Helpless: Can Developmental Trauma Cause Someone To Feel Helpless?

In general, someone can have the inclination to feel helpless, and this is likely to make it hard for them to live a fulfilling life. What this comes down to is that they won’t feel as though they are able to do anything to change their life.

This is likely to show that this is more than just something that they feel, though, as it could be something that has permeated their whole being. It is then not just going to be that they feel helpless; they will be helpless.

Going Upwards

If something does happen and they end up feeling different, it is unlikely to be long until they fall right back down again. When this happens, it might take a little while for them to adapt to how they feel.

The reason for this is that experiencing a sense of power will have allowed them to feel good and then, to go back to how they were before will be even harder, if only for a short while. Due to this, they might prefer to stay as they are.

For Example

There are a number of things that might allow them to rise up, albeit briefly. These can include: receiving money, receiving attention, being in a relationship, exercising and having sex.

How they feel when they experience one of these things or another will be so different to how they usually feel that they might often try to hold onto the experience. When this happens, it will be difficult for them to surrender to the experience and to fully embrace it.

Other Elements

As they often feel helpless, it is also likely to mean that they will often feel down and depressed. This can be seen as a natural consequence of feeling powerless and not feeling as if they have much of an effect on their life.

When they feel this way, their whole body could feel very heavy and weighed down. They won’t have anything on top of them but it will be as though they are at the bottom of a fallen building.

Looking Back

If they were to think about how long they have experienced life in this way, they may find that they have more or less always been this way. So, for as long as they can remember, they will have been out of touch with their personal power.

They could believe that they were born this way and this is then how they will always be. Based on this, they will have been born feeling powerless and there won’t be anything that they can do about it.

One Outlook

However, if they were to reach out for support, they could end up being told that they need to master their mind. Their ‘negative’ thoughts will be the problem and, once, they are able to replace these with ‘positive’ thoughts, they will start to feel different.

In other words, what is going on for them up top will be the issue, not what is going on anywhere else. This mind-based approach may work or it might only work for a short while.

A Surface Level Approach

Even if it does work, it might only repress what is truly going on for them. What this comes down to is that what is taking place in their mind, along with how they feel can be an effect of what is going on for them at a deeper level.

What is seen as the problem is then a symptom of what is going on for them in their unconscious mind/body. The challenge is that if one lives in a society that is mind centred and believes that someone begins and ends with their conscious mind, the cause won’t be dealt with.

Going Deeper

With this in mind, if someone has felt helpless for as long as they can remember, it can show that their early years were not very nurturing. When they were an infant and then a toddler, they may have often been left.

When they were given attention, it may have often been mssatuned care. Consequently, they wouldn’t have received the emotional nutrients that they needed to be able to grow and develop in the right way.

A Loveless Environment

The only way for them to handle the pain that they experienced would have been to disconnect from themselves. This would have also caused their body to go into a shut down, collapsed state.

They would have felt helpless because they were helpless. Shutting down and not resisting what was going on would have allowed them to survive a stage of their life that was brutal; if their parasympathetic nervous system hadn’t been activated and they had tried to resist what was going on, they would have probably soon died.

A Reflection of Reality

Without this understanding, how they feel as an adult can simply be seen as being irrational and as purely a reflection of what is taking place in their head. With this understanding, it becomes clear that how they feel is completely rational given what they experienced very early on.

What this illustrates is that the pain that someone experiences during their early years doesn’t just disappear once they become an adult. The challenge is that if they live in a society where their history is not explored and then taken into account, this pain will be overlooked and the root of their issue/s won’t be dealt with.

Awareness

If someone can relate to this and they are ready to change their life, they may need to reach out for external support. This is something that can be provided with the assistance of a therapist or healer.