Learned helplessness is a condition where people do not remove themselves from a stressful or dangerous situation even when they are able to.

Animals and people can be trained relatively easily to feel helpless. Learned helplessness develops when we consistently feel we cannot control what will happen. It comes about when a person experiences intense emotions or pain and cannot control the source that causes it.

At first they might struggle for control but if their efforts fail and the source of their stress is inescapable then struggle gives way to helpless resignation and depression. We only act if we expect our actions to bring us some relief. Once we believe they are useless we don’t bother trying.

Studies using electric shocks as a source of pain show that once people have been taught helplessness by being given shocks at random, unpredictably, and beyond their control, they no longer try to avoid the pain. The subjects in the experiments came to believe that all future shocks would be beyond their control, like the earlier random shocks, so why bother trying to escape? (Seligman, Martin P, Helplessness: On Development, Depression and Death, W H Freeman and Company, New York, 1992).

If we make a response to an unpleasant situation and it helps us feel we have some control, but if at another time, in a similar situation, the same response does no good, we feel we have little influence on events.

When ill-treatment, stress, pain or abuse is random and inconsistent we eventually come to believe it is inescapable, that nothing we do makes a difference, and that nothing we can do in the future will make any difference. So we give up trying. In this way learned helplessness is instilled in people in oppressive or abusive relationships, or by dysfunctional families.

Once conditioned to helplessness we become more passive, more submissive, less assertive, more controllable. We expect less and less from life and might even come to believe that we could never have anything better or that no one would ever treat us any better. But if helplessness can be learned, it can be unlearned.

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