In other words, she starts to see herself as powerless and dependent, as someone who relies on others, particularly the men who call her that, to take care of her.

and which, being only light, was more alarming than a dozen ghosts as he was powerless to make out what it meant or would be at,

She no longer talks to her family. "One feels so powerless.

So the system wants you to feel mostly powerless, because they have power, you don't.

but over the last several decades has seen his world upended by economic and cultural and technological change and feels powerless to stop it.

One can imagine autocrats who feathered their nests and jailed or killed only those who directly attempted to usurp their privileges, while allowing their powerless subjects to complain all they want.

and they feel very overwhelmed, very powerless, except this little hummingbird.

It's just that for us, home was a place of grief and persecution. It's easy enough to see why children put up with poor treatment. They're born radically powerless. They can't run away. They are utterly at the mercy of others. They can't even think especially straight. What they must do, above all else, is adapt. Which in practice means learning to put up with poor treatment. They have to develop an advanced skill at not noticing quite how awful things are, an expertise at being unfazed by cruelty and neglect. Children in deprived circumstances tend to be geniuses at looking away, disassociating and making light of things. Of course, it might not be perfect that their father screams at them constantly, but there are some interesting shows on television and there's a really fascinating bit of the garden to explore in the morning. You can climb up the big tree and imagine it's a little house. And of course, ideally their mother wouldn't be so mocking and disloyal. But that's just the way things are, neither more or less sad than the fact it's often raining and there's a lot of homework to do. In any case, the bad treatment almost certainly has to do with something that they, the child, have done wrong. Badly treated children tend to take a compulsively generous view of those who injure them. Obviously, they aren't nasty on purpose. That would make no sense. Clearly, their ostensible brutality has sound explanations. It must be because they, the child, is in the wrong. That's why they're being neglected. That's why they've been declared fools. That's why they're being bullied. It's a great deal easier to believe that the parent is tough, yet fundamentally right, rather than gratuitously callous and unjustifiably hostile. In other words, what a bad childhood trains us to do, above all else, is to indulge meanness. The muscle that normally functions to repel attacks has had to be starved and has atrophied. In order to survive, we had to lose the ability to work out what was good and bad for us, lest we discover that we spent 18 years in the company of fiends. What this means for our futures is that we will be extremely poor at discerning when the partners we let into our lives cross the border into selfishness and malevolence. We'll continue under a narcoleptic command not to notice that we're being robbed and deceived. We'll be as blind to the blows now as we were then. For a long time, it simply won't occur to us to wonder why we've ended up paying for everything for the partner, or why they're unreliable in their promises, or constantly prioritise their friends over us, or are angrily defensive whenever we raise a complaint. We will simply, as we had to early on, fall into line and invent elaborate explanations for their behaviour. They're good, but they're tired. They're durable, but under pressure at work. They're fierce, but compensating for their childhood traumas, for which we have a lot of sympathy. Anything other than the more straightforward conclusion, we've fallen in with unconcerned egoists. We shouldn't compound our disloyalty towards ourselves by feeling, on top of everything else, ashamed for our tolerance. It isn't weakness, it's a survival strategy from childhood that served a very sensible purpose then but is liable to be ruining our lives now. To wake ourselves up, we need to consider our choices as if someone else had made them. We might wonder what we would advise a friend to do if they were in our situation. And through such a lens, we might start to perceive that the treatment we're facing isn't, as we've long thought, a sign of our partner's depth or complexity, but in the end, something much more humble, evidence that we need to get away. But this will be only a momentary liberation until we can understand the more fundamental issue, that the muscle most people use to eject poison has withered because of a distinctive history. We need to reverse the direction of our psychological fate. Our early suffering should not condemn us to yet more pain. It is what gives us an especially powerful claim on original sources of kindness, tenderness and calm.

And you are not powerless.

and which, being only light, was more alarming than a dozen ghosts, as he was powerless to make out what it meant or would be at,