What you say is true about learned helplessness and actual helplessness. However you have to add in the time of the event. It is brutally true that as a child being forced to face actual abuse that you are in FACT helpless. But you are not forever helpless or hopeless. It is true that we have NO CHOICE until we install the ability to chose. When we were six years old we could not drive a car. We grow into an adult and can in fact now drive a car and this applies to many things we could not do as a child. When we learn to drive a car then we have a choice to drive or not. It is a process of learning that empowers us to have a choice. Inside us we have a wide range of feelings available. Love or hate and gratitude or joy. This is a big list of our emotional range. None of our emotions need to be tied to the outside at all. We can chose to feel what we wish or want. This include feeling empowered and self assured or feeling victorious and powerful . We never feel our feeling outside our skin. And we can control or chose what we feel and when we feel it. This is a power we all have that by trauma we were conditioned to deny in favor of being forced to feel the victim and the powerlessness as a child. We are responsible for only what we feel and do and can not take responsibility for what events unfold in the world. We can control and guide our reaction to what is being done out in the world. I promote ranting and raging at the unfairness, judgment and cruelty of this world as an armor to keep from being traumatized again. The opposite of being a victim.
Watch my videos and tell me what you feel of the process.