S2 EP284 – The Pain of Powerlessness – And the Path to Peace

Hi everyone! Dr. Margaret Paul here with the Inner Bonding Podcast. Today I’m speaking about a topic that is a challenge for all of us, which is how to manage the helplessness we feel over others and events when we can’t change them or fix them.

Lots of times we might get angry rather than accept the fact that we have no control over a situation. Anger is often a coverup feeling, a secondary feeling. Getting angry makes us feel powerful. Like if we get angry enough, we can have some control over the situation when actually the reality is we don’t have control over others or over events. I mean, sometimes of course we can help people, we can help situations, but we don’t have control over them.

So what do you do when you feel helpless? Do you get angry at somebody? Do you blame somebody? Do you blame yourself? Do you judge yourself? What do you do when you feel helpless? This is really an important question to answer for yourself because there is a lot of helplessness, of powerlessness in life; there’s so much we can’t control.

We can control our own intention, in fact, that’s the essence of free will is being able to choose our own intention. It’s fine to have control over our intention, over our own behavior, over our own thoughts, our own actions, but we have to accept that we don’t have control over how others feel and how others act, and events that may be very painful for us, and sometimes you might find yourself getting angry as a way to avoid accepting your lack of control over a situation or over a person.

So for example, my client, Mona, expressed a lot of anger at God due to losing a baby. She really wanted a third child, and she got pregnant, and she miscarried the baby. a\And her concept of God is that God decides these things. It’s not my concept of God. My concept of God is that God is the energy of love, the energy of wisdom, the energy of peace, the energy of joy, and we can tap into it when our frequency is high enough.

But many people do have a concept of God – that God is a being that decides things, punishes them. So she was angry at God rather than feeling her helplessness over the loss of the child. Fortunately, she’s young enough to get pregnant again, but this is just an example of using anger rather than feeling the powerlessness, the helplessness, the grief, the sadness over what happened. Sometimes people just cover it over with anger.

Another example is Joe. Joe gets angry at his employees due to not doing what he wants; he wants control over his employees. He has a big manufacturing business, and he wants things done the way he wants them done, and he thinks that getting angry at them is going to have control over what they do, and he doesn’t want to accept his helplessness over what other people do.

Certainly he’s the boss, he can fire them, but what’s happened in his business is that people who were important to him have quit because they don’t like how he’s treating them. So instead of giving him control, it’s having the opposite effect. People don’t like it, and they’ll leave and look for another job.

So he’s using anger at his employees rather than being open to learning about why they might not be doing what he wants and rather than feeling his powerlessness over other people’s choices.

And then another client of mine, Rachel, is angry at COVID. She’s a young woman who has long COVID. I don’t blame her for being upset about it because there’s not much being done in medicine, but she’s using anger as a way to avoid the pain of her helplessness over her grief of what’s happened in her life as a result of COVID.

And so these are some examples of people using anger to avoid the reality, the reality of their powerlessness over others and over situations. So again, I want to ask you, what do you do when you feel helpless? What do you do when you feel powerless?

Do you reject yourself to not be rejected with other people’s anger? Or somebody gets angry with you, and you feel powerless over their being angry with you? Do you then reject yourself, get angry at yourself, tell yourself that you’re bad or wrong, or do you give yourself up?

Do you realize that abandoning yourself, whether it’s judging yourself, getting angry at yourself, giving yourself up is a form of self-rejection? And once you reject yourself, you’re going to be fearful of rejection of others, and then you’re going to try and have control over how others feel about you, which you don’t have.

You are helpless. I am powerless over how others feel about me, I don’t control that. You don’t control that, but you’re not powerless over how you treat yourself. But if you’re rejecting yourself with self-judgments, if you’re rejecting yourself by giving yourself up, then you’re going to be afraid of others rejection, and that may lead you to being afraid of rejection and then trying to have control over them, which is one of the main reasons that relationships have problems, people trying to control each other.

So I did this for years – I’ve talked about it. I tried to have control by being a good girl, giving myself up, not wanting to accept my helplessness, especially in my 30 year marriage. I didn’t want to accept that there was nothing I could do to create the kind of relationship I wanted.

