Bridget is a single mother, suffering in the midst of the pandemic. She feels overwhelmed by the weight of homeschooling her children while working from home at half her former wages. In addition to the necessities of shopping, cooking, cleaning and caregiving, she can’t stop thinking of how she dropped out of college, about the great job she lost, and how her marriage fell apart. After a sleepless night, her life seems to her like a litany of failures with no way out of the gloom. She worries she’s reached the breaking point, yet can’t muster the motivation to call her mother or best friend for support. She imagines they’re tired of her complaints and will just offer unwanted advice. She emails her ex to pick up the kids and crawls back under the covers, trapped and alone.
Many of us have felt something akin to Bridget’s emotional paralysis. You may have experienced a sense of futility that temporarily sapped your motivation. Often it resolves on its own. However, for some, “learned helplessness” becomes a permanent frame of mind, often associated with PTSD and clinical depression. People stuck in a situation, unable to change tracks.
The Oxford dictionary defines “learned helplessness” as “a condition in which a person suffers from a sense of powerlessness, arising from a traumatic event or persistent failure to succeed and becomes unable or unwilling to avoid subsequent encounters, even if they are escapable”. The term was coined by Martin Seligman in 1967 after observing the behavior of dogs who lacked the initiative to escape following repeated exposure to electrical shock, despite being offered the opportunity.
Some of my clients express feeling this way in their family or work life. These are intelligent, well-intentioned individuals who may have felt overwhelmed by divorce, health issues, job-loss or stress at work. They are unable to visualize steps to improve their situation. There is no issue of blame here. Given a world in which external forces impose relentless, unwanted pressures beyond their control, the temptation to believe their situation to be hopeless is entirely understandable. But the sense of hopelessness mires them deeper. It blinds them from seeing the one thing they can control, which is their response.
“Learned optimism” is the answer, and Seligman has emerged as a world expert in the field. Along with other positive psychologists such as Kelly McGonigal, (see her TED talk and book: The Upside of Stress) a powerful movement has emerged making a convincing case that learned helplessness can be overcome, and that an attitude of balanced, realistic optimism can, with effort, be acquired.
Bridget may not be able to transform the circumstances that gave rise to her distress, but she can energize and transform her response. By challenging her automatic thoughts, by expressing her needs in honest, vulnerable conversations and by connecting with others she can shift the lens through which she sees herself and her world.
In next month’s blog I’ll present a more detailed description of practical steps to overcome learned helplessness, and not only to survive, but to grow stronger in response to unwanted stress.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mike MacConnell, founder of Reflective Mediation, is an accredited family mediator, conflict coach, educator and author. He is the highest-ranked mediator on Google in the greater Toronto area, with over 180 5-star reviews. To book your free consultation click here.
