Learned Helplessness
Learned helplessness is behavior exhibited by an individual after enduring repeated negative re-enforcement beyond their control. It is caused by their acceptance of their powerlessness in a situation where the punishment is worse than the fight. Over time, this “giving up” becomes a state of learned helplessness and affects behavioral and cognitive feelings, emotions, and attitudes all at the same time.
Now conditioned to follow the “rules” or behaviors presented by her “master” she is “broken” much like a horse trainer breaking a horse or a dog trainer manipulating their canine students to respond to the bell. This master may be parents, foster parents, or any other caregiver who is close enough to her to affect her on a regular basis.
Any time an individual is unable to experience and express their internal power, that which is at the core of healthy self-esteem, her self-esteem will be low and feelings of frustration will be high. Over time, that frustration may turn into rage.
She will most likely experience an inability to solve problems due to the fact that she has no confidence in herself. Factors related to learned helplessness affect her thinking and she will show signs of depression. When she fails at anything, the blame will be her lack of abilities and when she succeeds this will be due to "luck."
As a child who has been conditioned to give up total control over herself, she thought she deserved the punishments, threats and/or negative criticism she received because she was a "bad" little girl. That's what she was told to believe. "YOU are a bad girl!"
**********************
Lee was that girl. From day #1 of living in the foster home, there was the threat of getting whippings with the belt if she, her brother and sister stepped out of line. Not only the threat of getting a whipping with the belt, but there was the threat of being taken back to the juvenile courts, which as a little girl she and her siblings lived, if any of the three of them didn’t do what they were told. That terrified Lee more than the belt. Whippings she could endure but being taken back to “that place” she could not. And she knew from experience that these foster parents were not kidding when that threat was made. This is my story, the one that let me know how much I was being controlled.
I was seven years old. One Saturday morning Mom made rice with raisins. I, who was a very good eater, couldn't to eat the the bowl of rice sitting in front of me. I tried to, but something was terribly wrong. I didn’t understand it and could not put it into words, but for some reason this bowl of something that should be welcomed for breakfast turned my stomach and made me gag.
I had already been in conditioning mode after having gotten the belt across my buttocks several times. I knew what I had been told on that very first day, a day that was full of joy and excitement, until this new dad burst my bubble with the news of punishment in the future if there was any “trouble”.
Now, as I sat at the table, mom was yelling at me and telling me that I wasn’t getting up from the table until I ate all of the rice in the bowl. I tried again, but when I put another spoonful in my mouth I gagged as I tried to swallow it, then I threw up. Mom was furious! So much so her face was red and veins were popping out on her.
Then came that BIG threat.
"How would I like to take a trip back to the place from where you came, from" she asked. There I sat, looking up at mom with sadness and fear. I didn’t want to be a bad girl. I tried so hard to do everything “right” and now it was ruined. Mom told me I was a bad girl and I believed her. Afterall, she stood over the stove and cooked rice for everyone for breakfast. How could I not eat it if for no other reason than out of respect for her hard work. Yep! I was bad!
Mom's first solution was to pour rice in the bowl again and tell me to eat it. After several attempts of trying to threaten me into submission, Mom told me to get up from the table, go to the bedroom and get dressed. I did what I was told. I was scared because I knew something bad was about to happen. Dressed, I went back to the kitchen. Mom decided to give me one more chance. There sat the bowl of rice looking up at me. I stood next to the table biting her lower lip and fidgeting with her fingers. I just couldn't eat it. I didn't know why, I just knew I couldn't.
“Nothing to say?” Mom asked.
I slowly shook her head from side to side.
“Then go outside and get in the car.” Mom said as she gave me a shove out the back door.
Dad was already in the car. Mom got in the passenger side and I got in the back seat behind dad. Mom told me they were taking me “back” since I was bad and didn't appreciate anything. "You know where we're taking you, don't you? I'll bet you would eat their rice and raisins if they made it for you. But you don't get that kind of food there. You get food no one wants to eat."
As they started down the driveway toward the main road, mom asked me one more time if I was ready to eat the rice and raisins. This time I slowly shook her head up and down. "If we go back, are you going to eat the rice?" My face was red with rage and I had tears in my eyes, but I said, "yes". Dad backed the car back into its parking space at the back of the house and we went inside. There on the table sat the uneaten bowl of rice and raisins. Cold. Mom stood by the table and watched me eat it, gagging as I swallowed each bite. After the last bite I ran to the bathroom and threw up. Then I had to stand in the corner in the living room for several hours as punishment.
