Learned helplessness is an inherent form of self-defeat that can be conscious or unconscious. In any case it can permeate your life to the point where there seems to be no ease.
Learned helplessness can be the result of socialization, schooling or through generational patterns. Some examples:
• A child who has undiagnosed dyslexia consistently struggles with reading comprehension in school. When he is called on to read out loud the other children laugh and mock his mistakes. He continues to have nightmares of reading out loud in class throughout his adult life. Although his dyslexia was recognized and treated early on, he still fears speaking publicly and feels a huge amount of shame when people talk about the books they are reading.
• Lucy has never had a drink in her life. There is a long family history of alcoholism, something that almost killed her mother. Whenever she goes out with her friends, she fears that if they drink something horrible will happen to them. She keeps coming up with excuses to not be as social, preferring to limit her social obligations to “dry” occasions to feel safe.
• Tony never liked sports, either playing or watching them. His brothers and father bonded over sports and Tony continually felt left out. He tried for years to pretend he enjoyed them. H even made self-inflicting jokes about how uncoordinated he was which his brothers would howl over. Tony feels like there is something inherently wrong with him for not being able to be more like the other men in his family.
Learned helplessness does not look one particular way but has many different manifestations. Emotions such as shame, guilt, fear, terror, anger, rage and embarrassment are but a few of the ways learned helplessness is felt.
And Then We Become Adults…
As this learned helplessness gets transferred from difficult childhood situations onto our adult life we come up against a series of self-defeating behavior. We may implicate ourselves before a false judge for something we haven’t done, creating a prison of our own making. Although we may not like the prison, we’re used to it. Leaving it does not seem like an option.
Within the learned helpfulness is a survival technique, a strategy that despite all circumstances allowed us to make our way through it. If we have never learned an alternative to that strategy then we may use it over and over again. As the saying goes, “The definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and expecting different results”.
Finding the Seeds of Wisdom
One thing to recognize is that there is wisdom in this survival strategy. If you imagined this wisdom to be a seed that you planted and tended to it would eventually grow and become a flower or some other form of nourishment. Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche once said that our neurosis is like manure. We have enough shit, so we may as well use it to grow something beautiful. Being able to sift through and find the wisdom can be the tricky part but it can also be a fun investigation into how we operate.
Our helpless feeling states are opportunities to see how we can befriend the current emotion so that we gain insight, harness and cultivate the wisdom and compost the crap for a future garden. Our individual helplessness could probably feed a family of four for a year. That’s a big harvest.
It’s also an indicator that we may need to reach out to others without an agenda. Just by sharing the experience of being human and all of its implications we can see that our helplessness is not felt in solitude. Each one of us has all been through difficulties and being able to witness and be witnessed in that process creates a more ordinary, objective viewpoint. In other words, our suffering is not felt in isolation although our experience is our own.
What’s Next?
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