something you don’t like can be overwhelming. And the longer it takes to feel different, the more it starts to seem like everything might actually be hopeless bullshit. I don’t like when I can’t control what reality is doing. Which is unfortunate because reality works independently of the things I want, and I have only a limited number of ways to influence it, none of which are guaranteed to work. I still want to keep tabs on reality, though. Just in case it tries to do anything sneaky. It makes me feel like I’m contributing. The illusion of control makes the helplessness seem more palatable. And when that illusion is taken away, I panic. Because, deep down, I know how pointless and helpless I am, and it scares me. I am an animal trapped in a horrifying, lawless environment, and I have no idea what it’s going to do to me. It just DOES it to me. I cope with that the best way I know—by being completely unreasonable and trying to force everything else in the world to obey me and do all the nonsensical things I want.

We've got two kinds of language in our heads. The kind we're using now is acquired. It patterns our brains as we're learning it. But there's also a tongue that's based in the deep structures of the brain, that everyone shares. These structures consist of basic neural circuits that have to exist in order to allow our brains to acquire higher languages." "Linguistic infrastructure," Uncle Enzo says. "Yeah. I guess 'deep structure' and 'infrastructure' mean the same thing. Anyway, we can access those parts of the brain under the right conditions. Glossolalia -- speaking in tongues -- is the output side of it, where the deep linguistic structures hook into our tongues and speak, bypassing all the higher, acquired languages. Everyone's known that for some time." "You're saying there's an input side, too?" Ng says. "Exactly. It works in reverse. Under the right conditions, your ears -- or eyes -- can tie into the deep structures, bypassing the higher language functions. Which is to say, someone who knows the right words can speak words, or show you visual symbols, that go past all your defenses and sink right into your brainstem. Like a cracker who breaks into a computer system, bypasses all the security precautions, and plugs himself into the core, enabling him to exert absolute control over the machine." "In that situation, the people who own the computer are helpless," Ng says. "Right. Because they access the machine at a higher level, which has now been overridden. In the same sense, once a neurolinguistic hacker plugs into the deep structures of our brain, we can't get him out -- because we can't even control our own brain at such a basic level.

You, my dear, do not know how to have fun." "I do, too!" "You do not. You are as bad as Lucien. And do you know something? I think it's time someone showed you how to have fun. Namely, me. You can worry all you like about our situation tomorrow, but tonight ... tonight I'm going to make you laugh so hard that you'll forget all about how afraid of me you are." "I am not afraid of you!" "You are." And with that, he pushed his chair back, stalked around the table, and in a single easy movement, swept her right out of her chair and into his arms. "Gareth!  Put me down!" He only laughed, easily carrying her toward the bed. "Gareth, I am a grown woman!" "You are a grown woman who behaves in a manner far too old for her years," he countered, still striding toward the bed. "As the wife of a Den member, that just will not do." "Gareth, I don't want — I mean, I'm not ready for that!" "That? Who said anything about that?"  He tossed her lightly onto the bed. "Oh, no, my dear Juliet. I'm not going to do that —" She tried to scoot away. "Then what are you going to do?" "Why, I'm going to wipe that sadness out of your eyes if only for tonight. I'm going to make you forget your troubles, forget your fears, forget everything but me. And you know how I'm going to do that, O dearest wife?"  He grabbed a fistful of her petticoats as she tried to escape. "I'm going to tickle you until you giggle ... until you laugh ... until you're hooting so loudly that all of London hears you!" He fell upon the bed like a swooping hawk, and Juliet let out a helpless shriek as his fingers found her ribs and began tickling her madly. "Stop!  We just ate!  You'll make me sick!" "What's this? Your husband makes you sick?" "No, it's just that — aaaoooooo!" He tickled her harder. She flailed and giggled and cried out, embarrassed about each loud shriek but helpless to prevent them. He was laughing as hard as she. Catching one thrashing leg, he unlaced her boot and deftly removed it. She yelped as his fingers found the sensitive instep, and she kicked out reflexively. He neatly ducked just in time to avoid having his nose broken, catching her by the ankle and tickling her toes, her soles, her arch through her stockings. "Stop, Gareth!"  She was laughing so hard, tears were streaming from her eyes. "Stop it, damn it!" Thank goodness Charlotte, worn out by her earlier tantrum, was such a sound sleeper! The tickling continued. Juliet kicked and fought, her struggles tossing the heavy, ruffled petticoats and skirts of her lovely blue gown halfway up her thigh to reveal a long, slender calf sheathed in silk. She saw his gaze taking it all in, even as he made a grab for her other foot. "No!  Gareth, I shall lose my supper if you keep this up, I swear it I will — oooahhhhh!" He seized her other ankle, yanked off the remaining boot, and began torturing that foot as well, until Juliet was writhing and shrieking on the bed in a fit of laughter. The tears streamed down her cheeks, and her stomach ached with the force of her mirth. And when, at last, he let up and she lay exhausted across the bed in a twisted tangle of skirts, petticoats, and chemise, her chest heaving and her hair in a hopeless tumbled-down flood of silken mahogany beneath her head, she looked up to see him grinning down at her, his own hair hanging over his brow in tousled, seductive disarray.

