Dear ninibee:

You are welcome. I am glad that you found parts of the two posts relevant to you. It so happens that I too experienced learned helplessness for most of my life. It was only 2 or 3 of years ago, summer time, I was indoors and it felt too hot. At one point I noticed that I can open the windows, it just didn’t occur to me for hours and days to do that. The undesirable situation in this example was: the temperature was too high, the action to improve the situation was to open windows. It just did not cross my mind to do so. When I did- the temperature went down and I was comfortable.

There are many other examples over the years, some way more serious than the one I just described, some involved lots of shame.  I mentioned self-forgiveness earlier. Understanding learned helplessness helped me forgive myself for many of those shameful situations because I realized that I was unable to change or exit those situations.

People who do not understand learned helplessness would say: but you could have just left! Not so. Here is the proof that this condition is not a human excuse- animals too suffer from learned helplessness and scientists studied the phenomenon. For example, a baby elephant who is tied with a strong rope to a fixed structure, tries and tries but cannot break free from the rope because he is too small to break the rope. When the elephant is tied with the same kind of rope, as an adult, the elephant is more than big and strong enough to break the rope if he tries, but he doesn’t try because he gave up long ago on breaking three from the rope and it does not occur to him to try.

Anytime you want to discuss further these topics, anything you want to talk about, let me know.

anita