Why You Might Have Been Raised to Be Helpless.
How We are Taught to Surrender Before Trying, and How to Change.

A mental cycle forms when you become trapped in distress: You become convinced that your stressful situation is interminable.
It makes you feel helpless—and eventually, you start believing you are helpless, and it manifests.
When people believe they are helpless, they often turn down opportunities to improve their situations or even resist ways to learn to help themselves because their feelings of helplessness are so ingrained.
They’ve become resigned to living in perpetual stress and anxiety that has led them to this place. Believe it or not, this is an actual condition called “Learned helplessness,” a developed trait identified in 1967 by psychologists Martin E. P. Seligman and Steven F. Maier.
For the first 25 years of my life, I believed I had no control over my emotions. I felt held hostage by my panic disorder and believed everything I did would result in suffering tremendous emotional consequences.
Because the usual routines of childhood made me panic, they were removed from my life: My mother got me out of sleepovers; she picked me up halfway through a weekend at my father’s when I called begging to return and canceled events for invitations I’d accepted far in advance when I was feeling brave.
The “solution” was to have someone remove the conditions that made me feel helpless. Because—I was convinced—it was only when the path was free of challenges that I’d be free to truly live.
Despite knowing that the path would never be entirely clear, I still held onto the hope that I might one day arrive at that fantastical stretch of existence in which I had no challenges and could live with a freedom no one in the world has ever before lived.
When, at 25, I was finally diagnosed with panic disorder, I realized that the only way to liberate myself from confinement was to face the fact that I was imprisoning myself. I needed to find a way out.
That’s when I finally understood that the obstacles WERE the path and that having them removed for me had confined me to a prison of co-dependence. But to break free, I had to face my fears and learn to tolerate the obstacles, and not run from adversity.
I grew up learning to surrender before trying, and while I easily could have grown into an adult who continued on that path, I didn’t want that. So I chose to live in accordance with my true nature, reclaiming the part of myself that is resourceful and risk-taking, which has been the work of my life.
Because I’ve spent decades facing my fears and working to become self-reliant, I can get incredibly frustrated when I see an adult lose all ability to do something as simple and mundane as turning off a lamp in someone else’s house. Before they even look for the switch, they simply give up and rely on others to do what they believe they can’t.
But I know it’s even worse for the person who feels powerless. It’s a type of depressed state that convinces you there is no way out.
Only, there is a way out. There is always a way out.
According to Martin Seligman in his book Learned Optimism, learned helplessness often originates in childhood, usually under the guidance of neglectful or unresponsive caregivers.
Either the child needs help, and no one comes to their aid, so they are left unable to control their situation and simply accept it, or they are not taught how to confront difficult situations and feel they must always rely on someone else.
This very quickly fosters a co-dependent style of relating.
In children, it can manifest as a lack of effort, low self-esteem, failure to ask for help, poor motivation, passivity, and procrastination.
In school, children who suffer from learned helplessness are afraid to try because they believe they are doomed to fail. They won’t challenge themselves to read more complex material and instead read what they read when they were younger because they know they will understand the material. (This is what I was like as a kid.)
Conversely, they may try incredibly hard but still do poorly and become resigned to the idea that they will never succeed, so they give up.
It makes sense then that learned helplessness can, and often does, results in anxiety, depression, or both. When you believe that nothing you do will ever change the outcome of an event, people often think there’s no use in trying.
According to Dr. Seligman, when we believe that we have no control over what happens to us, we are convinced that we’re helpless, and when we see ourselves in a certain light, we behave and act accordingly.
Some people learn to be helpless because that’s what’s been modeled to them by their caregivers; others learn it through intentional conditioning—like in a cult—or based on their perception that they have no choice and that lack of control becomes their dominant narrative.
When you feel you have no control over the events around you, it’s quite easy to lose motivation. This lack of motivation can set in so deeply that even with opportunities to change their circumstance, people will not take action.
No one is born to believe that they lack control over what happens to them or that failure is inevitable, so what’s the point of even trying? Even a 6-month-old will bat away food that they don’t want.
The helplessness I’m writing about is learned behavior. Ironically, it’s when we buy into our learned helplessness as a condition that cognitive blocks prevent us from learning.