It was years later when I realized what it was about the rice and rasins that made me gag. At the precious age of six, I had already been forced to perform oral sex on more than one predator. There was something about the sperm that was ejaculated in my mouth, some kind of grittiness and sliminess that made me gag and throw. The rice with raisin had that same feeling when I put it in my mouth. When I gagged back then, I was told by the sexual offender that if I threw up, I would have to eat my vomit. Luckily, I never saw that man again.
I was just seven years old when that memory came rushing back.
Seven years old! **********************Women who feel trapped in abusive relationships and afraid to leave have developed learned helplessness at some point in their life. That type of powerlessness is enraging and paralyzing. No one can understand why she can't leave the relationship. Only those who have experineced that kind of conditioning. There is another type of conditioning, which involves the girl who was loved and adored and protected to the point of her parents making EVERY decision for her. Even as a teenager when she expressed an opinion or a desire to do something “different,” one or both parents, ever so gently, gave her reasons why she was too young to give opinions and too special to do what all the other kids were doing. Pretty, smart, with everything a young girl could ask for, but very shy. Her shyness was due to not feeling capable or confident in herself. If you read Self-Esteem Matters, then you know that feeling capable, confident, and secure in decision making is a big part of what healthy self-esteem is about. She has low self-esteem. Never learning to make decisions, never feeling valued when she spoke, not being part of peer activities cause low self-esteem. This girl has never experienced her own power. How could she? Powerlessness causes low-self-esteem and feelings of worthlessness and underserving of goodness. This is why some girls/young women who would be expected to marry a good partner because she comes from such a "good" family surprisingly marries someone who is very controlling. Controlling individuals usually makes all the decisions. So, why is it so surprising that this is who she would choose to marry.
Women who have been conditioned, whether it's through abuse, or control that looks like love, and are a victim of learned helpless always have low self-esteem and they almost always blame themselves when things go wrong. Therefore, they think they deserve the physical, mental, and/or emotional abuse or control they receive from partners, bosses and other authority figures.
Society and family play a partial hand in this abuse by putting unnecessary pressures on women by making them think it is their responsibility to make the relationship work. These pressures need to be removed and support from family needs to be increased. Society as a whole needs to take a stand against abuse and stop blaming women.
Studies show how learned helplessness can develop during early childhood and continue through adulthood. This usually happens by being controlled by another person or even a group of people, such as members of an occult. But an individual ca alson become a victim of learned helplessness on their own through trauma.
Take, for instance, a girl who had the perfect life. As a young woman she accomplished a lot and felt very proud of these accomplishments. She welcomed new adventures and was very competitive in healthy ways. She loved her family and friends.
Then, one night while asleep in the middle of the night, a man came into her home and raped her. Violently. When he finished he told her that if she told anyone, he would come back and kill her.
Since he wore a mask, and she couldn’t see his face, she didn’t understand why he threatened to kill her if she told anyone about the rape. What was she going to tell anyone about him? Nevertheless, she didn’t want to find out if he would return, so she didn’t tell anyone. Not even her best friend.
Suppressing this traumatic night of rape, she was afraid to go to sleep at night. She used to go for a run every morning before she got ready for work, but now she was afraid to go outside while it was still dark. When she showered, she got in and out as quickly as possible because she was afraid she wouldn’t hear the door open if “he” returned.
She no longer parked her car in its usual space given to her by the company where she worked for fear “he” might be lurking behind a car close to her own. At work, she viewed her male co-workers differently. In her mind, each man she came in contact with was a suspect. Fear took over her life. She felt out of control, damaged, and worthless. It began to show in her work. As fear got larger her self-esteem got smaller. Her friends and family and coworkers noticed the difference. No longer the outgoing young woman she used to be, the life of the party, she hurried home right after work every day.
The odd thing was, she hated being at home. It was like she was in a bubble of fear the minute she walked through the door. She rarely watched TV anymore, something she loved to do in the evenings, because she was trying to tune into any unusual sounds in the house.
