Learned Helplessness: A Theory for the Age of Personal Control
What You Can Change and What You Can’t
Authentic Happiness
The Optimistic Child

“When I first began to work on learned optimism, I thought I was
working on pessimism. Like almost all researchers with a background in
clinical psychology, I was accustomed to focusing on what was wrong
with individuals and then on how to fix it. Looking closely at what was
already right and how to make it even better did not enter my mind.”

Martin E. P. Seligman, Ph.D.
Learned Optimism

I found this book when I looked for the book “Learned Helplessness” by the same author. I am glad. Learned helplessness seems to explain how I lived my life after overwhelming conditioning in childhood. My life is no longer stuck in the past, really, I am not stuck, it remains my story, the shaping of me. Beyond that, learned optimism and the practice of optimism through my gratitude and daily actions is me in the present.

Life is, indeed hard. We all know that on some level. And so many circumstances leave us feeling powerless, like being born black in America, or for me, being born DeGolier in a world I thought functioned “normally” outside my four walls. As a child I used to gaze at other peoples houses and wish I lived in one of them because surely other people were not like us. Now, of course, I know every household has its own set of dysfunction and being “not a DeGolier” would have only meant not having the same set of woes.

Back to helplessness; I needed to know where my helplessness came from that left me pitching and swaying like a boat crashing through rough seas at the slightest hint of a brewing storm. The following passage is from Seligman’s book “Learned Optimism.” Just a heads up for animal lovers, it is hard to read about use of animals in tests. This is a mild shock.

“His most senior graduate student, a friendly, almost solicitous Mid-
westerner named Bruce Overmier, immediately volunteered an expla-
nation.

“It’s the dogs,” said Bruce. “The dogs won’t do anything. Something’s
wrong with them. So nobody can do any experiments.” He went on to say
that over the past several weeks the laboratory dogs-being used in what
he un illuminatingly called the “transfer” experiments-had had Pavlovian conditioning. Day after day they had been exposed to two kinds of stim-
ulation-high-pitched tones and brief shocks. The tones and the shocks had been given to the dogs in pairs-first a tone and then a shock. The
shocks weren’t too painful, the sort of minor jolt you feel when you touch
a doorknob on a dry winter day. The idea was to get the dogs to associate
the neutral tone and the noxiolls shock-to “pair” them-so that later, when they heard the tone, they would react to it as if it were a shock-
with fear. That was all. After that, the main part of the experiment had begun. The dogs had been taken to a “two-compartment shuttlebox,” which is a large box with
(as you might expect) two compartments in it, separated by a low wall.
The investigators wanted to see if the dogs, now in the shuttlebox, would
react to the tones the same way they had learned to react to shock-by
jumping the barrier to get away. If they had, this would have shown that
emotional learning could transfer across widely different situations.

THE QUEST
The dogs first had to learn to jump over the barrier to escape the shock;
once they’d learned that, they could then be tested to see if tones alone
evoked the same reaction. It should have been a cinch for them. To escape
the shock, all they’d have to do was jump over the low barrier that divided
the shuttlebox. Dogs usually learn this easily.
These dogs, said Overmier, had just lain down whimpering. They hadn’t
even tried to get away from the shocks. And that, of course, meant that
nobody could proceed with what they really wanted to do-test the dogs
with the tones.
As I listened to Overmier and then looked at the whimpering dogs, I
realized that something much more significant had already occurred than
any result the transfer experiment might produce: Accidentally, during the
early part of the experiment, the dogs must have been taught to be helpless.
That’s why they had given up. The tones had nothing to do with it. During
Pavlovian conditioning they felt the shocks go on and off regardless of
whether they struggled or jumped or barked or did nothing at all. They
had concluded, or “learned,” that nothing they did mattered. So why try?
I was stunned by the implications. If dogs could learn something as
complex as the futility of their actions, here was an analogy to human
helplessness, one that could be studied in the laboratory. Helplessness was
all around us-from the urban poor to the newborn child to the despondent
patient with his face to the wall. My father had his life destroyed by it.
But no scientific study of helplessness existed. My mind raced on: Was this
a laboratory model of human helplessness, one that could be used to
understand how it comes about, how to cure it, how to prevent it, what
drugs worked on it, and who was particularly vulnerable to it?
Although it was the first time I had seen learned helplessness in the
laboratory, I knew what it was. Others had seen it before, but thought of
it as an annoyance, not as a phenomenon worthy of study in its own right.
Somehow my life and experience-perhaps the impact that my father’s
paralysis had had on me-had prepared me to see what it was. It would
take the next ten years of my life to prove to the scientific community that
what afflicted those dogs was helplessness, and that helplessness could be
learned, and therefore unlearned.
As excited as I was by the possibilities of this discovery, I was dejected
about something else. The graduate students here gave shocks that were
in some degree painful to perfectly innocent dogs. Could I work in this
laboratory? I asked myself. I had always been an animal lover, particularly
a dog lover, so the prospect of causing pain-if only minor pain-was very
distasteful. I took a weekend off and went to share my doubts with one of
my philosophy teachers. Though he was only a few years older than I, I
regarded him as wise. He and his wife had always made time for me and
helped me sort out the puzzles and contradictions that filled undergraduate
life in the Sixties.

