Transcending Helplessness & Powerlessness
The Politics of Integration in Therapy and Society
(If you have received this by email, please click on the title to read the latest version. I often correct typos and continue to edit my essays after publishing the first version).
In his 2001 book, Politics on the Couch; Citizenship and the internal life, Dr Andrew Samuels argued that politics should not be excluded from the therapy room. He says,
Along with the expected problems – relationship difficulties, early traumas, feelings of emptiness – we see ecological and other crises presented as sources of symptoms and cause of unhappiness in individuals. From a psychological point of view, the world is making people unwell; it follows, that, for people to feel better, the world’s situation needs to change. But perhaps this is too passive: perhaps for people to feel better, they have to recongize that the human psyche is a political psyche and hence consider doing something about the state the world is in. (Andrew Samuels. 2001. Politics on the Couch, p.21) [my highlight]
Samuels argues that people bring “political energy” into the therapy room, and suggests that therapists have a duty to engage with it, not deflect or dismiss it as an internal ‘malfunction’ in the person’s mind. He suggests that therapists and clients might need to consider acting to change the world, because just talking about how the world hurts us may be too passive.
In their 1992 book, We’ve Had A Hundred Years of Psychotherapy And The World’s Getting Worse, James Hillman and Michael Ventura maintain that therapy—they focused specifically on psychoanalysis—concentrates too much on the inside of individuals. They suggest that therapy actively encourages people to dismiss their concerns and fears about society, politics, and the human world in general as nothing more than manifestations of their own troubled psyche.
I’m outraged after having driven to my analyst on the freeway. The fucking trucks almost ran me off the road. I’m terrified, I’m in my little car, and I get to my therapists’s and I’m shaking. My therapist says, “we’ve gotta talk about this”.
So we begin to talk about it. And we discover that my father was a son-of-a-bitch brute and this whole truck thing reminds me of him. Or we discover that I’ve always felt frail and vulnerable, there’ve always been bigger guys with bigger dicks, so this car that I’m in is a typical example of my thin skin and my frailty and vulnerability. Or we talk about my power drive, that I really wish to be a truck driver. We convert my fear into anxiety—an inner state. We convert the present into the past, into a discussion of my father and my childhood. And we convert my outrage—at the pollution or the chaos or whatever my outrage is about—into rage and hostility. Again, an internal condition, whereas it starts in outrage, an emotion. Emotions are mainly social. The word comes from the Latin ex movere, to move out. Emotions connect to the world. Therapy introverts the emotions, calls fear “anxiety”. You take it back, and you work on it inside yourself. You don’t work psychologically on what the outrage is telling you about potholes, about trucks, about Florida strawberries in Vermont in March, about burning up oil, about energy politics, nuclear waste, that homeless woman over there with the sores on her feet—the whole thing. (Hillman J. & Ventura, M. 1992. We’ve Had A Hundred Years of Psychotherapy And the World Is Getting Worse. pp11-12)
These books emerged when psychology and psychotherapy had already abandoned their once-vital engagement with politics, society, and the pursuit of a better world. By then, these disciplines had largely surrendered their soul to the neoliberal ethos of individualistic survival.
So much of what passes as therapy these days is not only soulless, it’s also intellectually dishonest. Many of the prevalent therapies currently offered to people cloak themselves in science, but the science they rely on is deeply flawed (see for example, Farhad Dalal’s critique of CBT - cognitive behavioural therapy). The scientific methodology used to validate popular therapy approaches ignores everything we know about what makes us human, and what we need in order to be well. Essential factors, such as warmth, empathy, presence, the feeling we get when someone cares about us, shows understanding, or interest in what we feel or say, or the quality of the relationship between therapists and clients cannot be measured or counted in simple numbers. What passes as therapy these days is a way for therapists to make a living, for clients it’s an exercise in coping with a bad world that is making them suffer, and for politicians and bureaucrats a way to appear to invest in mental health.
This shift is not a new phenomenon. It represents a regression to the era before the humanistic revolution in psychology. Humanistic psychology emerged as a response to the incomplete view of humanity offered by psychoanalysis, behaviourism, and the medical model of mental health. These earlier approaches reduced people to either products of unconscious drives, collections of conditioned responses, or walking diagnoses—missing the full depth and potential of human experience. While drawing on existing philosophical foundations, humanistic psychology gained significant influence beginning in the 1940s through the pioneering work of Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow
Humanistic psychology established two fundamental principles about human beings. First, that we are shaped by the environment that raises us and in which we live—recognising that society and the individual are intricately interconnected. Second, that our psychological problems are caused largely by our failure to develop and grow into what we have the potential to become. Our need to grow toward our potential isn’t optional; it is as essential as our need for physical survival. While we must be safe, alive and well in order to grow, the need for growth is so fundamental, that when it’s blocked, it inevitably produces significant psychological distress.