When you are conditioned young, you grow into the beliefs you’re raised upon. Take the story of elephants and the rope that binds them. When they are very young, elephants are secured to a pole with a thin rope, so they won’t escape.
The rope is too strong for their tiny little leg, and no matter how hard they try to wrest themselves off the pole, they can’t. Sooner or later, they give up.
As they grow, they become larger and more robust than the thin rope that secures them, and with just a bit of effort, they’d quickly free themselves, but they’ve already learned that they can’t escape, so they no longer try.

Original art for How to Live by Edwina White
This is how minds are set and how people are brainwashed. People are taught to believe that what holds us in place is stronger than the thing it’s holding (in this case, us).
We must learn how to break this mindset to prove that we can free ourselves from the thin rope securing us to our maladaptive beliefs that we’re incapable.
As he tells the story in his book Learned Optimism, when Martin Seligman was 21 years old, and just starting graduate school for experimental psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, he walked into the lab of Richard Solomon, the man with whom he was eager to study.
When he arrived, the other graduate students were distressed. There was something wrong with the dogs they were using for experiments. After pre-conditioning them with minor jolts and high-pitched tones, trying to get them to associate the noise with pain, they transferred the dogs into a different environment: a box with two chambers.
The dogs continued to receive shocks in the chamber, but they could easily escape over a very low barrier to a second chamber. They didn’t; the dogs simply laid on the jolt side, whimpering. They had given up before even trying.
The graduate students were up in arms. Instead of seeing what young Marty saw, they could only see that something was wrong with the dogs, and the experiment they meant to conduct could not continue.
No one is born with the belief that they lack control over what happens to them, or that failure is inevitable so what’s the point of even trying. Even a 6-month-old will bat away food that they don’t want. The helplessness I’m writing about is learned behavior. Ironically, it’s when we buy into our learned helplessness as a condition that cognitive blocks prevent us from learning.
But what Marty saw was that the experiment had just begun.
The dogs had learned to be helpless to the shocks. But now he was in a real dilemma. An animal lover (like me), Seligman wanted to study the helplessness that the dogs had inadvertently learned, but that would mean continuing to cause innocent dogs pain.
After speaking with a mentor and reflecting, he decided that short-term pain would prevent longer-term pain, making the experiment worth it. And so, with another student named Steven Meier, they conducted experiments on dogs to determine whether their helplessness was learned.
The only way I can write about this experiment as a dog lover is to swap out dogs for something inanimate, like a Beanie Baby.
THE EXPERIMENT
Group 1 was the control group. The Beanie Babies were placed in harnesses for a specific period of time and then released.
Group 2 heard a bell and then were given an electric shock that could be stopped if they pressed a lever.
Group 3 also heard a bell and were shocked, just like the second group, only the lever they were given had no impact on stopping the shocks they received.
Seligman then put the Beanie Babies into that same two-chamber box from the experiment done by the first group of graduate students.
The Beanie Babies from the first two groups learned to jump over the barrier and away from the shocks pretty quickly. But the Beanie Babies in the third group did not. They surrendered to the pain because they had already been conditioned that they were powerless to prevent it.
Despite having the ability and the recourse to jump to safety, they didn’t even challenge the situation they were in.
They made no effort to help themselves.
Seligman had to physically lift the Beanie Babies over to the other side to show them how to escape. But it didn’t take. He had to repeat this over and over. It took an average of 25 attempts before the Beanie Babies believed they could escape on their own.
The Beanie Babies suffered a traumatic event, and after their persistent efforts to escape from trauma failed, they succumbed to the trauma and the pain.
This same characteristic can be found in people. Take dieters who often give up after they “cheat” and gain weight. Smokers who try to quit and fail assume they are just not capable of not smoking, and so they give in, continuing to smoke despite knowing it might lead to serious health problems and possibly death.
What Seligman discovered from all of his studies was that people who suffer from learned helplessness are pessimists, and those who don’t are optimists.
A pessimist is a person who sees a setback as something endless that undermines everything. An optimist, however, sees setbacks as temporary. Their default is to accept the challenge and try harder.
