Building Resilience — 6 Tips to Trade Helplessness for Healthy Control  (Part 2)

This is part 2 of a four-part series on how to root out a sneaky pattern called “learned helplessness” from our life and relationships. In part 1 , we described what this dynamic is and is not. In this part 2, we will look at how it tends to work in real life. In parts 3 and 4, we will offer practical steps to address it, and build a sense of resilience instead.

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Last week I described a (very abusive) 1960’s experiment in which dogs who endured shocks without being able to escape were more likely to endure a second round of shocks that they could escape. They were showing what the scientists called “learned helplessness.” While all the other dogs simply jumped over a low wall to get away from the second set of shocks, the “helpless” group endured it and didn’t even try to jump the wall – even though nothing was there to stop them.

In the years since, researchers have discovered that this dynamic affects every one of us to some degree or another. It may be running under the surface when we can’t seem to stop ourselves from watching that steamy movie – even though we know it’s probably not healthy for us. It may be in play when we throw up our hands and say to our spouse, “Fine, you do it your way,” because we assume they will never listen. It could be part of the reason why we feel sorry for ourselves at work, but still put up with a toxic boss.

Learned helplessness, if left unchecked, can end up derailing a life or a marriage.

There are many ways this plays out, many causes (for example, childhood trauma), and many different ways to address it – and a short blog series can’t do them all justice. But to get us started, let’s look at just one common real-life example of what learned helplessness might look like, and the big-picture solution.

What does this look like in “real life?”

Learned helplessness appears in many ways, in part because of a truth that researchers were surprised by but will be familiar to any reader of the Bible: our default setting as humans is often an immature, self-interested response like passivity or self-pity when things go wrong.

Let’s examine a common pattern in marriage, using the example of a representative couple I’ll call Tom and Kim.

Tom is fed up with being corrected by Kim on everything from how he loads the dishwasher (“The plates go this way.”) to how he plans dates (“Why is it always hamburgers and action movies with you?”) to what he and the kids had for dinner when she went out with friends. (“The kids told me they had pizza and soda and ice cream. No wonder their tummies hurt.”)

So Tom quits trying. He feels like his best efforts to help, plan dates, and have fun with his kids aren’t the right ones, so he develops a passive, “why bother” attitude. He shuts down at home, thinking “what’s the point in trying?” He’s “learned” that he cannot change his situation no matter how hard he works (which isn’t true, but he thinks it is).

On her side, Kim feels lonely in the marriage. Tom consistently withdraws to his “man cave” instead of talking to Kim whenever he is tired from work (which is often) or in a bad mood. She gets upset and seeks reassurance, but rarely gets what she needs. She feels helpless and like nothing will change, so she retreats to the safety of spending most of her time with her kids and at work rather than trying to connect with her husband. And she vents regularly in an online group with other women who have gone through challenging relationships. After all, they will listen to her, give her a shoulder to cry on, and validate her feelings.

As regular blog readers will know, roughly 75% to 85% of men and women have different “raw nerves” that a spouse can hit without intending to. There are exceptions (about 15-25% depending on the survey), but the most “raw” insecurity of men tends to be “Am I any good at what I DO?” while that of women tends to be “Am I loveable? Does he REALLY love me?” Thus, her regular “corrections” about his performance and his regular disappearances from her presence really hit each other’s raw nerves. In the face of that repeated pain – and feeling like they can’t do anything to stop it – it is not surprising that both shut down and feel helpless.

To Kim, her observations about plates, dinner dates, and junk food seem like just that: observations. But to Tom, they’re electric shocks that jolt his primary insecurity over and over again, with no way out.

To Tom, his disappearance to his “man cave” is just a way to chill out when he is tired; he assumes Kim knows he loves her. But to her, they are electric shocks that jolt her primary insecurity and there’s nothing she can do.

The safest thing, each of them thinks, is to avoid triggering the shock in the first place by not getting close to the source of electricity. After all, they think, if we can’t change anything, it is better to avoid the whole situation by shutting down.

We can always change something

I need to say directly that there is nothing wrong with expecting a spouse to care enough to work hard to give us what we need and avoid causing us pain! In fact, it is a related but different topic (see this recent blog for more) that most spouses do care, and don’t want to cause us pain.

The issue is: what do we do in the face of that pain? What do we do when, either through cluelessness, confusion, or laziness, someone (our spouse or anyone else) is making life pretty hard?  As you have no doubt heard many times, we cannot change someone else, we can only change ourselves. And that’s the key. We need to ask what we can do.

What’s the way out?

So in our marriage example, how do Tom or Kim jump the low wall to avoid the shocks?

The starting point is a mind shift. Turns out, as we said last week, learned helplessness is a misnomer. Our human default is to feel stuck, hopeless, like a victim, self-pitying. We might get passive in response, we might get angry, we might vent. But the ‘stuck’ feeling is natural. What isn’t natural is what we have to do to overcome it: we learn a healthy sense of control. We learn that there is always something we can do, even if there are also things we need to accept. We are not helpless. We can train ourselves out of helplessness in the particular area where we are tempted to give up.

(In fact, not to nerd out on the brain science, but it’s the very presence of healthy control that cues our brains not to slide into the Eeyore-type mood changes that make us feel doomed or “stuck.”)

Thus, Tom and Kim need to realize that they are not helpless and that there are healthy things they can do. For example, using my own research as a starting point, one or both of them might ask the other person to read and discuss the “Insecurity” or “Reassurance” chapters in For Women Only and For Men Only for increased understanding of how they can avoid causing each other pain. Or perhaps they ask their spouse to attend counseling together. (And if their spouse will not, they can always go on their own to understand what they themselves can work on.)

Or maybe Tom and/or Kim decide to create boundaries. And the boundaries could be with themselves (“I realize I need to limit my time in that online group; there’s a pressure to complain more than to encourage.”) or with one another (“I know you don’t mean to sound so critical about what I did with the kids, but that’s what it feels like and it hurts. Can you moderate your tone a bit, so we can continue this conversation?”)

Whether it is marriage, work, a personal compulsion, or anything else, there are always things we can do.

So that is an example of how this “learned helplessness” dynamic works. In parts 3 and 4 we will cover the six steps that will help us overcome this pattern, and build a better one.

And if you are interested in having Shaunti speak on kindness for your workplace, church, school or community group, please contact Nicole Owens at nowens@shaunti.com.

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