Humanistic psychology argues that society has a duty to help people grow, not just survive physically. This means politics is woven into the very DNA of humanistic psychology. Indeed, many psychotherapists and theorists of that era were active political advocates. I suspect that the few therapy schools that still teach Person-Centred therapy1 in the UK do not dedicate sufficient space to discussing the deeply political nature of humanistic psychology. Meanwhile, clinical psychology students are taught the medical model of mental health almost exclusively and are led to believe that therapy is merely about helping people cope with and manage symptoms. If Carl Rogers could witness the current state of the field, he would likely despair, concluding that his life’s work had amounted to nothing and made no lasting difference. The very forces he challenged have only strengthened their grip on our world so thoroughly that most people remain unaware any alternative exists.
I am not suggesting that people should avoid taking responsibility for themselves, or spend their lives simply complaining about external circumstances. I merely criticise how therapy has ignored our external reality. Any approach that focuses solely on helping people cope with ‘symptoms’—which are mostly uncomfortable feelings triggered by past or present contexts, often both—serves neither the individual nor society effectively. Such approaches mistake the natural human response to harmful conditions for individual pathology, treating the reaction rather than addressing its causes.
This shift from politically-engaged humanistic psychology to individualised symptom management hasn’t just changed the profession—it has fundamentally altered how people understand and respond to their distress about world events. By pathologising appropriate reactions to disturbing realities, contemporary therapy often intensifies the very helplessness people experience when facing global crises and authoritarian threats.
In a neoliberalist world, therapy that focuses on symptom-management makes perfect sense. If we assume—albeit with no scientific basis—that people’s psychological suffering results from an internal ‘malfunction’, we conveniently avoid changing anything about our society. We can continue to live in ruthless, fragmented communities and countries that neglect growth and focus solely on physical survival—not of everyone, mind you—but of the wealthy, privileged few.
There are not many therapists who are also activists. A colleague once rebuked me saying, “we are quiet people” when I suggested that as a professional peer group we needed to speak out about an issue. Most therapists would probably agree with my former colleague because they believe that we have no business commenting on social or political issues, or being activists. Whatever modality people practice, the expectation is that the focus would always be on the inside of people, to hell with the rest of the world. With the exception of the UK Palestine Mental Health Network, I know of no other activist network or organisation of therapists, and I know only a handful of therapists who are political activists. (If you know any other organisations, please let me know).
Imagine a CBT therapist telling a starving woman surviving in a tent in Gaza’s rubble, whose life and entire family were destroyed by Israel that she would feel better if she only changed her ‘faulty thinking’… or a psychoanalyst suggesting that her difficult feelings are a result of the fact that her parents were a bit too harsh or rigid. The medical model would suggest that her feelings are some kind of a malfunction, and that she needs to be medicated out of her mind, so she doesn’t feel so bad. By ‘bad’ I mean entirely appropriate feelings such as shock, grief, loss, anger, disappointment, betrayal. In what universe are these feelings a ‘malfunction’, given people’s lived reality in Gaza or in any context where people are mistreated? With the exception of truly disordered people, most individuals rarely ‘malfunction’—it is the world driven by disordered people that does.
Clients have always brought their political, social and environmental concerns to the therapy room, and my eyes do not glaze over when they want to discuss these issues. I do not try to convince my clients that their concerns are really a deflection from, or an avoidance of their ‘mother issues’. Clients repeatedly tell me they choose me because I express my views openly on therapy, society and politics, and because I stand up for Palestine. Clients need to feel safe and trust in the therapeutic relationship to benefit from therapy. Trust and safety between people are often built on shared values. From the early days of my practice I realised that therapy is more likely to succeed when clients’ and therapists’ values are reasonably compatible.
Transcending Helplessness & Powerlessness
What does all this have to do with helplessness and powerlessness? A great deal, I believe. Like all our feelings, helplessness is an appropriate limbic response to actual conditions, rather than a malfunction/pathology to be ‘fixed’. However, many therapy approaches individualise collective problems, creating a double burden—people feel powerless about external events, and at the same time are made to feel their distress is a personal failing rather than a natural and appropriate response to reality. This compounds the helplessness people might already be feeling in the face of sociopolitical events.
Real psychotherapy helps people grow, and when people begin to grow to their full potential, everything changes. This isn’t theoretical to me. I am privileged to witness this process in my work regularly. Well-developed people are not only more peaceful and robust internally, their intolerance of war, injustice, abuse, and all forms of unnecessary suffering inflicted by humans on other humans increases. As people grow, they become powerful agents of change, each working in their own sphere of influence to make the world better.
