Why can’t I think of where ‘Helping The Hopeless’ comes from?
I know it is something I know well. I am not going to look it up. It will come to me.
Helping the hopeless isn’t quite right. Helping the helpless is what I want to talk about. Sometimes I think that I blame fears and feelings of inadequacy on being raised by a narcissist, when maybe some of these issues are things that most people deal with. Even people who had two parents that loved them.
ANGEL!
It’s Angel (the Joss Whedon TV show). It was on the business card of Angel Investigations. Dammit, getting old is hard. Or I’ve been overdoing the anti-anxiety meds lately. In my defense, two people that I care very deeply for are going under the knife this week. Caring about people is hard.
Anyway, getting back to helplessness.
I hate to feel helpless. I hate to be in a situation where I feel that I have absolutely no power. It’s a horrifying and frustrating feeling that makes me want scream and cry and hit things.
I am so wary of people who are in positions of authority. Not bosses. I don’t like being told what to do, but I can walk away from that situation if I have to. It’s people in authority where I have no recourse and I am at their mercy.
I know someone who works with a man who is a part time cop trying to get a full time position in a fairly large Midwestern city. I had lunch with my friend today and he told me this cop guy talks lovingly about tazing people. He fully admits that he profiles people. He abuses his authority.
This makes me angry, but it goes so far beyond anger. It makes me feel helpless. Then I fantasize about being a superhero. If I only had a cape and some super powers, I would put an end to this abuse.
I dealt with this abuse of authority on a much smaller scale recently.
While in the car with my son, we had an incident with a school bus driver. We were driving toward our subdivision and a school bus driver was waiting at a stop sign on a side street. What happened next, sometimes happens. People space out. I’ve done this before and am very glad I didn’t cause an accident.
She pulled right out in front of me.
It was so close that I had to slam on my brakes. My son was thrown against his seat belt. Every unnecessary thing sitting on my back seat became missiles. Coats, sweaters and multiple energy drink cans were everywhere.
I was not that angry that she pulled out in front of us. I wasn’t happy about it, people space out sometimes. Perhaps those people who cart around little children shouldn’t be so spacey, but still, shit happens.
I did react though. I slammed on my brakes and I honked my horn at her.
She stopped her bus and turned her lights on and put her stop sign out.
Joey and I waited. We waited for about a minute with nary a kid in sight. No kid got on that bus and no kid got off.
She stopped her fucking bus and put on her fucking stop sign and forced me to sit there because I beeped my horn at her. I beeped my horn at her because she nearly KILLED ME AND MY CHILD. I might be exaggerating a little, but at the very least, she did very nearly cause an accident. Then she used the tiny little bit of authority she has and made me sit there.
Angry doesn’t cover how I felt. I felt helpless. I needed my cape.
What I did was call the school’s transportation department to report what happened. I would like to say I spoke calmly and with dignity. I think I at least started out that way, I may have taken the low road toward the end of the call.
I spent so much of my childhood in the same haze of the helplessness I feel at the hands of people with authority. When you live with a narcissist they exert their authority when it suits them. It doesn’t have to make sense, it doesn’t have to be fair, but you goddamn well better do what they say.
I’m sure than most people have a problem with people who abuse their authority, but does it make them feel shaken and angry to irrational levels? Or is this something that most adult children of narcissists feel a little more deeply than others?
I need to learn to let these things go.
Any suggestions?
Ugh, do I hear you. I’m sensitive to abuses of authority too. My husband (who, unlike me, was not raised by narcissists) keeps his cool. It’s so hard for me to. The only thing that helps is to “pick my battles.” The world is full of douchebags and if I get angry at every one of them—and allow myself to be super agitated—I’ll be in a “fight or flight” state constantly. That’s my only advice….be as diplomatic as possible and pick your battles. This sounded like a fight worth picking to me!!
Yeah, picking your battles is important. It’s exhausting to be in flight or fight mode all the time. Good advice!!!
YUP! I think it has a hint of paranoia, as well? Since I EXPECT there to be douchebags EVERYwhere. But when I get the feeling of powerlessness and invalidation AGAIN from someone in a position of authority – I think the worst part is that because I was never allowed to stand up for myself that I don’t know HOW to handle it. Which causes more feelings of powerlessness since I just feel like erupting! (and sometimes do…) Which then circles back to being mad at myself for my imperfection and weakness of not being able to deal with it. Do you know what I mean???
Sister, I know EXACTLY what you mean. 🙂
You couldn’t have described it any better.
