Have you ever had the feeling that something did not depend on you, and over time, have you seen how you could change the situation? Or, have you settled into passivity, powerlessness, and have been unable to “make a move”, thinking that you yourself could not change your circumstances?
It is clear that there are things that are beyond our control, and learning to identify them can benefit us. But there are others that do depend on us; when we feel that we cannot do anything to change them, and we submerge ourselves in passivity, in “doing nothing”, then we are suffering from the so-called learned helplessness.
This phenomenon is at the base of disorders such as depression (which make it chronic), or in cases of women who have suffered gender violence, for example, who “believe” -wrongly- that they cannot do anything to get out of their situation. They believe it because their brain has integrated that idea, through experience (for example, trying to ask for help and not getting it).
And that makes them stay in the aversive situation, suffering and with the feeling that they cannot escape from there. But why do we develop helplessness? How was this phenomenon discovered? How can we get over it? What is it, what are its causes and its main characteristics? We tell you in this article
Learned helplessness: what is it?
Learned helplessness is that condition in which people (or animals) can find ourselves when we become inhibited in aversive or painful situations; We also arrive at it when the actions that we have used to avoid these situations have been insufficient or have had no direct effect.
When we suffer this helplessness, what we really suffer is a great passivity, to which is added the -irrational- belief that nothing depends on us, and that we can do nothing to change our current situation.
Causes and characteristics of learned helplessness
- How did we get to this state? We have already advanced some of its causes; Generally, learned helplessness arises when we have verified that the actions carried out to change (normally, improve) our situation have been useless. In a way, our brain integrates the following idea: “since what I do is useless, I stop doing anything”.
- People who have been exposed to punishment or annoying, aversive or painful situations that seem arbitrary, random or unavoidable events, end up developing learned helplessness. This helplessness translates into a feeling of impotence and the impossibility of improving current circumstances.
- On the other hand, it is important to know that there are people who experience the same traumatic situation and that some of them develop helplessness, and others do not. This also depends on the characteristics of each one, their coping resources, their personality, their circumstances, etc.
- In this sense, Bernard Weiner, an American social psychologist, was the first to talk about the influence exerted by the interpretation and perception that each person has regarding the event in question; that is, how we interpret and perceive what happens to us influences the subsequent development (or non-development) of learned helplessness, and also how we deal with it.
- In addition, as we said in the introduction, learned helplessness appears in disorders such as depression, especially as a maintaining factor. “Since I can’t change my situation, I don’t do anything to change it; I don’t invest resources in it.” And in that passivity the person settles; and this passivity feeds the depressive symptoms, which are maintained, become chronic over time and even increase in intensity.
Origin of learned helplessness and early research: Martin Seligman
- Martin Seligman is an American psychologist and writer who was the first to conceptualize and investigate the phenomenon of learned helplessness. He did it with Overmaier; both raised the following question: why an animal or a person who suffers, in their own flesh, adverse and painful conditions, does not do anything to leave their situation?
- This question was posed to them as a result of their discoveries in 1965: Investigating with dogs. The researchers designed a variant of Pavlov’s famous experiment for the study of classical conditioning (a type of learning). What they did was the following: they used two dogs inside a cage; They gave them electric shocks for no apparent reason. One of the dogs had the possibility of cutting the current through a blow with the muzzle, but the other did not.
- The first dog remained alert and cut off the power, but the second lived scared and nervous, and ended up falling into depression. The attitude of this second dog was one of complete defenselessness; when the experimental conditions changed, that is, when he had the possibility to turn off the current, he simply did not. He had developed learned helplessness.
- This experiment, which is actually cruel and would present many detractors today, allows us to understand the phenomenon of learned helplessness. The dog, like people, had learned that he “couldn’t do anything to change his situation,” even though he could do something to change it. What the second dog had actually learned was that electric shocks occurred randomly, were unavoidable, and therefore did not depend on his own behavior.
- Later, other researchers, Watson and Raymen, studied this phenomenon no longer with dogs, but with human beings.
How to overcome learned helplessness
- How to overcome learned helplessness? The first thing that we should not do, if we know someone who is manifesting this symptom, is to try to tell the person what to do. So you don’t help him. Because surely, that person already knows what he has to do, but due to his condition, he finds himself unable to do it. Nor should you tell him what to think, let alone what to feel.
- Keep in mind that the person with learned helplessness does not feel bad just because, or because they want to, but because their mind has developed dysfunctional schemes that prevent them from changing their situation (or feeling that they can change it).
- In these cases, if you are the one who suffers from learned helplessness, it is best to start reviewing your mental schemes, your behavioral patterns, your emotions. Identify what happened to you and draw up a plan to get out of your situation. Evaluate pros and cons, available resources, chances of success… and put small behavioral experiments to the test.
- Try small “things” that help you start to get out of that situation that causes you so much discomfort.
Psychological Therapy
However, if you feel that you cannot do it alone, it is best to ask for psychological help. Psychological therapy, specifically cognitive therapy, will help you: modify dysfunctional thoughts, perform behavioral experiments that allow you to become aware that you are capable of changing certain situations, work on cognitive distortions that prevent you from interpreting reality realistically, etc.
Does everything depend on us?
- It is clear that, in life, we will encounter situations and realities that do not depend on us, and that is fine; things that we cannot change and that, therefore, we must accept.
- Acceptance is key in these cases, and understanding this brings us closer to happiness and away from the anxiety that we often develop as a result of this uncertainty, of this inability to understand that not everything depends on us.
- “We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not release, it oppresses”
-Carl Gustav Jung- - However, learned helplessness has nothing to do with this; This phenomenon refers to that passivity in which our brain (and our body) settles in the face of things that we can change. But remember, learned helplessness can be worked on in therapy. Ask for help if you need it: you deserve it!