Dear joanna:

Do you know of the term “learned helplessness”?

Wikipedia explains it this way (I am paraphrasing some): a behavior typical of an animal that occurs when the animal endures repeatedly painful stimuli which she is unable to escape or avoid. After such experience, the animal learns to no longer try to escape or avoid such painful stimuli/ situations. The animal learns that it is helpless in painful situations, that it has no control over such and it and it gives up trying.

In your second thread, May 3 of this year, you shared the following regarding your experience as a child with the violence between your parents: “I remember asking her.. please open those door please‘ I was so terrified.. she never listened… Sometimes I tried to separate them. Sometimes I just watched my mother beating my dad… me sitting in my room watching them beating and yelling. I can’t imagine worse thing in the world, a thing that would terrify worse… There was no escape, no hope and no help”-

you tried to prevent their fights by telling your mother to not  open the door to your father coming home drunk, but she opened it anyway. You tried to separate them but they continued to fight.

You were helpless in that situation and it happened repeatedly, learned helplessness took hold. You wrote on that thread: “I feel like all my life I have been living, reliving and replaying those scenes from my childhood, sitting in this room with them, being exposed to violence, not being able to stop this (despite asking them) with no help from anyone. Sometimes I imagine myself.. leaving this room. I imagine getting up and leaving”

As an adult, now 31 or 32, you never left that room. Literally, you live with your mother. When she is not staying with you, it is because she chose to stay elsewhere (with a boyfriend). You never chose to move away from her, never took such an action. This is Learned Helplessness.

“Being able to imagine getting up and leaving countless times gives me a bit more freedom, and insight. I hope someday I will be able to do this”- this is your hope, to get up and leave, to take on action for the purpose of avoiding pain. To get up and leave your mother (and to get up and leave Tom, before).

February 3, in your first thread, you wrote: “I always seek someone to take care of me, because I feel I’m unable to take care of myself”- when you suffer from learned helplessness, you are unable to take care of yourself, you feel powerless, incapable, weak.

You keep wanting that “magical feeling (of safety) WITHOUT EVEN CHANHGING ANYTHING IN MY LIFE”, you wrote, February 4 (your capital, big letters).

You want that safe feeling when you visited your father after your parents’ divorce. You wrote about that: “He DIDN’T DO ANYTHING, everything just disappeared and it was okay” (your capital, bit letters).

This magical feeling of safety with no action to avoid and prevent pain is magic. Real safety and learned helplessness do not go together. For real safety, you have to take action.

In my last post to you I wrote: “you never experienced (as far as I am aware of) a strong motivation to move out and away from your mother. It is as if, and maybe you are, okay with things… almost, sort of, okay with your life as is”- I was correct. You did not express motivation to move out or better your life. What I understand now is that the reason you did not express such motivation is not because you are okay with your life but because you believe that you are unable to change it, and so, there is no use trying.

anita