In a neoliberalist world, insisting on growing to our potential, and not just existing is a subversive political act. Healthy, robust people are a neoliberalist nightmare, because they are comfortable with their personal power and agency. When I say ‘healthy and robust’ I do not mean ‘rebellious‘. As Murray Bowen rightly argued, compliance and rebellion are both reactive. They are two sides of the same limbic coin, and both typically lead to behaviours based on the needs of self-preservation. Good development is neither a choice between rebellion against, or compliance with external authority, nor a balance between them. It is an entirely new and integrated position based on agency, principles, and real choice. Many people remain caught up at the bottom of the triangle their entire life, and believe that this is all there is.
Growing, and supporting others to grow, is the most powerful resistance there is to forces that wish us to return to an unspecified time in our history when things were allegedly ‘uncomplicated. ‘Back then’ we knew we were the ‘good guys’, and we needed a strong leader to save us from the ‘bad guys’. Without a strong leader, this nostalgic view suggests, we were like helpless and powerless children, and risked annihilation.
Our struggle is not between ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘Left’ or ‘Right’. It is between survivalism and growth—two fundamental orientations that shape both individual lives and collective societies. Survivalism is not inherently ‘bad’, and growth is not inherently ‘good’. They are both fundamental human needs, representing different aspects of our humanity.
Survivalism addresses our basic requirements for safety and continuation, while growth responds to our equally essential need for development and fulfilment. To be all we can be, both needs must be acknowledged, validated, and ultimately integrated. The survival-driven conflict inside each one of us and in humanity may be natural, but it need not remain permanent. There is another way—one that honours our need for security while creating space for the expansive possibilities of growth.
Survivalists believe that living means not dying, and are interested in doing only what is necessary to stay alive, e.g., ‘getting ahead’, amassing wealth, or accumulating power. According to survivalists, growth to our potential, living a fulfilling life, social justice, or inclusiveness are ‘luxuries’ we can’t afford when our life is in danger. The survivalist orientation becomes problematic when it dominates to the exclusion of our growth and development needs. Survivalists maintain a climate of permanent fear by highlighting either fictitious threats—such as immigrants or DEI ‘endangering’ civilisation—or preventable dangers created by politicians who prioritise competition and aggression over cooperation and sharing. What makes this approach so limiting is that it keeps individuals and societies locked in a state of perpetual anxiety, where the possibility of growth is perpetually deferred in service of an endless series of ‘emergencies’.
The survivalist worldview relies on individuals remaining at the bottom of the triangle, feeling helpless and powerless in the face of external forces or demands. If we allow ourselves to believe that the world is a dangerous place and we are powerless against it, the survivalists win. In other words, when people feel powerless and helpless it is because the survivalists who dominate the world want them to feel this way. Whether they do it consciously or not is irrelevant. (People with personality disorders who are overrepresented in places of power have no self-awareness). Either way, they promote themselves to powerless, frightened people as ‘strong leaders’ who will ‘fix everything’. Powerful people with agency have no need for a ‘strong leader’, and are not likely to be mindless followers of anything or anyone.
Feelings of powerlessness have both internal and external dimensions—they arise from real external conditions, but are processed through our individual psychological frameworks. What can we do when we feel helpless and powerless in the face of powerful forces that shape the world in their image, and impact on each one of us?
Powerlessness is one of the most devastating feelings that any mammal can experience. From our limbic brain’s perspective, feeling helpless and powerless, especially in uncertain situations, is a signal that we are in great danger. When we are powerless to help ourselves or those closest to us, we could die or get seriously hurt. The inability to save ourselves or others from harm because we lack power or agency is at the heart of psychological trauma. Being in a bad situation and feeling, or being objectively powerless to change it is the clinical and scientific definition of depression.
Our protective limbic system could cause us to rush into ‘doing something’, anything, just to eliminate uncertainty and powerlessness. Some people who rush to alleviate the discomfort of helplessness or powerlessness can fall into a CBT-esque approach such as, ‘just think positive!’, which I consider to be ‘toxic positivity’. The alternative is to collapse into fatalistic despair.
I don’t think anyone can, or should become completely comfortable with powerlessness, but if we want to grow and develop, we must learn to validate all our feelings, including helplessness. Feelings are not mysterious or strange. They are merely limbic information about whether we are safe or unsafe. Real psychotherapy helps us integrate all aspects of ourselves in order to become fully what we are. An integrated approach creates space for meaningful engagement with difficult emotions within their proper context, which inevitably leads to clarity and agency.