She now slept on the sofa, wearing a high-neck, long-sleeved, one-piece leotard jumpsuit. When she did sleep it was usually a series of nightmares of a man coming after her, chasing her through the house, down the street, through the parking lot at work and into her office. She woke up just as she was looking out of her office window and thinking about jumping.
This woman was completely consumed and controlled by fear. Every thought, every feeling, every action was fear based. She was powerless, helpless, and unable to make simple decisions. She desperately needed counseling. She knew it but was afraid “he” was watching her every move and would see her go to a counselor and know what she was telling the counselor.
One day she collapsed at work from total exhaustion and was taken to the hospital by ambulance. It was there that she began to talk about the rape. Thinking no one from outside her work could know who was in the ambulance, she felt safe. The emergency room doctor got a therapist involved. The young woman was admitted to the psyche ward, where she had extensive therapy for a few weeks.
Convinced by her therapist that most rapists make the same or similar threats and it’s usually nothing but an empty threat, she continued therapy after being discharged from the hospital.
Home should be a person’s safest place. In order to feel completely safe at home, she put safety locks on all of her windows and doors and subscribed to an electronic security system. She had police, neighbors, and close friends on speed dial.
Explaining what happened to her boss, she was given time off to get the help she needed. And help is what she got. Group therapy and a couple of friends got her back on track and into her regular routines. Within a couple months she felt safe again.
Often times women stay in unhealthy, even abusive, relationships because their partners have convinced them that she couldn’t live without him/her. They flaunt affairs and feed into her fear of losing him. Her self-esteem slowly drifts lower. Her feelings of worthlessness gets stronger. She wants out but is well aware that she is damaged.
At the core of learned helplessness is hopelessness and/or fear. The stronger the hopelessness or fear, the more it controls an individual. For Lee, it was the fear of returning to an institution. The woman who was raped feared being raped again. The women in the abusive relationship feared not being able to get out. Most likely all three at one point or another felt hopelessness as well.
Society and parents can and should play major roles in making sure a child avoids learned helplessness. Children and teens must be encouraged to use their cognitive abilities to their fullest, be given positive criticism and be shown adaptive ways to cope with negative events that happen in their lives. They must know that they are heard, and then validated.
No one can eliminate negative events. They happen. Fortunately, there is counseling, support groups, both within and outside of the therapy office, classes and workshops that work with victims of abuse and trauma.
Now conditioned to follow the “rules” or behaviors presented by her “master” she is “broken” much like a horse trainer breaking a horse or a dog trainer manipulating their canine students to respond to the bell. This master may be parents, foster parents, or any other caregiver who is close enough to her to affect her on a regular basis.
Any time an individual is unable to experience and express their internal power, that which is at the core of healthy self-esteem, her self-esteem will be low and feelings of frustration will be high. Over time, that frustration may turn into rage.
She will most likely experience an inability to solve problems due to the fact that she has no confidence in herself. Factors related to learned helplessness affect her thinking and she will show signs of depression. When she fails at anything, the blame will be her lack of abilities and when she succeeds this will be due to "luck."
As a child who has been conditioned to give up total control over herself, she thought she deserved the punishments, threats and/or negative criticism she received because she was a "bad" little girl. That's what she was told to believe. "YOU are a bad girl!"
**********************
Lee was that girl. From day #1 of living in the foster home, there was the threat of getting whippings with the belt if she, her brother and sister stepped out of line. Not only the threat of getting a whipping with the belt, but there was the threat of being taken back to the juvenile courts, which as a little girl she and her siblings lived, if any of the three of them didn’t do what they were told. That terrified Lee more than the belt. Whippings she could endure but being taken back to “that place” she could not. And she knew from experience that these foster parents were not kidding when that threat was made. This is my story, the one that let me know how much I was being controlled.
I was seven years old. One Saturday morning Mom made rice with raisins. I, who was a very good eater, couldn't to eat the the bowl of rice sitting in front of me. I tried to, but something was terribly wrong. I didn’t understand it and could not put it into words, but for some reason this bowl of something that should be welcomed for breakfast turned my stomach and made me gag.
I had already been in conditioning mode after having gotten the belt across my buttocks several times. I knew what I had been told on that very first day, a day that was full of joy and excitement, until this new dad burst my bubble with the news of punishment in the future if there was any “trouble”.
