Learned Helplessness

Hello Internet, my name is John Wessel.

I want to start by telling you about a psychological experiment. Psychologists gave electric shocks to dogs. Now, I don't know what the fetish is with psychologists and giving electric shocks. I certainly don't know what it is about giving them to dogs. They should either pick on people their own size and give the electric shocks to college freshmen, or lab rats, or maybe even a cat, but not a dog. I'm a dog person so I don't like that. But anyway…

The experiment was to take a dog. Put it in a harness so the dog couldn't get away and then give the dog electric shocks. The dog was also given a button that the dog could push to stop the electric shocks. The dog learned pretty quickly, "If I'm getting shocked, push the button, shocks go away."

A second dog was put in a similar harness and given a button but its button didn't work. The second dog was at the mercy of the researchers to stop the shocks. I think in the original experiment the second dog's circuit was hooked up to the first dog's circuit so the second dog was at the mercy of the first dog. The point is that the second dog was helpless.

As you'd imagine, that second dog became pretty depressed. "I'm restrained in a harness, I'm getting electric shocks and there's nothing I can do about it." Why it takes research grant money to figure this out, to figure out that it will make someone depressed, I don't know.

I guess what separates psychologists from garden-variety weirdoes is the subsequent idea. They would then take the dogs and put them in a similar contraption but a little bit different. It was a box with a partition. You put the dog in one side where there are electric shocks. All the dog has to do is jump over the partition to the other side of the box where there are no electric shocks.

The first dog, the one whose button had worked, figured out to jump over and escape the electric shocks. But, the second dog did not. The second dog just whimpered and took the pain. He did not attempt to escape. The second dog had learned to be helpless.

Here's a similar idea applied to humans, though less well studied because of ethical considerations. It's called Stockholm syndrome. It's when a captive begins to empathize and then sympathize and then perhaps even assist their captor. Captives suffering from Stockholm syndrome have in some cases even been known to help their captors resist the police trying to conduct a rescue!

Why? Why would a person do this? In the case of the dog, we can hypothesize that dog is just too stupid to recognize that the scenario has changed: that the box contraption is not like the harness contraption and that he can actually escape the shocks. But, a human ought to be smart enough to understand that the scenario where your arms and wrists are zip-tied and the terrorist has a glock against the side of your head is very different than when SWAT teams are busting in through the door. In the second case it ought to be obvious that you're no longer help;ess and can change your behavior.

When the captives start helping their captors, this is some kind of like 9th level black belt learned helplessness. The shallow answer is that by the time SWAT comes around, the captor has convinced the captive of his world view and now the captive wants what the captor wants, even when that involves self-harm.

The immediate and deeper question is: How did that convincing happen? I think the reason is that agreeing with your captor provides an escape from the mental anguish of being a captive. Being in emotional distress for an extended period of time can be very physically damaging. By rationalizing away your distress you can actually protect your physical body. You've probably heard the expression, "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade." Well, what if you can't make lemonade? I guess if life gives you lemons just pretend you've made lemonade. To flog a metaphor a little bit more, the problem is that if life then comes along with sugar, you're not likely to take it because you think you've already got lemonade.

Rationalizations may be helpful to prevent mental anguish when you truly are helpless but they turn into your worst enemy the second there's an actual chance to escape your helplessness. They hold you back.

We want a third way. We want to be able to recognize a real solution should it present itself. That requires being cognizant that a problem exists so rationalization is not going to work. At the same time, we don't want to incur the mental and physical damage of knowing that a problem exists. What that third path is called is acceptance. It's a hard stage to reach up front. It involves facing the fear of the consequence of the predicament that you're in. But, if you can face those fears and accept them, then emotionally you relax and you remain open to solutions should they come down the road.

I did some self-exploration a while back to try to find out if I was suffering from something analogous to Stockholm syndrome. I looked in my life to when I have been a captive. Maybe, when I was a captive, I rationalized away a lot of my stress and maybe I'm no longer in that distress. I can think of 3 situations in which I, and I think almost every typical person, has been a captive. I can probably stretch that to 4 or 5.