A pessimist’s default is to take setbacks personally and surrender to the despair of it all, because the core of pessimism is helplessness. People with pessimistic tendencies seem to turn minor setbacks into major disasters.
One way they do this is by converting their innocence to guilt.
People suffer from two types of helplessness: universal and personal. Universal helplessness is when a person believes that there is nothing that anyone can do to resolve the situation she is in, while personal helplessness is when a person believes that others could probably find a solution to their despair but that they are not one of those people. (Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978.)
Both types of helplessness can lead to a state of depression, but the extent of that depression may differ. Those who feel universally helpless tend to find external reasons for their problems and their inability to solve them, while those who feel personally helpless tend to find internal reasons.
In addition, those who feel personally helpless are more likely to suffer from low self-esteem, believing others are better equipped to solve their problems.
A pessimist would read all this and give up. What’s even the point? But the pessimist cannot see what the optimist can, which is that while pessimism seems inescapable, it is not.
Pessimists CAN learn to become optimists by developing a new set of cognitive skills.
There are certain ways of thinking that can elevate, or devalue, our life. We can learn to become better at thinking, just as we learned to become bad at it. Humans can choose how they think.
Before I take you through this, I invite you to notice how this system is applicable to depression and anxiety. If we can learn how to pull ourselves out of learned helplessness, we can also learn to pull ourselves out of depression and anxiety. Baby steps.
THE SOLUTION
Just as you can learn helplessness, you can also learn optimism. There are myriad ways to challenge learned helplessness, but because we only have so much time, I will offer just a couple, with links to more for continued reading at the bottom.
The first is my invented methods, and those that follow are from psychologist Dr. Martin Seligman.
MINE
Do you notice that you’re saying to yourself, “I can’t”? or “She might be able to do that, but I could never figure it out”? Is there an implication of permanence to your feeling of helplessness?
Does what you say about yourself sound like an impenetrable, unchangeable fact? If you say, “I can’t,” that’s a permanent statement.
If you’re saying, “At the moment, I’m not sure I can figure this out,” that is more temporary.
When we are rigid, we can’t make changes.
When we are flexible, we can. Permanent states = rigidity. Temporary states = flexibility.
In Spanish, there are two ways of saying “I am.” One way, “Soy” indicates a permanent state. For instance “I am five feet tall” is a permanent state. The other, “Estoy,” indicates a temporary state: “I am standing on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 9th street.” When we confuse the two and say, “For the time being, I am five feet tall.” Or, “For the rest of my life, I am standing on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 9th Street,” it sounds, well, ridiculous.
I want you to pay attention to how you approach challenges. When you think, “I can’t,” ask yourself, “Never? Can you never ever, for the rest of your life, not even for one second, go to a dinner party?” Every time you Soy, I want you to Estoy.
SELIGMAN
Seligman’s method is based on Albert Ellis’s ABC method called the “ABC’s.”.
A is for adversity, or the situation or event causing distress.
B is for belief, and it’s our explanation or interpretation for why the situation occurred.
C is the consequence, or the feelings and behavior that our beliefs cause.
To use this model, we:
A. record the event as objectively as we can. Answer who, what, where, when?
B. record your thoughts about the event. Why do you think this happened? What are your beliefs about the situation? How are we interpreting the adverse event?
C. Record your feelings and what you did.
HERE’S ARE TWO (FICTITIOUS) EXAMPLES:
ONE
Adversity: I left a message for Rachel on Sunday. It’s now Wednesday, and she hasn’t called or texted me back.
Belief: If she’s mad at me because of something I did, she should be mature and tell me. The silent treatment is so juvenile and not the way I operate. I think it’s kind of abusive and manipulative.
She’s so manipulative. Maybe I didn’t ask her about her mother, who has dementia, or her brother going through a divorce, but she didn’t ask me anything about the things my family members are going through. She’s such a jackass. I don’t even know if I like her anymore.
Maybe this is for the best.
Consequence: Just talked to Rachel and I feel really stupid. It was her tenth anniversary with Justin and he surprised her by taking her to Costa Rica and insisted on a “no phones” policy. She had the best time and seems really refreshed. She wasn’t mad at me at all. I really blew that one out of proportion.
