How to Overcome Helplessness

In order to reduce your sense of helplessness and become more self-sufficient, competent and self-confident, you need to do the following self-help activities.

-Identify those problems, obstacles, fears or issues over which you feel helpless and identify what beliefs keep you locked into being helpless for each one.

-Develop a new belief system that encourages you to recognize that being independent, competent, self-confident and capable of helping, fixing and changing yourself is healthy, desirable and necessary.

-Learn "normal" coping behaviors from others who are in a healthier place than yourself.

-Practice healthy coping, problem-solving, fear-desensitizing and conflict-resolving behaviors.

-Build on your successes at being an independent, free-standing self-helper and self-healer.

-Remember that success breeds success and be sure to reinforce yourself for all of your successes , no matter how small they are.

-Accept that relapse is part of the recovery process and get back with your program of self-help if you should slip or fall back to your old mold of helplessness.

-Call upon your Higher Power to give you the courage, strength and persistence necessary to gain self-sufficiency to cope with your life.

-Give permission to your network of support to "call you" on any lapses back into helplessness.

-When you get angry about "always having to do it on your own,'' do anger workouts to ventilate these emotions, which are traps waiting to draw you back into your old attention-seeking, helpless role.

-Parent your "inner child'' by nurturing and self-loving, and allow your "inner child'' to grow to be a healthy adult by giving it the freedom to make a mistake or fail in its attempts at self-help.

-Accept that it takes time--sometimes an entire lifetime--to fully rid yourself of a sense of helplessness since it is often such an ingrained, automatic habit of acting, thinking and feeling.

-Let go of your absolute need to be "healed perfectly" since it traps you to give up if at first you don't do it exactly right.

-Emotionally detach from all "fixers,'' advice givers, rescuers and enablers in your life so you don't fall into their need for you to be helpless.

-Stop hiding behind all excuses, beliefs and cliches about why you can't possibly help yourself.

-Have a farewell party or wake for the "old you'' who was wrapped up in self-pity, self-doubt and self-abasement. Let go of that "old you,'' and as in any death grieve all of the lost benefits from the old role of helplessness.

-Embrace the "new you'' who is more self-competent, self-helping, self-healing, self-respecting, self-confident and self-enhancing and recognize all of the healthy, normal, natural, beneficial consequences of living your life in this way.