#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 It has been replaced by shear helplessness as they quickly walk past me with their heads tilted down and to the right.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

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

When discouraged some people will give up, give in or give out far too early. They blame their problems on difficult situations, unreasonable people or their own inabilities. When discouraged other people will push back that first impulse to quit, push down their initial fear, push through feelings of helplessness and push ahead. They’re less likely to find something to blame and more likely to find a way through. ↗

— Steve Goodier

#blaming-others #courage #discouragement #fear #give-up

The suspense: the fearful, acute suspense: of standing idly by while the life of one we dearly love, is trembling in the balance; the racking thoughts that crowd upon the mind, and make the heart beat violently, and the breath come thick, by the force of the images they conjure up before it; the desperate anxiety to be doing something to relieve the pain, or lessen the danger, which we have no power to alleviate; the sinking of soul and spirit, which the sad remembrance of our helplessness produces; what tortures can equal these; what reflections of endeavours can, in the full tide and fever of the time, allay them! ↗

— Charles Dickens

#helplessness #loved-ones #sickness #equality

Learned helplessness is the giving-up reaction, the quitting response that follows from the belief that whatever you do doesn't matter. ↗

— Arnold Schwarzenegger

#follows #helplessness #learned #matter #quitting

The basis of tragedy is man's helplessness against disease, war and death; the basis of comedy is man's helplessness against vanity (the vanity of love, greed, lust, power). ↗

— Dawn Powell

#basis #comedy #death #disease #greed

It's going to be a hard time; we can count on that. But with all the misery, what opportunities to show mercy and brotherly love in our land, which has sinned so greatly against love. And patience! For now is the time when the victors, in the blind triumph of their victory, are likely to make mistakes. But that's not our concern, for we shall only be the sufferers, not the agents of suffering. What a power for peace will lie in our own powerlessness if we can only glimpse in it the sign of grace! ↗

— Margot Benary-Isbert

#peace #suffering #war #love