Now, as I sat at the table, mom was yelling at me and telling me that I wasn’t getting up from the table until I ate all of the rice in the bowl. I tried again, but when I put another spoonful in my mouth I gagged as I tried to swallow it, then I threw up. Mom was furious! So much so her face was red and veins were popping out on her.
Then came that BIG threat.
"How would I like to take a trip back to the place from where you came, from" she asked. There I sat, looking up at mom with sadness and fear. I didn’t want to be a bad girl. I tried so hard to do everything “right” and now it was ruined. Mom told me I was a bad girl and I believed her. Afterall, she stood over the stove and cooked rice for everyone for breakfast. How could I not eat it if for no other reason than out of respect for her hard work. Yep! I was bad!
Mom's first solution was to pour rice in the bowl again and tell me to eat it. After several attempts of trying to threaten me into submission, Mom told me to get up from the table, go to the bedroom and get dressed. I did what I was told. I was scared because I knew something bad was about to happen. Dressed, I went back to the kitchen. Mom decided to give me one more chance. There sat the bowl of rice looking up at me. I stood next to the table biting her lower lip and fidgeting with her fingers. I just couldn't eat it. I didn't know why, I just knew I couldn't.
“Nothing to say?” Mom asked.
I slowly shook her head from side to side.
“Then go outside and get in the car.” Mom said as she gave me a shove out the back door.
Dad was already in the car. Mom got in the passenger side and I got in the back seat behind dad. Mom told me they were taking me “back” since I was bad and didn't appreciate anything. "You know where we're taking you, don't you? I'll bet you would eat their rice and raisins if they made it for you. But you don't get that kind of food there. You get food no one wants to eat."
As they started down the driveway toward the main road, mom asked me one more time if I was ready to eat the rice and raisins. This time I slowly shook her head up and down. "If we go back, are you going to eat the rice?" My face was red with rage and I had tears in my eyes, but I said, "yes". Dad backed the car back into its parking space at the back of the house and we went inside. There on the table sat the uneaten bowl of rice and raisins. Cold. Mom stood by the table and watched me eat it, gagging as I swallowed each bite. After the last bite I ran to the bathroom and threw up. Then I had to stand in the corner in the living room for several hours as punishment.
It was years later when I realized what it was about the rice and rasins that made me gag. At the precious age of six, I had already been forced to perform oral sex on more than one predator. There was something about the sperm that was ejaculated in my mouth, some kind of grittiness and sliminess that made me gag and throw. The rice with raisin had that same feeling when I put it in my mouth. When I gagged back then, I was told by the sexual offender that if I threw up, I would have to eat my vomit. Luckily, I never saw that man again.
I was just seven years old when that memory came rushing back.
Seven years old! **********************Women who feel trapped in abusive relationships and afraid to leave have developed learned helplessness at some point in their life. That type of powerlessness is enraging and paralyzing. No one can understand why she can't leave the relationship. Only those who have experineced that kind of conditioning. There is another type of conditioning, which involves the girl who was loved and adored and protected to the point of her parents making EVERY decision for her. Even as a teenager when she expressed an opinion or a desire to do something “different,” one or both parents, ever so gently, gave her reasons why she was too young to give opinions and too special to do what all the other kids were doing. Pretty, smart, with everything a young girl could ask for, but very shy. Her shyness was due to not feeling capable or confident in herself. If you read Self-Esteem Matters, then you know that feeling capable, confident, and secure in decision making is a big part of what healthy self-esteem is about. She has low self-esteem. Never learning to make decisions, never feeling valued when she spoke, not being part of peer activities cause low self-esteem. This girl has never experienced her own power. How could she? Powerlessness causes low-self-esteem and feelings of worthlessness and underserving of goodness. This is why some girls/young women who would be expected to marry a good partner because she comes from such a "good" family surprisingly marries someone who is very controlling. Controlling individuals usually makes all the decisions. So, why is it so surprising that this is who she would choose to marry.
Women who have been conditioned, whether it's through abuse, or control that looks like love, and are a victim of learned helpless always have low self-esteem and they almost always blame themselves when things go wrong. Therefore, they think they deserve the physical, mental, and/or emotional abuse or control they receive from partners, bosses and other authority figures.
