In my last post, I wrote about how we sometimes feel stuck at one or several moments in life and in many different areas (e.g., career, hobbies, spiritual journey, relationships).
But while some people can work through this feeling of ‘stuckness,’ many will remain feeling stuck and helpless for years and years.
One reason why some people feel stuck for a prolonged time has a lot to do with what they’ve learned about pain and discomfort and their ability to escape it.
Learning to Feel Helpless
In the late 60s, psychologists Martin Seligman and Steve Maier wanted to know what happens when a person continuously faces a negative and uncomfortable situation. How would it affect their behaviours?
They devised an experiment by placing a dog in a box with two chambers. The dog had to climb a small wall to get to the other chamber.
The experimenters then applied a small electric shock to the floor of one of the chambers.
In Group 1, the dogs could escape the shock by climbing over the wall to the other side, where there was no shock.
But in Group 2, the dogs would still receive electric shock regardless of where they were. In other words, the dogs could not escape the mild electric shock no matter what they did or where they went.
The experimenters found that dogs who could not escape the shock (because the shock was present in both chambers) stayed put. They just sat there and let themselves be shocked. Because they couldn’t escape the shock, they didn’t bother climbing the small wall.
From this observation, the experimenters created the term learned helplessness.
Trauma and Ongoing Suffering
The findings of the learned helplessness experiments are significant to human behaviour because they suggest that when a person is constantly experiencing discomfort (like depression, abuse, addiction, unhappiness), and after several failed attempts at stopping the pain, a person is likely to give up.
The person has learned that no matter what they do, they are helpless.
We see the same behaviors in many victims of trauma. As Bessel van der Kolk pointed out in his book, The Body Keeps the Score,
The mere opportunity to escape does not necessarily make traumatized animals, or people, take the road to freedom. Like Maier and Seligman’s dogs, many traumatized people simply give up. Rather than risk experimenting with new options they stay stuck in the fear they know.
Summary
Sometimes we make assumptions about a person’s desire to seek change and to improve their circumstances. But the reality is that when you grow up or spend years and years in a chaotic and dysfunctional environment, pain and suffering are all you know.
Even when allowed to escape pain, people who’ve been traumatized or who view their situation as unchangeable will often remain in the same condition because they are more comfortable being in an environment they know than in one they don’t.
Or, they don’t believe that a life without pain is possible.
In my next post, I’ll discuss learned helplessness a little more while providing some strategies to help you overcome it.
Until then, I hope this post helps you to understand how easy it is for someone to feel helpless and how these feelings and beliefs are learned throughout life.
Richard
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