In describing the evolution of the various danger-situations from their prototype, the act of birth, I have had no intention of asserting that every later determinant of anxiety completely invalidates the preceding one. It is true that, as the development of the ego goes on, the earlier danger-situations tend to lose their force and to be set aside, so that we might say that each period of the individual's life has its appropriate determinant of anxiety. Thus the danger of psychical helplessness is appropriate to the period of life when his ego is immature; the danger of loss of object, to early childhood when he is still dependent on others; the danger of castration, to the phallic phase; and the fear of his super-ego, to the latency period. Nevertheless, all these danger-situations and determinants of anxiety can persist side by side and cause the ego to react to them with anxiety at a period later than the appropriate one; or, again, several of them can come into operation at the same time. It is possible, moreover, that there is a fairly close relationship between the danger-situation that is operative and the form taken by the ensuing neurosis.

At first the social worker may become too emotionally involved with his clients, so that when they fail he suffers, both because they are unhappy and because their failure is his failure, too. It’s hard to spend his days confronting devastating problems that he cannot fix—the misery and helplessness rub off on him. It may seem to him that to feel happy or spend money on himself is to betray the people he knows who are still suffering; or it may seem that his own unhappiness is a sign of his devotion. Perhaps he becomes angry, blaming systems and society for what he cannot fix himself. Gradually, he learns to be more detached. He realizes that he needs to be tough, and to develop a thick skin. But if he becomes too detached, he stops caring about his clients at all. Perhaps he withdraws into cynicism and self-defense, as he feels his ideals and his sense of potency wither. Longer-serving people in the office notice the waning of his enthusiasm, and welcome him to their gallows-humor fellowship. He retreats into apathy and jokes and drinks after work. But even with his fellow apathetics to keep him company, the situation is depressing, and he looks for a way out.

As logotherapy teaches, there are three main avenues on which one arrives at meaning in life. The first is by creating a work or by doing a deed. The second is by experiencing something or encountering someone; in other words, meaning can be found not only in work but also in love. Edith Weisskopf-Joelson observed in this context that the logotherapeutic "notion that experiencing can be as valuable as achieving is therapeutic because it compensates for our one-sided emphasis on the external world of achievement at the expense of the internal world of experience." Most important, however, is the third avenue to meaning in life: even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond himself, and by so doing change himself. He may turn a personal tragedy into a triumph. Again it was Edith Weisskopf-Joelson who, as mentioned on p. 136, once expressed the hope that logotherapy "may help counteract certain unhealthy trends in the present-day culture of the United States, where the incurable sufferer is given very little opportunity to be proud of his suffering and to consider it ennobling rather than degrading" so that "he is not only unhappy, but also ashamed of being unhappy.