I don’t know if that’s a children of narcs thing. I would think it would be amplified in them/you, if you know what I mean. But my best friend and I just talked yesterday about her inability to deal with authority figures, and her parents are awesome. Her little girl is doing horribly in school and a teacher told her she needed to be tested for special education. She doesn’t feel like that’s right, but she wasn’t able to say that to the teacher, even though other teachers told her that lady was just mean and not a good teacher. It made me so mad, I told her I’d go with her to her next conference! And you know how I hate leaving my house, lol.
See? Teachers bother me as well! Some of them just shouldn’t be teaching. They abuse their authority. Auditors too.
I hope that works out for your friend. How very frustrating!
Oh, sister, I really do hear you on this one. I have massive problems with authority. I don’t trust them to be good or fair (oops, my trust issues are showing).
I can’t claim to be very Zen about this issue, but *after* I’m done honking and flipping people off and writing vitriolic letters that I never send, then I look at people whose behavior I don’t like and I think of them as examples of what I don’t want to be. I use them as inspirations to do better myself. I think, “I don’t want to be like that. I can do better than that in my own life.”
Of course, I’m still a work in progress…
It’s always nice to have people who understand.
Yes…trust issues. That is something I think I’ll be working on for a very long time. I can say, though, that I do feel like I’m making some progress. Like you..it’s an ongoing process.
I think I can agree with everything said so far. My particular problems with authority come from hating confrontation. While I don’t believe in following rules blindly (especially stupid rules) I do believe in following the rules as a general guideline that ideally keeps people from being terrible to their full potential. So, I have serious issues when the person making the rules breaks them while holding you to them and I have serious issues when the rules make absolutely no sense. That particular brand of helplessness is the kind where I can’t possibly win: whether I break the rules or follow them, neither option will sit right with me.
Exactly! It’s soooo frustrating when that happens. My boss makes arbitrary rules that make no sense and it drives me crazy..but like I said..I at least have the option of walking away from that.
This makes me SO mad. But…Here’s why I suck at confrontation. In a situation like this, here’s what happens to me:
First I freak out that she just pulled out in front of me. “OMG What the–? *HONK* I can NOT believe–! Did you see that?”
Then if someone like that turned on the lights and sat there, I think I probably would be so stunned by that, that I’d have to tell myself that she can’t POSSIBLY be doing this just to piss me off, and I’d try to give her the benefit of the doubt, because OK, so maybe she seriously doesn’t realize how close we just came to hitting her, and she’s just going about her job, clueless, and it was an accident. Maybe there’s an actual bus stop there, that I don’t know about. Maybe she’s actually sitting there with the door open, going, (Ferris Buelleresque) “Frye…..Frye………..Frye” and the kids are like, “Just GO. Cameron Frye’s not on the bus today. And there’s a lady behind us who is getting out of her car with a baseball bat.”
But inside,I know that there is no Frye and she’s just being nasty, because people these days are getting worse that way, because they think they CAN.
THAT’S when I get on my phone and chew some royal A$$ at the school bus district. Long and loud. Bus drivers do NOT get to use the freaking school bus to give other drivers the finger.
The older I get, the less inclined I am to let people arbitrarily dish out CRAP like that. I don’t have to take it any more.
*takes off Power to The People shirt*
Yep…this is pretty much exactly what I thought…I was so damn angry. It just brought up so many negative feelings.
I do tend to take things personally when other people are stupid and/or making poor decisions that put the lives of me and my loved ones at risk. Like in your case, the result can often be the person in the wrong being the biggest ass. Like cutting you off and then flipping you the bird. That’s true class. There have been times, in the distant past, where I gave in to the urge to get revenge. That’s not a wise move and ultimately self-defeating. (One guy claimed he had a gun.) I think you handled it the right way, going through channels, knowing that any loss of control on your part only weakens the impact of your message. Hopefully a little good will come from your effort!
I hope it does make a difference..it was just so frustrating. I really wish I hadn’t lost my shit at the end of the conversation…but..that moment has passed..
I’ve been striving to be more diplomatic and calm when faced with irrational authority — however, I’m not always successful. Let’s be honest, I’m probably only successful about half the time or less. I still haven’t figured out why I’m successful sometimes and not others.
I’ve had a long and turbulent history of problems with authority (I talk about it quite often on my blog) — starting at a very young and continuing to the present. I think that, because I was responsible for myself during my youth and because the adults in my life were not reliable, I became suspicious and resentful of those who tried to tell me what to do — especially when they were 1) incompetent 2) hypocritical and/or 3) cruel.