“I’ve seen something in the lab that might be the beginning of under-
standing helplessness,” I said. “No one has ever investigated helplessness before, yet I’m not sure I can pursue it, because I don’t think it’s right to
give shock to dogs. Even if it’s not wrong, it’s repulsive.” I described my
observations, where I thought they might lead, and, mostly, my misgivings.
My professor was a student of ethics and of the history of science, and
his line of questioning was informed by what he worked on. “Marty, do
you have any other way of cracking the problem of helplessness? How
about case studies of helpless people?”
It was clear to both of us that case histories were a scientific dead end.
A case study is an anecdote about the life of only one person. It provides
no way of finding out what caused what; usually there isn’t even a way of
finding out what really happened, except through the eyes of the narrator,
who always has his own point of view and so distorts the narration. It was
equally clear that only well-controlled experiments could isolate cause and
discover cure. Further, there was no way I could ethically give trauma to
other human beings. This seemed to leave only experiments with animals.
“Is it ever justified,” I asked, “to inflict pain on any creature?”
My professor reminded me that most human beings, as well as household
pets, are alive today because animal experiments were carried out. Without
them, he asserted, polio would still be rampant and smallpox widespread.
“On the other hand,” he went on, “you know that the history of science
is littered with unpaid promissory notes from basic research-assurances
for techniques that were supposed to alleviate human misery but somehow
never did.”

Here is the part that intrigued me.

“They had concluded, or “learned,” that nothing they did mattered. So why try?
I was stunned by the implications. If dogs could learn something as
complex as the futility of their actions, here was an analogy to human
helplessness, one that could be studied in the laboratory. Helplessness was
all around us-from the urban poor to the newborn child to the despondent
patient with his face to the wall. My father had his life destroyed by it.
But no scientific study of helplessness existed.”

In this time as no other I can recall, there is an overwhelming feeling of helplessness, almost universal, against the mad dog in the White House spreading terror everywhere. (never imagined I would say that) I feel it like a knot in my gut but keep plowing forward like a snail pulling a sled full of weights up a slippery hill. I have learned that feeling helpless is not the whole story because feelings are not facts. It is true there is nothing, in this moment, that can be done to thwart this monstrosity, by me.

Setting that aside, and needing desperately to get off this topic, I can vote, I can feel my helplessness then do everything I can to stay positive, I can put out a face of gratitude and positivism to others, probably a long list of actions I can take rather than to be helpless.

But back to MY learned helplessness, no, don’t roll your eyes, I learned that I was powerless many times and many ways as the 20th child in a family of wackos. When I asked questions I was often answered with “Don’t you know that already?” or “Don’t pester me, go play with the cat.” I learned to not ask questions.

Incest, yes, another eye roll please, get it over with, but without incest being a fact in my life I just become a selfish, spoiled, lazy, manipulative, cruel, and “crazy” woman.

So, incest. Began at 3 1/2 years old, I’ll leave out the graphic, let’s just say it was my first introduction to a penis. OMG I feel the creepies, still. One brother, two brother, three brother, and when I finally thought I was free of all that, my nephew when I was 12. He was surprised when I cried. He said my brother said I would not mind. Then he apologized and never came near me again. I lay there in the tall grass beyond the barn where I”d hidden for a game of hide-and-seek on a balmy Sunday evening with family all about and fire flies glowing their alarm as I cried my eyes out. I cried because it was not going to end. I was 12 and I was completely helpless against some form of sex happening to me. I was 12, and there was no way out for me.

Then my dad put a nail in my coffin when I was 16. The lesson? OK, if that is all I am worth, then that is who I will be. Learned helplessness. I would be helpless against being sexually used and abused for decades. Can anyone call be a whore, or slut, as mother used to refer to the girls? I dare you, go ahead. I know who I am now, and no one will ever shame me again.

I did not try to escape it. In fact, I thought I had learned the secret of getting and keeping a man. I had nothing else to offer, after all. I know my actions condemned me, even by my husband who once told me no man would ever marry me because all I was good for was sex. And when his girlfriend accused me saying that “sex is not everything” she did not know that sex had been everything since I was 3 1/2 years old, and I could not tell her that because my childhood, where I came from was buried instead of dealt with. And I sat and cried because I did not understand why they condemned me so harshly. I’d lived what I learned, not having a clue how to be anyone else.

I am not helpless, though I feel it often. I have power in myself and the knowledge about myself. I have power to feel what I feel and act the opposite. I have power in healing and in smiling and in research, and in writing.

I have a voice. It is my responsibility to use it, for me and for the millions who still don’t dare to speak.