When circumstances render us powerless, the one thing we always have power over is our own development, our own growth and integration. Validating our feelings internally changes our brain in the direction of growth, and no despot can stop us doing it. The more integrated we are, the more grounded and well-regulated we become. We can look at the world and experience feelings in response to it, but without becoming destabilised or paralysed by what we feel.
Investing in our own development is not a recipe for selfishness. In fact it is quite the opposite. People who are well developed do not succumb to fear or social pressure easily. They can see things more clearly and with perspective. They are also capable of collaborating with others and sustaining activism without burning out for as long as activism is necessary. Meeting our own growth and development needs, and cooperating with others are both powerful forms of resistance. They offer a different paradigm, and demonstrate a way of being that is different to the impoverished and anxious way of life based on individualism, tribalism, and survivalism peddled by regressive movements.
The relationship between inner development and outer action is not merely theoretical. When we invest in our own integration, we develop a more grounded capacity to engage with political realities. Integrated people can hold the tension between acknowledging harsh realities and maintaining a vision for change. They can absorb disturbing information without becoming overwhelmed by it. Most importantly, they can remain engaged over the long term, avoiding both the burnout that comes from reactive activism, and the numbness that results from disengagement. This sustained, grounded engagement is precisely what effective political action requires in our complex world—not sporadic bursts of outrage or retreat into hopelessness, but a consistent presence that remains engaged even when change is slow or resistance is fierce.
How can this integrative approach be translated into society? One obvious path is to stop fighting. We need to consider that those who push for authoritarianism, sectarianism, oppressive religion, racism, tribalism and exclusion are doing what they do out of fear. I am not naive. I know how dangerous frightened, insecure people can be and how much harm they can cause, but I also know what it’s like to be afraid, and I can empathise. I don’t have to agree with other people’s opinions to empathise with their fear.
Many try to suppress their own fears and uncomfortable survivalist feelings in the hope of finding inner peace. But just as rejecting parts of ourselves doesn’t work in individual psychology, rejecting or fighting against those driven by fear doesn’t create societal integration. The political pendulum we experience is simply the collective expression of the bottom of the triangle—swinging between compliance and rebellion without finding integration.
If we want to transform our world, we must work toward integration at both personal and collective levels. This begins with each of us developing the capacity to hold and validate all aspects of our experience—including the helplessness and powerlessness we inevitably feel in the face of overwhelming global events. Rather than pathologising these feelings or rushing to eliminate them, we can recognise them as natural emotions that contain important information.
When we develop this internal capacity for integration, we become more effective agents of change in our external world. We can engage from a place of groundedness rather than reactivity. We can sustain our commitment to justice without burning out. And perhaps most importantly, we can model an alternative to the survivalist paradigm—demonstrating through our very presence and the way we interact with others that growth, connection, and integration offer a more fulfilling and sustainable way of being in the world.
The path forward isn’t about overpowering those who disagree with us, nor is it about surrendering to despair in the face of global challenges. It’s about the quietly powerful revolutionary act of growing into our full potential and helping others do the same—creating spaces where both security and development are possible, where both fear and a new vision can be honestly acknowledged, and where the false choice between survivalism and growth gives way to a more integrated way of being human together. I don’t have a plan, but I have reasons to believe that what works in my therapy room can also work in wider society. It just requires us to start thinking differently about our individual role in society and the world in general.
Carl Rogers created Person-centred therapy, a modality, or approach to psychotherapy that is based on the principles of humanistic psychology. PC is often taught badly, for example, teaching therapists to sit silently and say nothing to clients. It has also not been updated to align it with what we now know about neuroscience and about how people change. While PC therapy is based on a holistic view of human beings, and is focused on growth and development rather than on ‘fixing’, it has limited effectiveness. To change our psychology, we need to change our brain. PC therapy, unfortunately, does not work because therapists cannot change the brains of adult clients directly. Talking to a therapist in an accepting, supportive, non-judgmental and validating environment is fundamental to clients feeling safe with therapists, but it does not in itself lead to change. Rogers thought it did, but clients’ testimonies suggest otherwise. I am a strong believer that if Rogers lived now, he would revise his approach to include new knowledge that has been developed within the framework of Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB).
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Thank you so much for reading my work!
Thanks for making such an important point, Avigail.
Excellent article and I’m sure most people recognise the dilemma of sporadic engagement and withdrawal from events which evidence how vile the world can be when sociopaths and narcissists take power. I was also impressed by the clarity of analysis concerning the uselessness of what masquerades as psychotherapy these days. Well said again Avigail👍💚