He approached his head to the dismal cavity, and heard, as at a great depth, the sound of a sullen and, as it seemed, subterranean stream. The sunless waves appeared murmuring for their victim. Death is dreadful at all ages; but in the first springtide of youth, with all the feelings of enjoyment afloat, and eager for gratification, to be snatched forcibly from the banquet to which the individual has but just sat down, is peculiarly appalling, even when the change comes in the ordinary course of nature. But to sit, like young Philipson, on the brink of the subterranean abyss, and ruminate in horrid doubt concerning the mode in which death was to be inflicted, was a situation which might break the spirit of the boldest; and the unfortunate captive was wholly unable to suppress the natural tears that flowed from his eyes in torrents, and which his bound arms did not permit him to wipe away. We have already noticed that, although a gallant young man in aught of danger which was to be faced and overcome by active exertion, the youth was strongly imaginative, and sensitive to a powerful extent to all those exaggerations which, in a situation of helpless uncertainty, fancy lends to distract the soul of him who must passively expect an approaching evil.

Ever since she was a young girl, [Patricia Highsmith] had felt an extraordinary empathy for animals, particularly cats. The creatures, she said, 'provide something for writers that humans cannot: companionship that makes no demands or intrusions, that is as restful and ever-changing as a tranquil sea that barely moves'. Her affection for cats was 'a constant as was feline companionship wherever her domestic situation permitted,' says Kingsley. 'As for animals in general, she saw them as individual personalities often better behaved, and endowed with more dignity and honesty than humans. Cruelty to or neglect of any helpless living creature could turn her incandescent with rage.' Janice Robertson remembers how [...] Highsmith was walking through the streets of Soho when she saw a wounded pigeon lying in the gutter. 'Pat decided there and then that this pigeon should be rescued,' says Janice. 'Although I think Roland persuaded her that it was past saving, she really was distraught. She couldn't bear to see animals hurt.' Bruno Sager, Highsmith's carer at the end of her life, recalls the delicacy with which the writer would take hold of a spider which had crawled into the house, making sure to deposit it safely in her garden. 'For her human beings were strange - she thought she would never understand them - and perhaps that is why she liked cats and snails so much,' he says.

I began to see that the stronger a therapy emphasized feelings, self-esteem, and self-confidence, the more dependent the therapist was upon his providing for the patient ongoing, unconditional, positive regard. The more self-esteem was the end, the more the means, in the form of the patient’s efforts, had to appear blameless in the face of failure. In this paradigm, accuracy and comparison must continually be sacrificed to acceptance and compassion; which often results in the escalation of bizarre behavior and bizarre diagnoses. The bizarre behavior results from us taking credit for everything that is positive and assigning blame elsewhere for anything negative. Because of this skewed positive-feedback loop between our judged actions and our beliefs, we systematically become more and more adapted to ourselves, our feelings, and our inaccurate solitary thinking; and less and less adapted to the environment that we share with our fellows. The resultant behavior, such as crying, depression, displays of temper, high-risk behavior, or romantic ventures, or abandonment of personal responsibilities, which seem either compulsory, necessary, or intelligent to us, will begin to appear more and more irrational to others. The bizarre diagnoses occur because, in some cases, if a ‘cause disease’ (excuse from blame) does not exist, it has to be 'discovered’ (invented). Psychiatry has expanded its diagnoses of mental disease every year to include 'illnesses’ like kleptomania and frotteurism [now frotteuristic disorder in the DSM-V]. (Do you know what frotteurism is? It is a mental disorder that causes people, usually men, to surreptitiously fondle women’s breasts or genitals in crowded situations such as elevators and subways.) The problem with the escalation of these kinds of diagnoses is that either we can become so adapted to our thinking and feelings instead of our environment that we will become dissociated from the whole idea that we have a problem at all; or at least, the more we become blameless, the more we become helpless in the face of our problems, thinking our problems need to be 'fixed’ by outside help before we can move forward on our own. For 2,000 years of Western culture our problems existed in the human power struggle constantly being waged between our principles and our primal impulses. In the last fifty years we have unprincipled ourselves and become what I call 'psychologized.’ Now the power struggle is between the 'expert’ and the 'disorder.’ Since the rise of psychiatry and psychology as the moral compass, we don’t talk about moral imperatives anymore, we talk about coping mechanisms. We are not living our lives by principles so much as we are living our lives by mental health diagnoses. This is not working because it very subtly undermines our solid sense of self.

