Responses to Powerlessness

Rothko

 More from Hollis:

The Wound of Overwhelmment – The first category of inevitable existential, childhood wounding we may call overwhelmment, namely, the experience of our essential powerlessness in the face of our environment. 

First, given the message that the world is larger, more powerful, we may logically try to evade its potential punitive effect upon us by retreating, avoiding, procrastinating, hiding out, denying, dissociating – the avoidant personality. 

The second logical response to overwhelmment is found in our frequent efforts to seize control of the situation – sociopathic personality. In service to the core message, he or she internalized: “The world is hurtful and invasive. You must hurt or invade it first or be hurt and invaded instead.” 

Most of us learned other, less extreme, coping mechanisms. We may pursue education as a means to understand, because to understand is to be in control . . . perhaps. At any rate, all of us have endeavored, with greater or lesser success, to get in control of our environment, lest it control us. 

Many have sought overt power in life, from petty dictators to insecure, bullying spouses. Their urgent desire for power is a measure of their inner powerlessness. 

Others, giving up on the notion of gaining power overtly, resort to what we commonly identify as passive/aggressive behaviors. Such a person appears to cooperate, even be congenial, but surreptitiously sabotages, turns up late, inserts the chilling, critical remark, fails to carry through, and thereby gains power through apparent powerlessness. 

Thirdly, with the power of the world inordinately impressed upon us, there is another category of logical response, surely the most common: “Give them what they want!” Accommodation is a learned response,. Notice that there are so many polite words we have learned to accommodate our accommodation. We say someone is “sweet,” “personable,” “amiable,” “easygoing,” and most often, “nice.” When these labels repeatedly apply to someone’s behavior the consequences to the person’s inner life may in fact be ugly. We are conditioned to be nice, yet if we find ourselves repeatedly, reflexively being nice, we have not only lost integrity through reflexive responses, we have lost the power to conduct our own life. In recent years, this adaptive response has become so common as to earn its own pathologizing name, “codependence.” Codependence may or may not be a psychiatric category, but it is certainly an estrangement from our souls.

Three major categories of response to protect our fragile psyche:

1. …The absence of the supportive other is internalized as “I am not met halfway because I am not worth being met.” Such a person has a tendency to hide out from life, diminish personal possibilities, avoid risk, and even make self-sabotaging choices. One takes the lesser opportunity as a confirmation of one’s apparent worth. One chooses the safe option, be it in work or relationship, rather than one that challenges and opens new possibilities… Sense of dispossession and the lifelong need to “arrive.” He has been climbing this mountain for a long time. His psyche tells him that he is over that hump, and he is then able to effortlessly gambol down the hillside.
2. … Overcompensate and seek power, wealth, the right partner, fame, or some form of sovereignty over others…. What one lacks within one will seek in the outer world … The narcissist. Narcissists work very hard to conceal their inner poverty from recognition by others. They may boast, inflate their reputations, swagger and belittle others, or they may fall apart at the first hint of neglect and criticism, making others feel guilty for the alleged injury done to them. Such adult children typically either run off and marry the person they love and suffer the guilt and loss of their parent’s approval or accede to their parent’s desire and live depressed and angry marriages. Some even fantasize waiting until the parent dies, so great is their inner anxiety.
3. … The anxious, obsessive need to seek the reassurance of others. Every therapist will attest to receiving many clients who complain about their relationships. They think all the good men are gone, or there are no woman without disturbed agendas. They meet and mate with someone and quickly begin to hector them and demand continuous reassurance from them. In time they grow weary of the other person, for the other can never fill the vast void within them. They are quick to find fault and they bitterly blame their partners for being so inadequately present. Even in normal marriages this sort of disappointment arises, for each of us has a lifelong need for fulfillment that no other person can ever meet. For the more mature, this insufficiency is perceived as the nature of life itself, and not the fault of their partner. For those whose history is especially charged with insufficiency, this intractable wound is larger than consciousness, and leads to a familiar, heartbreaking round of repeated disappointment, frustration, anger, disillusionment, and the desire to cast off in a new direction in hope of better results through the “magical other” over the next hill