When everything feels like it’s happening to you
Times when you feel completely helpless can be overwhelming. Like a leaf caught in a raging river, you may get pushed this way or that regardless of what you want. There is little or no sense of choice or control.
This is not about times when you feel overwhelmed from trying to manage too many things at once. This is a different experience—one often tied to trauma. It may come with dissociation, shutdown, or a sense of being carried along without any ability to change what’s happening.
Why this feeling is so intense
When you feel completely helpless, it’s not just a thought—it’s a full-body experience.
Your nervous system may be responding as if you are in danger or have no way to affect what’s happening. In those states, your system may shift into patterns like heightened threat awareness, shutdown, or a sense of being frozen or carried along.
When that happens, your brain is not looking for options. It’s registering something much simpler:
“I am helpless here.”
That can make even small choices feel unavailable or irrelevant. It’s not that you’re refusing to act or not trying hard enough—it’s that your system is operating from a place where neither control nor influence feels possible.
Understanding this can help you see that the feeling of helplessness isn’t random. It’s your nervous system responding to what it perceives as a situation where you don’t have control.
You don’t need to take control of everything
You might be surprised—or even relieved—that this page isn’t going to try to help you take back full control. There’s no implication that you should be able to.
When you feel like a leaf in a raging river, the goal is not to control everything. In many situations, that simply isn’t possible.
But that doesn’t mean there is no way to respond.
Instead of trying to take back full control, we’re looking for something more realistic:
any place where you still have some ability to affect what’s happening
You may not be able to control what’s happening, but you can still do the parts that are yours to do.
Control and influence are not the same thing
Before going further, it helps to distinguish between control and influence.
When you have control, you can directly determine what happens. You can start, stop, or change something in a clear and immediate way.
When you have influence, the effect is smaller. You may not be able to change the situation itself, but you can still affect something within it.
In situations involving trauma or dissociation, full control is often limited or unavailable. That’s part of what makes these experiences feel so overwhelming.
But even when control isn’t possible, influence often still is.
And that’s where we begin.
What this can look like (even when you feel helpless)
Influence is smaller than control. It means you may not be able to change what’s happening—but you can still affect part of it.
Even when you feel completely helpless, there are often very small areas where you still have some control.
That might look like:
- choosing where to look
- adjusting your position, even slightly
- deciding not to respond yet
- choosing which flavor of jelly bean to eat next
- choosing the type of music to listen to
These are small, but they are still forms of control. You are directly choosing what happens in those moments.
But there are also times when you can’t control the situation itself—and that’s where influence becomes important.
Influence means you can’t control the whole situation, but you can still do the parts that are yours to do.
That might look like:
- completing one small step in a situation you can’t fully change
- responding to one part of a problem instead of the whole thing
- taking one action that moves things slightly, even if it doesn’t resolve anything
- doing what you can, even while other parts remain out of your control
You’re not taking control of everything.
You’re participating where you still can.
For some people, this can show up in very serious ways.
You may have thoughts about not wanting to be here, or parts of you that feel pulled toward ending your life. In those moments, it can feel like everything is out of your control.
And yet, many people are already making a choice in those moments, even if they don’t think of it that way.
They choose not to act—at least for now.
“Not today.”
That choice doesn’t solve everything. It doesn’t take the thoughts away. It doesn’t address tomorrow. But it is still a decision that can be made in this moment.
And in a moment that feels completely out of control, that can be a meaningful form of agency.
Why this matters more than it seems
When you find even one choice, however tiny, it interrupts total helplessness. It signals, “I am not completely without power here.” It can begin to shift your state from passive depression or panic to one where you start to notice small possibilities—even tiny ones—that change the dynamic of the situation in your favor in some small but important way.
If you can’t find anything you can control
Sometimes, it really does seem like nothing is in your control. Even there, you may find something; you just may need to go even smaller. For instance, you might choose to:
- notice something (the sounds around you, the pressure of the seat under you)
- name things (your favorite songs, happy times you can recall, what you know to be true right now)
- take a slow, deep breath
A different way to think about power
So often, when people think about power they think about something forceful. But power can be quiet, too. It doesn’t have to mean that it controls everything. Power can mean finding a place, no matter how tiny, where you get to decide for yourself.
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