Gallipoli was one of a series of military ‘Easterner’ adventures launched without proper analysis of the global strategic situation, without consideration of the local tactical situation, ignoring logistical realities, underestimating the strength of the opposition and predicated on a hugely optimistic assessment of the military capabilities of their own troops. Not for nothing is hubris regarded as the ‘English disease’. But the Gallipoli Campaign was a serious matter: vital resources had been drawn away from where it really mattered. The Turks were all but helpless if left on their own. They had tried to launch an ambitious attack across the Sinai Desert on the Suez Canal but had been easily thwarted. Gallipoli achieved nothing but to provide the Turks with the opportunity to slaughter British and French troops in copious numbers in a situation in which everything was in the defenders’ favour. Meanwhile, back on the Western Front, was the real enemy: the German Empire. Men, guns and munitions were in the process of being deployed to Gallipoli during the first British offensive at Neuve Chapelle; they were still there when the Germans launched their deadly gas attack at Ypres in April, during the debacles of Aubers Ridge and Festubert, and during the first ‘great push’ at the Battle of Loos in September 1915. At sea Jellicoe was facing the High Seas Fleet which could pick its moment to contest the ultimate control of the seas. This was the real war – Gallipoli was nothing but a foolish sideshow.

When you first begin this procedure, expect to face some difficulties. Your mind will wander off constantly, darting around like a bumblebee and zooming off on wild tangents. Try not to worry. The monkey-mind phenomenon is well known. It is something that every seasoned meditator has had to deal with. They have pushed through it one way or another, and so can you. When it happens, just note the fact that you have been thinking, daydreaming, worrying, or whatever. Gently, but firmly, without getting upset or judging yourself for straying, simply return to the simple physical sensation of the breath. Then do it again the next time, and again, and again, and again. Somewhere in this process, you will come face to face with the sudden and shocking realization that you are completely crazy. Your mind is a shrieking, gibbering madhouse on wheels barreling pell-mell down the hill, utterly out of control and helpless. No problem. You are not crazier than you were yesterday. It has always been this way, and you just never noticed. You are also no crazier than everybody else around you. The only real difference is that you have confronted the situation; they have not. So they still feel relatively comfortable. That does not mean that they are better off. Ignorance may be bliss, but it does not lead to liberation. So don’t let this realization unsettle you. It is a milestone actually, a sign of real progress. The very fact that you have looked at the problem straight in the eye means that you are on your way up and out of it.

Like stress, emotion is a concept we often invoke without a precise sense of its meaning. And, like stress, emotions have several components. The psychologist Ross Buck distinguishes between three levels of emotional responses, which he calls Emotion I, Emotion II and Emotion III, classified according to the degree we are conscious of them. Emotion III is the subjective experience, from within oneself. It is how we feel. In the experience of Emotion III there is conscious awareness of an emotional state, such as anger or joy or fear, and its accompanying bodily sensations. Emotion II comprises our emotional displays as seen by others, with or without our awareness. It is signalled through body language — “non-verbal signals, mannerisms, tones of voices, gestures, facial expressions, brief touches, and even the timing of events and pauses between words. [They] may have physiologic consequences — often outside the awareness of the participants.” It is quite common for a person to be oblivious to the emotions he is communicating, even though they are clearly read by those around him. Our expressions of Emotion II are what most affect other people, regardless of our intentions. A child’s displays of Emotion II are also what parents are least able to tolerate if the feelings being manifested trigger too much anxiety in them. As Dr. Buck points out, a child whose parents punish or inhibit this acting-out of emotion will be conditioned to respond to similar emotions in the future by repression. The self-shutdown serves to prevent shame and rejection. Under such conditions, Buck writes, “emotional competence will be compromised…. The individual will not in the future know how to effectively handle the feelings and desires involved. The result would be a kind of helplessness.” The stress literature amply documents that helplessness, real or perceived, is a potent trigger for biological stress responses. Learned helplessness is a psychological state in which subjects do not extricate themselves from stressful situations even when they have the physical opportunity to do so. People often find themselves in situations of learned helplessness — for example, someone who feels stuck in a dysfunctional or even abusive relationship, in a stressful job or in a lifestyle that robs him or her of true freedom. Emotion I comprises the physiological changes triggered by emotional stimuli, such as the nervous system discharges, hormonal output and immune changes that make up the flight-or-fight reaction in response to threat. These responses are not under conscious control, and they cannot be directly observed from the outside. They just happen. They may occur in the absence of subjective awareness or of emotional expression. Adaptive in the acute threat situation, these same stress responses are harmful when they are triggered chronically without the individual’s being able to act in any way to defeat the perceived threat or to avoid it. Self-regulation, writes Ross Buck, “involves in part the attainment of emotional competence, which is defined as the ability to deal in an appropriate and satisfactory way with one’s own feelings and desires.” Emotional competence presupposes capacities often lacking in our society, where “cool” — the absence of emotion — is the prevailing ethic, where “don’t be so emotional” and “don’t be so sensitive” are what children often hear, and where rationality is generally considered to be the preferred antithesis of emotionality. The idealized cultural symbol of rationality is Mr. Spock, the emotionally crippled Vulcan character on Star Trek.

