on limits

There is a personal discovery (by personal I mean that each of us makes it for themselves - if at all) which appeared independently, in a plethora of sources (like the stanford prison experiment or this movie)

That idea is that limits are not real.

I know what could be said: What Dreams May Come (and all the others for that matter) was just a movie, not some universal truth.

But this argument is not necessarily relevant, because those things (I'm talking here mainly about the movie) expresses someone's ideas about the way things are.
These ideas could be more or less true. Regarding the main points, I strongly believe they are.

I see it like this:
When someone wants to - say - torment you, what he has to do, is convince you first that he (or she) has the power to do it. That, what you go through, what you experience, depends on them.

I'd like to say that in fact it depends on you (and I believe it ultimately does) but for now I'll just say that the truth is somewhere in between: while they may control what you go through on an external level, they cannot decide how you feel about what you are going through.

They cannot decide, that is, that you should feel - for example - miserable. Only you can do that.

They cannot decide you should loose hope; Only you can do that also. Or that you are a victim. In fact, I strongly believe that there are no victims.

This (all this separation between what you go through and what you perceive from it) is the same, whenever you're in a situation you don't like. It is the same when you feel that something is pressuring you: it's up to you how you feel about it!

I'm not talking here about denying the facts!
When it is clear to you that you cannot do something (or that it won't happen the way you want it to), then there's no use denying that.

Denial is not actually going to make things change around you.

But even when you see no choice in your external circumstance, there's ALWAYS a choice in how you feel about it.

And this is all it takes for the world to take notice. And when the world takes notice, the world changes.

Thus, in a roundabout way, you're never powerless. It's just a matter or perspective.