Society and family play a partial hand in this abuse by putting unnecessary pressures on women by making them think it is their responsibility to make the relationship work. These pressures need to be removed and support from family needs to be increased. Society as a whole needs to take a stand against abuse and stop blaming women.
Studies show how learned helplessness can develop during early childhood and continue through adulthood. This usually happens by being controlled by another person or even a group of people, such as members of an occult. But an individual ca alson become a victim of learned helplessness on their own through trauma.
Take, for instance, a girl who had the perfect life. As a young woman she accomplished a lot and felt very proud of these accomplishments. She welcomed new adventures and was very competitive in healthy ways. She loved her family and friends.
Then, one night while asleep in the middle of the night, a man came into her home and raped her. Violently. When he finished he told her that if she told anyone, he would come back and kill her.
Since he wore a mask, and she couldn’t see his face, she didn’t understand why he threatened to kill her if she told anyone about the rape. What was she going to tell anyone about him? Nevertheless, she didn’t want to find out if he would return, so she didn’t tell anyone. Not even her best friend.
Suppressing this traumatic night of rape, she was afraid to go to sleep at night. She used to go for a run every morning before she got ready for work, but now she was afraid to go outside while it was still dark. When she showered, she got in and out as quickly as possible because she was afraid she wouldn’t hear the door open if “he” returned.
She no longer parked her car in its usual space given to her by the company where she worked for fear “he” might be lurking behind a car close to her own. At work, she viewed her male co-workers differently. In her mind, each man she came in contact with was a suspect. Fear took over her life. She felt out of control, damaged, and worthless. It began to show in her work. As fear got larger her self-esteem got smaller. Her friends and family and coworkers noticed the difference. No longer the outgoing young woman she used to be, the life of the party, she hurried home right after work every day.
The odd thing was, she hated being at home. It was like she was in a bubble of fear the minute she walked through the door. She rarely watched TV anymore, something she loved to do in the evenings, because she was trying to tune into any unusual sounds in the house.
She now slept on the sofa, wearing a high-neck, long-sleeved, one-piece leotard jumpsuit. When she did sleep it was usually a series of nightmares of a man coming after her, chasing her through the house, down the street, through the parking lot at work and into her office. She woke up just as she was looking out of her office window and thinking about jumping.
This woman was completely consumed and controlled by fear. Every thought, every feeling, every action was fear based. She was powerless, helpless, and unable to make simple decisions. She desperately needed counseling. She knew it but was afraid “he” was watching her every move and would see her go to a counselor and know what she was telling the counselor.
One day she collapsed at work from total exhaustion and was taken to the hospital by ambulance. It was there that she began to talk about the rape. Thinking no one from outside her work could know who was in the ambulance, she felt safe. The emergency room doctor got a therapist involved. The young woman was admitted to the psyche ward, where she had extensive therapy for a few weeks.
Convinced by her therapist that most rapists make the same or similar threats and it’s usually nothing but an empty threat, she continued therapy after being discharged from the hospital.
Home should be a person’s safest place. In order to feel completely safe at home, she put safety locks on all of her windows and doors and subscribed to an electronic security system. She had police, neighbors, and close friends on speed dial.
Explaining what happened to her boss, she was given time off to get the help she needed. And help is what she got. Group therapy and a couple of friends got her back on track and into her regular routines. Within a couple months she felt safe again.
Often times women stay in unhealthy, even abusive, relationships because their partners have convinced them that she couldn’t live without him/her. They flaunt affairs and feed into her fear of losing him. Her self-esteem slowly drifts lower. Her feelings of worthlessness gets stronger. She wants out but is well aware that she is damaged.
At the core of learned helplessness is hopelessness and/or fear. The stronger the hopelessness or fear, the more it controls an individual. For Lee, it was the fear of returning to an institution. The woman who was raped feared being raped again. The women in the abusive relationship feared not being able to get out. Most likely all three at one point or another felt hopelessness as well.
Society and parents can and should play major roles in making sure a child avoids learned helplessness. Children and teens must be encouraged to use their cognitive abilities to their fullest, be given positive criticism and be shown adaptive ways to cope with negative events that happen in their lives. They must know that they are heard, and then validated.
No one can eliminate negative events. They happen. Fortunately, there is counseling, support groups, both within and outside of the therapy office, classes and workshops that work with victims of abuse and trauma.