I hung up the phone after saying good night to Marlboro Man, this isolated cowboy who hadn’t had the slightest probably picking up the phone to say “I miss you.” I shuddered at the thought of how long I’d gone without it. And judging from the electrical charges searing through every cell of my body, I realized just how fundamental a human need it really is. It was as fundamental a human need, I would learn, as having a sense of direction in the dark. I suddenly realized I was lost on the long dirt road, more lost than I’d ever been before. The more twists and turns I took in my attempt to find my bearings, the worse my situation became. It was almost midnight, and it was cold, and each intersection looked like the same one repeating over and over. I found myself struck with an illogical and indescribable panic--the kind that causes you to truly believe you’ll never, ever escape from where you are, even though you almost always will. As I drove, I remembered every horror movie I’d ever watched that had taken place in a rural setting. Children of the Corn. The children of the corn were lurking out there in the tall grass, I just knew it. Friday the 13th. Sure, it had taken place at a summer camp, but the same thing could happen on a cattle ranch. And The Texas Chain Saw Massacre? Oh no. I was dead. Leatherface was coming--or even worse, his freaky, emaciated, misanthropic brother. I kept driving for a while, then stopped on the side of the road. Shining my brights on the road in front of me, I watched out for Leatherface while dialing Marlboro Man on my car phone. My pulse was rapid out of sheer terror and embarrassment; my face was hot. Lost and helpless on a county road the same night I’d emotionally decompensated in his kitchen--this was not exactly the image I was dying to project to this new man in my life. But I had no other option, short of continuing to drive aimlessly down one generic road after another or parking on the side of the road and going to sleep, which really wasn’t an option at all, considering Norman Bates was likely wandering around the area. With Ted Bundy. And Charles Manson. And Grendel.

Cam closed the door and leaned back against it, letting his caressing gaze fall on the small, tense form of his wife. He knew little of these matters. In both Romany and gadjo cultures, pregnancy and childbirth were a strictly female domain. But he did know that his wife was uneasy in situations she had no control over. He also knew that women in her condition needed reassurance and tenderness. And he had an inexhaustible supply of both for her. “Nervous?” Cam asked softly, approaching her. “Oh no, not in the slightest; it’s an ordinary circumstance, and only to be expected after—” Amelia broke off with a little gasp as he sat beside her and pulled her into his arms. “Yes, I’m a bit nervous. I wish … I wish I could talk to my mother. I’m not exactly certain how to do this.” Of course. Amelia liked to manage everything, to be authoritative and competent no matter what she did. But the entire process of childbearing would be one of increasing dependence and helplessness, until the final stage, when nature took over entirely. Cam pressed his lips into her gleaming dark hair, which smelled like sweetbriar. He began to rub her back in the way he knew she liked best. “We’ll find some experienced women for you to talk to. Lady Westcliff, perhaps. You like her, and God knows she would be forthright. And regarding what you’re going to do … you’ll let me take care of you, and spoil you, and give you anything you want.” He felt her relax a little. “Amelia, love,” he murmured, “I’ve wanted this for so long.” “Have you?” She smiled and snuggled tightly against him. “So have I. Although I had hoped it would happen at a more convenient time, when Ramsay House was finished, and Poppy was betrothed, and the family was settled—” “Trust me, with your family there will never be a convenient time.” Cam eased her back to lie on the bed with him. “What a pretty little mother you’ll be,” he whispered, cuddling her. “With your blue eyes, and your pink cheeks, and your belly all round with my child …” “When I grow large, I hope you won’t strut and swagger, and point to me as an example of your virility.” “I do that already, monisha.” Amelia looked up into his smiling eyes. “I can’t imagine how this happened.” “Didn’t I explain that on our wedding night?” She chuckled and put her arms around his neck. “I was referring to the fact that I’ve been taking preventative measures. All those cups of nasty-tasting tea. And I still ended up conceiving.” “Rom,” he said by way of explanation, and kissed her passionately.