Cut from the same goddamn cloth, aren’t we?
OK, three things:
First, whatever issues with authority figures you may have, the bus driver was behaving like a petty tyrant, and I would expect any normal, well balanced people (if I were ever to meet any) to react negatively to her acting the way she did.
Second, speaking as someone who drove a 20 foot delivery truck for my living for about half a million miles, her version of what occurred may sound quite a bit different from yours. When you drive a large, slow vehicle that has to stop a lot of places that other vehicles don’t, people save up some of their most irrational and bone-headed behavior for your interaction with them. She probably gets honked at for no reason a lot. She had to know that the stop-sign thing was wrong, but if she didn’t know what she did wrong, she probably felt it was justified. People do some weird things behind the wheel, and professional drivers, who are supposed to be above all that, aren’t always. They make mistakes. Which brings me to:
Third, when you are a professional driver it’s YOUR DAMN JOB to deal with the mistakes you make. Whatever amount of attitude you let yourself develop about being superior to all of the assholes you encounter on the road comes with a larger responsibility that you don’t BE one of those assholes… times about ten to account for the extra weight of your vehicle.
I also believe that all vehicles should be required to have an extra light on all four corners that flash bright purple when a button on the steering wheel is pressed and mean “sorry, my bad”.
hahaha. thank you!
I’m pretty sure she just spaced. She was actually looking right at me and then pulled out in front of me..that shit happens…
The couple times I’ve lost my shit was with people abusing their tiny amount of authority. And by “losing my shit” I mean that I got scary calm and ripped the person a new one without using cuss words. It sort of freaks me out how I feel because it’s dangerous. And I absolutely think it is a reaction born of years under a narcissist’s thumb.
I just freak out…it really bothers me and it inspires fear in me (from my childhood) which in turn makes me VERY angry..
good for you for contacting the school. We need more people like you to stand up for injustice and people who abuse their authority.
Thank you! Yeah, no way I was going to let that one go.
If she deliberately kept you waiting to annoy you, that’s bad and probably deserved a call to the school. Her running a stop sign certainly did. I’m just wondering (and I can’t tell from your description of the event) if she also hit the brakes hard at the point when you honked at her, possibly jostling the kids and their stuff around, much as the stuff in your car got jostled around, and she needed to stop for a minute to make sure the kids were safely in their seats with their belongings in hand. Maybe not. In any case, school bus drivers really, really, really need to pay attention to traffic rules.
She did not slam on her brakes..and honestly, I THINK the bus was empty…or at least there were only a few kids on it…so frustrating.
You know, I think people who work in the school system who have no REAL authority find ways to lord it over the rest of us because it’s the only way they can feel important. This sort of thing … well, let’s just say that sometimes I am a school photographer. You know, the person who goes to a different school each day and photographs all the children, whether they want to be or not? And I’ve had too many instances of the janitor or the bus monitor telling me what I can or cannot do (and I’m talking about ridiculous stuff here, like not using the bus lane a half hour before the buses show up). I’ve even had one volunteer telling me about what he expected to see in all of my photos – NEVER MIND that he wasn’t even going to be buying any of them because he had no children and no grandchildren at those schools. It was only when the freakin’ secretary finally showed up that I even realized I wasn’t dealing with the principal.
P.S. I used to teach, too, so I’ve been inside the school and seen it from that angle, too. Petty authoritarians, or little Hitlers, as I like to call them, are the worst.
They really so much are. I would LOVE to find compassion for them, because they are broken and sad and the fact that they NEED the authority is pathetic. BUt I don’t have compassion for them because they are so fucking upsetting
Okay. First on the list when feeling helpless….breathe, deep deep layers of clean crisp oxygen. Close your eyes and breathe until the only thing you are thinking about is breathing.
Next … emotionally let it go. The fact is we have zero control over any of it. BUT we do have control of how we respond to it …. especially misguided authority figures. They don’t get to boost their ego at the cost of your self esteem. Only you allow that to happen.
As for the bus driver – a Forest Gump moment as I fondly refer to them “Stupid is as Stupid does. “
As for the surgeries on your relatives … again breathe and have faith in the surgeons, in the universe and think positive … lots and lots of positive energy. When ALL control is in another’s hand send blessings and positive energy to that person in control.
Fact is we only think we have some kind of control when all we really have and are is energy, either positive or negative we choose.
Hang in … and breathe!
Thank you so much. I work on the breathing thing every day