How Often Do You Feel Helpless And Just Wished You Knew Better How To Help?

6 tips that help you feeling empowered when facing adversity

Photo by Miguel Bruna on Unsplash

We were just talking when my friend got up to walk over to the kitchen, her steps looking a bit unsteady, and banngggg, she collapses to the floor. Face first. Marble floor. Not pretty. It literally looked like a scene out of a cartoon movie. Except, it wasn’t funny.

You know that feeling when there is a **screwed-up situation unfolding in front of you and you feel helpless?

You have never been in that kind of situation and feel lost. You feel the panic rising in your body.

When you are confronted with a situation in which you feel helpless, your stress level rises. That doesn’t help with staying calm and cool-headed to make clear and rational decisions.

Especially in an emergency, time-sensitive or dicey situations it is vital to slow down to get a better overview of the problem with calmness and to think clearly. This is not the case when you feel like you have no clue whatsoever about how to handle the situation

Some people feel less helpless in certain “disaster” situations because they have a “databank” collection of knowledge from somehow similar experiences in their lives that can be applied to an emergency situation at hand. Depending on your job, or how much you got around, you were exposed to a wild multitude of situations, etc. your databank is stocked with more or fewer experiences you can draw from.

Case in point, my husband jumped in and knew what to do, drawing from his vast experiences in a variety of professional and life situations.

Luckily, I have not witnessed many health or accident situations where I or other people needed immediate emergency help. But this also means that my experience-databank in this regard is pretty limited.

I am not talking about crazy accidents in the mountains or terrible incidents on the highway. Just life situations that can happen around us every day, a bicyclist gets hit, your friend faints, the elderly woman gets sunstroke and you happen to be around and — you feel helpless because you don’t know how to give the most appropriate and effective help.