Tell me, Princess Olivia... why do you have to stay in your tower?" The soft entreaty made Livia feel as if she were melting inside. She laughed unsteadily, wishing for a moment that she dared to trust him. But the habit of independence was too strong. Shaking her head, Livia approached him, expecting him to back away from the doorway. He retreated half a step, his hands still grasping the edges of the doorway, so that she couldn't help but walk into an open-armed embrace. The bonnet ribbons slipped from her fingers. "Mr. Shaw-" she began, making the mistake of looking up at him. "Gideon," he whispered. "I want to know your secrets, Olivia." A bitter half smile touched her lips. "You'll hear them sooner or later from other people." "I want to hear them from you." As Livia began to retreat into the glasshouse, Shaw deftly caught the little cloth belt of her walking dress. His long fingers hooked beneath the reinforced fabric. Unable to back away from him, Livia clamped her hand over his, while a hectic blush flooded her face. She knew that he was toying with her, and that she once might have been able to manage this situation with relative ease. But not now. When she spoke, her voice was husky. "I can't do this, Mr. Shaw." To her amazement, he seemed to understand exactly what she meant. "You don't have to do anything," he said softly. "Just let me come closer... and stay right there..." His head bent, and he found her mouth easily. The coaxing pressure of his lips made Livia sway dizzily, and he caught her firmly against him. She was being kissed by Gideon Shaw, the self-indulgent, debauched scoundrel her brother had warned her about. And oh, he was good at it. She had thought nothing would ever be as pleasurable as Amberley's kisses... but this man's mouth was warm and patient, and there was something wickedly erotic about his complete lack of urgency. He teased her gently, nudging her lips apart, the tip of his tongue barely brushing hers before it withdrew. Wanting more of those silken strokes, Livia began to strain against him, her breath quickening. He nurtured her excitement with such subtle skill that she was utterly helpless to defend against it. To her astonishment, she found herself winding her arms around his neck and pressing her breasts against the hard plane of his chest. His hand slid behind her neck, tilting her head back to expose her throat more fully. Still gentle and controlled, he kissed the fragile skin, working his way down to the hollow at the base of her throat. She felt his tongue swirl in the warm depression, and a moan of pleasure escaped her. Shaw lifted his head to nuzzle the side of her cheek, while his hand smoothed over her back. Their breaths mingled in swift puffs of heat, his hard chest moving against hers in an erratic rhythm.

