#helplessness

Children who are not encouraged to do, to try, to explore, to master, and to risk failure, often feel helpless and inadequate. Over-controlled by anxious, fearful parents, these children often become anxious and fearful themselves. This makes it difficult for them to mature. Many never outgrow the need for ongoing parental guidance and control. As a result, their parents continue to invade, manipulate, and frequently dominate their lives. ↗

— Susan Forward

#boundaries #children #control #controlled #failure

Our national history has so often filled us with bitterness and the feeling of helplessness. ↗

— Lech Walesa

#feeling #filled #helplessness #history #national

I am noticing a big difference in the way the hospital workers are looking at me as I approach Jess’s room. The look of sincere sympathy that used to be on their faces when they made eye contact with me is gone. It has been replaced by shear helplessness as they quickly walk past me with their heads tilted down and to the right. I feel like Bud Fox walking into his office with the Securities and Exchange Commission awaiting him. ↗

— John Passaro

#helplessness #hospital-scene #sympathy #life

Loss of hope rather than loss of life is what decides the issues of war. But helplessness induces hopelessness. ↗

— B. H. Liddell Hart

#helplessness #hope #hopelessness #induces #issues

... and I experienced the bitter helplessness of a taunted old man dying to be whole again. ↗

— Philip Roth

#old-age #wholeness #age

Sometimes there's nothing you can do. [...] Sometimes they don't have enough to fight with. ↗

— Tamora Pierce

#death #flick #helplessness #henna #illness

I am afraid of reduction. After a lifetime's independence- yes, selfish independence- I am terrified of being reduced to childhood once more, to helplessness, to seas of confusion from which the cruel lucid intervals poke up like rock shoals. I don't want to sit in my chair and be fed, much less do I want to be handed over to medical professionals. ↗

— Rosie Thomas

#fear #helplessness #death

Self abandoned, relaxed and effortless, I seemed to have laid me down in the dried-up bed of a great river; I heard a flood loosened in remote mountains, I felt the torrent come; to rise I had no will, to flee I had no strength. ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#god #helplessness #faith

Helplessness is such a rotten feeling. There's nothing you can do about it. Being helpless is like being paralyzed. It's sickness. The cure calls for a monumental effort to stand up and start walking somewhere, anywhere. But that takes some doing. ↗

— Chuck Barris

#helplessness #life #you-and-me-babe #life

In our loss and fear we craved the acts of religion, the ceremonies that allow us to admit our helplessness, our dependence on the great forces we do not understand. ↗

— Ursula K. Le Guin

#helplessness #loss #religion #religion