I didn’t want to accept my lack of control, I didn’t want to accept my powerlessness over my ex-husband, I didn’t want to accept that I wasn’t the one causing his behavior. I was causing my own behavior, but I wasn’t causing his behavior.

This is not easy to accept for any of us. It’s not easy to accept the choices other people make, and certainly it was not easy for me to accept that I was not causing my ex-husband to be angry or to be withdrawn or to be needy – that I was not causing that. He came into the relationship with that; I came into the relationship with my caretaking.

We were a perfect couple for a long time because we were both operating out of our wounded selves, both trying to control each other in our own different ways and it was only when I started practicing Inner Bonding that I realized that I was not accepting the reality of my own lack of control.

Are you aware of feeling powerless? Are you aware of feeling helpless? And if you are, where do you feel it? What does it feel like in you? It’s really important for you to become aware of this feeling because if you’re not aware that you’re feeling powerless, then you’re going to turn to anger, withdrawal, compliance as forms of control.

So it’s really important for you to start to tune in to where do you feel that feeling of powerlessness in your body, and what triggers it? Are you aware of what triggers your feeling of powerlessness? Is there trauma in your background that triggers it? Is it from infancy when you were crying and nobody came, and you could have died?

Is it from some deep rejection that you experienced in your life? Is it from having fallen in love with somebody who then rejected you and there was nothing you could do about it? Where does it come from? Where do you feel it? These are important awarenesses for all of us.

Now obviously shifting out of getting angry or giving yourself up or trying to have control over other people and events comes from your intention. And are you aware of your intention when you’re triggered into a feeling of powerlessness? Are you aware that it might be more important to you to control than to be on the soul’s journey of evolving in your ability to love?

Every time something triggers your feeling of powerlessness, this is an opportunity for you to open to learning about accepting the reality of your powerlessness and opening to learning about what is loving to you in that moment, which is always going to be to accept the reality of your lack of control over others, your lack of control over events, but recognizing that you are in control of your own intention of whether you’re going to try and control others or whether you’re going to be loving to yourself and be on the soul’s journey of evolving in your ability to love, which is why we’re here.

This is why we’re here. Why not take every opportunity to learn about loving yourself? And certainly when we’re triggered into that feeling of powerlessness, we have an opportunity to open to learning about what would be loving to ourselves. There’s only those two choices: you can either ignore the reality and try and control what you can’t control, or you can open to learning about what would be loving to you in the face of feeling powerless over others and over events.

What is your priority? Is your priority to not be hurt? Or is your priority to love? Is it to not be rejected or is it to learn to love yourself and share your love with others? Those are the only two choices, and that of course is about the awareness of your intention. And so it’s really important for you to be honest with yourself about your priority.

Is control more important than love? Or is evolving in your ability to love more important than trying to control others and outcomes and learn to accept what you have no control over? The wounded self, which is the default setting in the brain for most people, always wants to control not being hurt and acts out of this intention.

So if you’re on automatic, you’re probably going to be trying to control not accepting the reality of the situation. And this is one of the reasons it’s so important to be aware that you have a choice of intention. All of us, all us learned to control, there’s no way of growing up in our culture and not learning to control.

The automatic default setting in the brain is from the wounded self to control not being hurt and to act out from that intention. So often when I’m working with my clients and they’re acting out from their wounded self, trying to control getting angry, giving themselves up, withdrawing, and I ask them, “There’s got to be a good reason that you’re doing this, got to be a good reason that you’re operating from your wounded self.”

And when they go inside to inquire, it’s to not get hurt because other people’s behavior and situations can certainly be very, very hurtful. But what they don’t realize is that they’re rejecting themselves when they’re choosing to try and control somebody else, especially by giving themselves up, trying to control somebody else or a situation, they’re rejecting themselves.

They’re hurting themselves. So many people don’t realize that when their intent is to control, it’s coming from a fear of being hurt, but that very intention is causing their hurt because they’re not being loving to themselves.

They’re hitting their head against the wall, trying to control a situation, trying to control a person that they have no control over and rejecting themselves by not tuning into what’s loving to themselves. This is like the serenity prayer, it’s like “Give me the strength to accept what I cannot control, and to control what I can, which is me.”

