There is a lot of talk now about the experience of powerlessness (unfortunately, the surrounding reality does much to encourage it).

I want to stress that powerlessness is not a feeling but precisely a state. And a state is a characteristic of a person’s energy level and their capacity for activity.

Examples of other states are sleep / sleepiness, tiredness / fatigue, exhaustion, alertness, excitement.

All states are accompanied by particular feelings, of course.

So powerlessness, in this series, is not at all an absence of strength as such, not exhaustion. Powerlessness is the absence of the strength we would need to reach some particular and very much wanted goal.

In physical terms, for example, powerlessness is my personal inability to shift a tractor from the spot.

The strength is there, but it is not enough.

It is this very circumstance that makes admitting one’s powerlessness so difficult – in exhaustion we simply stop, and the inability to get what we want is obvious, whereas in powerlessness it is not.

It seems that any moment now it will give way, and if it does not, then it must be because you are lazy, not determined enough, and so on.

But powerlessness has one more aspect, pointed out by Oleksandr Mokhovykov, a wonderful psychotherapist, sadly no longer with us.

For him powerlessness is a very high-energy state in which, however, the vectors of energy movement point in opposite directions.

«I am powerless before this» often also means that my capacity to make a choice is blocked.

Because very often I cannot make a choice not because I do not know what I want.

But because I cannot give something up.

We lose our freedom of choice and freeze in powerlessness when the thing we cannot give up is at least equal in «weight» to the thing we are striving for.

And it is impossible to have everything at once.

Just as a traveller packing a rucksack cannot cram into it everything they would like — otherwise they will not get far, if they manage to lift the rucksack at all.

In other words, powerlessness is a state holding a great deal of energy and tension.

To accept your powerlessness is not to state «I am not capable of anything at all, I have no strength whatsoever», but to admit to yourself and to live through and grieve the insufficiency of my strength for reaching a particular (even if desired) goal, or the impossibility of achieving two mutually exclusive goals.

And to give up something valuable but not authentic to us.

Then a mass of blocked energy is released and flows in the direction where the energy of the «inauthentic» goal previously would not let it go.