Learned Helplessness and Childhood Trauma

Posted On February 22, 2024

Learned helplessness is a term I had never experienced until recently. I had felt helpless and out of control of my life, but the words learned helplessness took me by surprise.

 

In this article, we shall explore learned helplessness and what it means for survivors of childhood trauma.

 

What is Learned Helplessness?

 

 

Learned helplessness is a psychological phenomenon that has been observed in humans. It is caused when humans are conditioned to expect suffering, pain, or discomfort without hope of escape. After enough conditioning, the person will stop trying to escape or to avoid the pain even if there is an opportunity to do so.

 

Once humans begin to believe that they have no control over their lives or what happens to them, they begin to feel, act, and think like they are completely helpless.

 

Learned helplessness is a psychic force that includes self-doubt, interfering, and blocking that keeps the person from continuing on to success when success is within their reach. The result is that people will turn away from trying to succeed and instead diagnose themselves as no good and without hope.

 

A great example of learned helplessness is how an elephant behaves after it has been tied to a tree with a strong rope. After a while, the elephant is conditioned to believe it cannot escape the tree and gives up. Then, the owner of the elephant does not need the rope anymore and even though the rope is gone, the elephant continues to behave as if it cannot get free.

 

People under the influence of learned helplessness believe they cannot control or change their situation, and so they quit trying.

 

Seligman’s Learned Helplessness Theory

 

 

A theory helps explain where learned helplessness originates and how people with lived experience with it may feel. Learned helplessness is not a mental health condition, rather it is considered a thought disorder with problematic thinking that leads to maladaptive behavior.

 

According to psychologist Martin Seligman in the 1960s and Steven Maier in the 1970s, there are three components of this thought disorder that are evident in people with learned helplessness. Let us examine them carefully.

 

Contingency. The relation between actions and the environment. In child abuse, contingency is the relation between the actions of one’s abusers and how and where the child is living. If the child lives in an unsafe environment, their actions might reflect that in their behavior at school and at home.

 

In adulthood, people who were abused as children are more prone to seeing relationships between their actions and their environment, perhaps seeing no means of escape from poor situations even though the opportunity is there.

 

Cognition. The awareness of contingency where you are not sure if an event will or will not happen. Children learn very young that they cannot count on events to happen or not, so they are always super aware of their surroundings and other people.

 

Adults do not function well in uncertainty, have learned they cannot count on others, and are hyperaware of their environment.

 

Behavior. A person’s reactions to events. In the case of a child, if the abuse is chronic, they will learn to use their brain’s ability to dissociate to escape, or they will adopt other unhealthy avoidance behaviors.

 

Adults who lived through chronic childhood abuse learned early behaviors, such as dissociation, which, now in adulthood, are maladaptive.

 

Childhood Trauma and Learned Helplessness

 

 

It is necessary to remember that adults can acquire learned helplessness also through maltreatment by a life partner. Adults who experience abuse learn they cannot escape and, after a while, give up hope and remain trapped in their misery.

 

Abuse in childhood sets us up as adults for learned helplessness because we are dependent on our caregivers for all our physical and emotional needs. As children, we quickly learn to appease the adults in our lives to minimize the displeasure of our caregivers.

 

If a caregiver is emotionally absent, neglectful, controlling, critical, or abusive, we, as children, do not feel secure and develop feelings of shame and inadequacy because we are powerless to be heard and change our situation. Children who live in overly strict homes where the message is loud and clear that the caregivers feel they are a burden or that it is only their rules that matter grow up feeling hopeless and helpless.

 

Ending Our Time Together

 

Child abuse is always an ugly topic to cover, but it is critical if we are to end it. We need to understand and have conversations about the effects it has on the adults these children become.

 

In the case of learned helplessness, the child is the elephant tied to a tree by a strong rope. The child may attempt many things to appease their abuser and gain the love and nurturance they deserve but fail, and eventually, they give up trying.

 

Then, these children, now adults, have learned that they are helpless to change whatever happens to them, so they miss many opportunities. As the picture above suggests, the cage door has been opened, but because of learned helplessness, they are unable to see it and feel safe in their misery.

 

It is up to us to ensure that learned helplessness is not taught to our children and that if we experience it ourselves, we reach out for professional help to increase our self-esteem and learn new ways of thinking about ourselves.

 

References

 

Maier, S. F., & Seligman, M. E. (2016). Learned helplessness at fifty: Insights from neuroscience. Psychological review, 123(4), 349.

 

Maier, S. F., & Seligman, M. E. (1976). Learned helplessness: theory and evidence. Journal of experimental psychology: general, 105(1), 3.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4920136/

 

Seligman, M. E. (1972). Learned helplessness. Annual review of medicine, 23(1), 407-412.

https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.me.23.020172.002203