helpless
The uncertainty heightens the sense of helplessness.
People who experience identity theft report a sense of powerlessness or helplessness.
Her story was all about one woman's feelings of frustration and helplessness.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Weakness and vulnerability
Achilles heel
asthenia
at a low ebbidiom
atonic
atony
fragile
fragility
frail
glass jaw
helpless
shakiness
shaky
sitting duck
sitting target
soft target
weakling
weakly
weakness
weedy
wetly

Examples of helplessness

helplessness
The caregivers of the cancer patients reported feelings of confusion and helplessness.
These partners viewed the person's ' dysfunctional ' behaviours as indicating helplessness and confusion rather than seeing them as presentational cues to the person's preferred persona.
By concentrating care on the physical body, the warehousing model's view of residents' helplessness pervaded their whole life and could destroy the person.
The loss of mobility is the worst experience for the ageing body as it is an ominous signifier of helplessness and dependency.
Effects on prepulse inhibition or learned helplessness assist in predicting antipsychotic and antidepressant qualities, respectively.
This in turn will make the patients feel less anxious, less depressed and reduce the common feelings of helplessness that often accompanies cancer patients.
The evolution of prolonged helplessness in hominid children opened the way for an alternative male reproductive strategy.
The perceived lack of power and control over the lives of the respondents led to feelings of helplessness and depression.
From tapes of the puzzle task, children were rated on behaviors presumed to reflect helplessness: intensity of work on solving puzzles, help-seeking behaviors, and persistence.
All but one of the women felt initial indecision about what to do and consequent depression over this helplessness.
Other times, action was mainly done f or the purpose of distraction or to counteract a sense of helplessness.
All these feelings of shock, hurt, helplessness and disappointment that have been explored antenatally are often magnified at the birth of an undiagnosed cleft baby.
These habits would then further augment social appraisals of inefficacy or helplessness.
Emotional uninvolvement, along with the helplessness, irritability, and hostility often associated with depression are likely to interfere with the parenting function.
In the context of present-day life, educator and educated face with equal helplessness the existential questions to be answered.
See all examples of helplessness
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.