I have been frequently asked how I felt when I found myself in a free State. I have never been able to answer the question with any satisfaction to myself. It was a moment of the highest excitement I ever experienced. I suppose I felt as one may imagine the unarmed mariner to feel when he is rescued by a friendly man-of-war from the pursuit of a pirate. In writing to a dear friend, immediately after my arrival at New York, I said I felt like one who had escaped a den of hungry lions. This state of mind, however, very soon subsided; and I was again seized with a feeling of great insecurity and loneliness. I was yet liable to be taken back, and subjected to all the tortures of slavery. This in itself was enough to damp the ardor of my enthusiasm. But the loneliness overcame me. There I was in the midst of thousands, and yet a perfect stranger; without home and without friends, in the midst of thousands of my own brethren--children of a common Father, and yet I dared not to unfold to any one of them my sad condition. I was afraid to speak to any one for fear of speaking to the wrong one, and thereby falling into the hands of money-loving kidnappers, whose business it was to lie in wait for the panting fugitive, as the ferocious beasts of the forest lie in wait for their prey. The motto which I adopted when I started from slavery was this--"Trust no man!" I saw in every white man an enemy, and in almost every colored man cause for distrust. It was a most painful situation; and, to understand it, one must needs experience it, or imagine himself in similar circumstances. Let him be a fugitive slave in a strange land--a land given up to be the hunting-ground for slaveholders--whose inhabitants are legalized kidnappers--where he is every moment subjected to the terrible liability of being seized upon by his fellowmen, as the hideous crocodile seizes upon his prey!--I say, let him place himself in my situation--without home or friends--without money or credit--wanting shelter, and no one to give it-- wanting bread, and no money to buy it,--and at the same time let him feel that he is pursued by merciless men-hunters, and in total darkness as to what to do, where to go, or where to stay,--perfectly helpless both as to the means of defence and means of escape,--in the midst of plenty, yet suffering the terrible gnawings of hunger,--in the midst of houses, yet having no home,--among fellow-men, yet feeling as if in the midst of wild beasts, whose greediness to swallow up the trembling and half-famished fugitive is only equalled by that with which the monsters of the deep swallow up the helpless fish upon which they subsist,--I say, let him be placed in this most trying situation,--the situation in which I was placed, --then, and not till then, will he fully appreciate the hardships of, and know how to sympathize with, the toil-worn and whip-scarred fugitive slave.

Had she witnessed his swim? He didn’t see how she could have missed it if she’d indeed been lunching by the water. The more intriguing question was, had she liked what she’d seen? Ever the scientist, Darius couldn’t let the hypothesis go unchallenged. Ignoring his boots where they lay in the grass at the edge of the landing, he strode barefoot toward his quarry. “So I’m to understand that you lunch by the pond every day, Miss Greyson?” he asked as he stalked her through the shin-high grass. Her chin wobbled just a bit, and she took a nearly imperceptible step back. He’d probably not have noticed it if he hadn’t been observing her so closely. But what kind of scientist would he be if he didn’t attend to the tiniest of details? “Every day,” she confirmed, her voice impressively free of tremors. The lady knew how to put up a strong front. “After working indoors for several hours, it’s nice to have the benefits of fresh air and a change of scenery. The pond offers both.” He halted his advance about a foot away from her. “I imagine the scenery changed a little more than you were expecting today.” His lighthearted tone surprised him nearly as much as it did her. Her brow puckered as if he were an equation she couldn’t quite decipher. Well, that was only fair, since he didn’t have a clue about what he was trying to do, either. Surely not flirt with the woman. He didn’t have time for such vain endeavors. He needed to extricate himself from this situation. At once. Not knowing what else to do, Darius sketched a short bow and begged her pardon as if he were a gentleman in his mother’s drawing room instead of a soggy scientist dripping all over the vegetation. “I apologize for intruding on your solitude, Miss Greyson, and I hope I have not offended you with my . . . ah . . .” He glanced helplessly down at his wet clothing. “Dampness?” The amusement in his secretary’s voice brought his head up. “My father used to be a seaman, Mr. Thornton, and I grew up swimming in the Gulf. You aren’t the first man I’ve seen take a swim.” Though the way her gaze dipped again to his chest and the slow swallowing motion of her throat that followed seemed to indicate that she hadn’t been as unmoved by the sight as she would have him believe. That thought pleased him far more than it should have. “Be that as it may, I’ll take special care not to avail myself of the pond during the midday hours in the future.” He expected her to murmur some polite form of thanks for his consideration, but she didn’t. No, she stared at him instead. Long enough that he had to fight the urge to squirm under her perusal. “You know, Mr. Thornton,” she said with a cock of her head that gave him the distinct impression she was testing her own hypothesis. “I believe your . . . dampness has restored your ability to converse with genteel manners.” Her lips curved in a saucy grin that had his pulse leaping in response. “Perhaps you should swim more often.