The serenity prayer is very powerful regarding what I’m talking about, to accept what we cannot control and to control what we can. The only thing I can control really is me, is my intention. And if my intention is to have control over others, then I am rejecting and abandoning myself, not loving myself, not opening to my guidance, not practicing Inner Bonding, not using my personal power to evolve in my ability to love, and that hurts me.

Anytime I choose the intention to control, I am hurting myself. And it’s not always easy to see that people get anxious, they get depressed, they feel guilty, they feel shame, they feel alone, they feel empty, they don’t realize that it’s coming from their intention to try and control what they can’t control, to try and get love and avoid pain and feel safe with their controlling behavior.

They don’t realize that doing that is the source of their pain now because that inner child, that beautiful soul within us needs our love. Of course, it’s wonderful when we get somebody else’s love, it’s great when we get that it’s the icing on the cake, but our inner child, our beautiful soul needs our love.

And when we don’t accept what we’re powerless over, we then try to control and we abandon ourselves, we’re not loving ourselves, and that causes us a lot of pain. So the intent to love yourself and others needs to be a conscious choice. You need to retrain the brain so that you don’t automatically go into trying to control when you feel helpless and this is where the practice of Inner Bonding comes in.

The more you practice the Six Steps of Inner Bonding, the more you stay in step one, tuned into your own feelings, and open to learning and connect with your guidance in step two, and explore your feelings and your beliefs in step three, and open to the truth and what’s loving in step four, and take loving action in step five, and then tune back into your feelings to see how you’re doing now in step six.

The more you do those six steps throughout a day, anytime you’re feeling anything other than fullness and peace inside, the more you do that, the more you are rewiring, retraining your brain for the loving adult and for your spiritual connection. Research on rewiring the brain shows that if you were to do this for two or three months consistently, then your default setting would no longer be the wounded self.

You will have retrained your brain to be a loving adult, retrained your brain to be conscious of your intention and to choose the intention to learn about loving yourself rather than the intention to have control over getting love and avoiding pain, and you would develop the strength to deal with it, to deal with the powerlessness that we feel over others and situations.

There’s so much that happens in life that we have no control over, but we need to be resilient enough to handle that, and the way that we become resilient enough is by practicing Inner Bonding, practicing these six steps over and over again throughout a day, like I said, anytime you’re not feeling peaceful, you’re not feeling full inside, that’s the time to practice these six steps and gradually rewire your brain for being a loving adult, for being a spiritually connected, loving adult.

The research does show that anything you focus on eventually rewires the brain. And so if you were to focus on being aware of your intention, being aware of feeling anything other than fullness and peace, being aware of feeling helpless over a situation or over a person – if you were to be aware of that and you were to choose to do Inner Bonding rather than get angry, rather than give yourself up, rather than shut down, you’ll be rewiring your brain.

And I assure you that there’s no way this does not work. The research shows that anything we focus on for a period of time consistently like two or three months rewires the brain. It doesn’t matter how old you are, even people in their nineties have been able to rewire their brain with consistent practice of Inner Bonding.

So I really encourage you to learn these six steps. You might have to write them down for a while and carry them around with you. Eventually, they will get to be much more natural and automatic for you, but I really want to encourage you to learn and practice the powerful, the very, very powerful Six Steps of Inner Bonding.

And one of the ways of doing that is to join me for my 30 day home study course that teaches Inner Bonding. The course is “Love Yourself. It’s a video course. You’ll get a video every single day, plus you’ll get an email with a lot of information about learning Inner Bonding, learning to love yourself, learning to be aware of your intention, learning to be aware of your feelings.

This course will help you to be on the path of love rather than on the path of control. And this is truly life-changing; when we change the path, we change everything. Jesus actually said in the Bible, “There’s the wide road and the narrow road.”

The narrow road is the road of love; the wide road is the road of control. Which road do you want to be on? Which is most important to you? Is it most important to you to try and control getting love and avoiding pain? Or is it most important to you to evolve as a loving human being? Only you can answer this question, but I really want to encourage you to have the courage to get onto the path of love. That is what is life changing.

I’m sending you my love and my blessings.