The next time I think someone is mad at me, I’m just going to ask them.
TWO
Adversity: My doctor told me I had to lose 30 pounds, so I joined a gym. But when I finally got myself there, everyone looked practically photoshopped with muscles.
Belief: I am so disgusting. If I reveal my body to these people, they’ll stop working out and laugh, whisper, judge, or mock me. I have no right being here. I should just hire a personal trainer and work out at home so no one has to see me and be repulsed.
Consequence: I couldn’t do it. I pretended I was just there to look at the swimming pool, didn’t take off my coat, and ran as fast as I could back to my car.
Seligman suggests keeping track of your ABCs and seeing, in writing, what you actually believe. You may not realize how pessimistic your thinking is until you read it. Then, try to find the link between your belief and the consequences. Did your pessimism always influence the outcome? Can you see how another style of thinking could have changed the outcome?
The longer you keep track of your style of thinking, the more aware you’ll become of your perpetual inner dialogue. You’ll see how you think in permanent statements, “He always,” “She never…”
Once you become aware of your pessimistic beliefs, it’s time to deal with them. One such way (my favorite) is looking for Evidence.
EVIDENCE + ALTERNATIVES
While Seligman proposes ideas about distraction and disputing our beliefs, which are valid and wise, I think jumping straight to evidence and reality (which is my addition) gets you where you want to be faster.
After making your ABC list, have a look at your Belief, and ask if it’s true? What evidence do you have to back up your claims?
Take one of my fictitious examples:
Belief: I am so disgusting. If I reveal my body to these people, they’ll stop working out and laugh at me, whisper, judge, or mock me. I have no right being here. I should just hire a personal trainer and work out at home so no one has to see me and be repulsed.
Evidence: What evidence do I have that I am objectively disgusting? None. So far, it’s just subjective. I also have no evidence that anyone will laugh, whisper, mock, or judge me. I could even test it out by taking off my jacket. And the gym is for everyone—in fact, the point of the gym is to get in shape, so it IS for people who are out of shape as much as it is for people who are IN shape.
So, I DO have a right to be here. It was probably more challenging for me to get here than for them.
Now, let’s do it again and ask about the reality of the situation. Specifically, we want to ask whether this belief is based in fact. When we’ve had this exact same fear, or a fear close to this one, what was the outcome? Did it match the fear? What was the reality?
Belief: I am so disgusting. If I reveal my body to these people, they’ll stop working out and laugh at me, whisper, judge, or mock me. I have no right being here. I should just hire a personal trainer and work out at home so no one has to see me and be repulsed.
Reality: Have I ever been in a situation where I’ve been mocked, judged, laughed at, or told I had no right to be in a gym before? No. Have I ever been in any situation where that has occurred? No, I have not. This seems to be an unfounded fear that I’ve had in the past, with no evidence to support it.
OUTCOME.
The goal to be different must outweigh the resigned nature of staying the same. One must believe that shifting their behavior will influence the outcome. Because it will.
If you don’t believe that what you do will have any effect, then you will be unmotivated to make any changes. This is essentially the thinking behind Carol Dweck’s research on the growth vs. fixed mindset and resilience, which finds people with growth mindsets and optimistic points of view can adapt when faced with adversity.
Resilience, growth mindsets, and optimism can all be learned.
Although Seligman’s name was synonymous with learned helplessness for many years, he knew he had a lot more to offer the world. His work on the subject led him to wonder what other mindsets and perspectives can be learned and whether people could develop positive traits instead of developing feelings of helplessness.
Seligman’s research led him to create the model of learned optimism. He found that, through resilience training, people can learn to develop a more optimistic perspective. This ability has been observed in children, teachers, members of the military, and more (Seligman, 2011).
In studies Seligman conducted later in his career, he found that optimists are healthier, do better in school and at work, and don’t suffer the usual ills of middle-aged setbacks—plus they usually live longer.
If that isn’t incentive enough to work hard on shaking your learned helplessness habit, then I surrender.
And you? Do you have anyone in your life with Learned Helplessness? How do you deal with it?
Let me know in the comments!
Thank you for reading.
Until next week, I am…

Amanda
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