The first is being a captive to nature. You've got to eat. You've got to work to eat. At some point you die. There's a lot of stress in the predicament we call life. Acceptance, as always, is the best path. We want to accept things like death while not being constantly distressed about it but also being open to solutions that come down the road such as researching medicine.

We don't want to develop a Stockholm syndrome where not only do we accept death, we go a little bit too far and somehow hope for death, which is I think what a lot of religions do. Right? The idea that what is after death is actually better than what we have in life.

At the same time, I don't think you want to go in the other direction and avoid the idea of death and hope that there will be some kind of rescuer, some kind of mothering figure who comes and gives you everything you need. I think when we're young that mothering figure is actually our mother - that's where the name comes from - but then when people get a little bit older there can be a failure to launch. I think a lot of that is held in the American political liberal viewpoint where the government becomes the mothering figure who is going to deliver healthcare and food and shelter and safety and all the things you need rather than accepting that we're in a predicament called life and sometimes distressing things just happen.

When I was a child I was also, in a way, a captive of my parents. Let's put it this way: I certainly couldn't escape. Things actually went pretty well. I had very loving parents who, for the most part, let me develop the way that I chose to. But, they weren't perfect people and when they made mistakes, I suffered. I was harmed. The best way to deal with that is to accept I was harmed and look for ways to heal myself and then look to see if I can forgive my parents for any mistakes they may have made. The answer for me is clearly, "yes." They were very good people. Any mistakes made were totally honest mistakes so I can forgive them. They can apologize to me for anything they've done so that's very nice.

Not everyone is nearly so lucky. In fact, I think most people are not. In a very bad situation, a kid can suffer routine physical abuse from their parents. You could go all Stockholm syndrome on that and start rationalizing the behavior. You could start thinking that, "Well, it's a good thing that I'm beaten because I'm a bad person." or "The beating is made out of love to give me a sense of discipline." These are the sort of rationalization I think are very popular. These rationalizations can lead to their own failure to launch scenario that I think is embodied in American conservative ideology where a lot of violence is celebrated. Violence is often seen as a good thing to keep people disciplined and to keep them in line with living life the way they're somehow supposed to. There winds up being a lot of violence against gay people or alternate sexual behavior. A lot of violence is used to enforce social norms where a more mature person would look to persuasion and negotiation to get what they want or to get people to behave in a more positive way.

In general, people wind up holding an ethic that one set of ethical rules applies to those with power and another set of ethical rules applies to you and your peer group. When you're a kid, you're subject to all sorts of rules but your parents are not. You can either choose to say, "Wow, my parents should be, but they're not acting that way. That's very bad." Or, you can get the idea that it's actually morally just for rules not to be universal, for some people to be more equal than others. When you grow up, you may still think that way. The little peasants need to have a certain ethic but a powerful group such as the government or the clergy should not be subject to those rules. Of course in reality, people are people, and the rules should be universal.

My third captivity, if I may be so melodramatic in saying so, was public schooling. For whatever that was, 6 or 7 hours a day, I was a captive of the public school system and I was delivered to that by my parents. Here again, I think I got quite lucky for the preschool through 8th grade level. I think I would have chosen to go, had I had the choice. But certainly once high school came things went downhill. I think an awful lot of people have pretty bad public school experiences all around. The Stockholm scenario of public schooling would be to get the ethic that without being forced to learn, or to study, I wouldn't do it. That, somehow, the reason I'm being coerced is because I'm a bad person who needs to be forced to do the reading and such. I think the reality is that people are naturally very curious and when people want to do something, want to learn something, they put a whole lot of their own effort into it. They don't need to be told what to do.

I remember one summer having a book that I especially loathed. It was A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. While most summers I would read a whole stack of books, that particular summer I didn't because when I was reading I thought I should be reading the assigned reading and then I didn't do that because I didn't want to and then I wound up hardly reading at all.

I finally learned to throw the book across the room into the corner and say, "You know what? I'm studying and learning what I deem to be important for me." When you finish your hamster wheel, public school existence and now you actually have the freedom to be creative, to put your creative juices where you want, recognize that you actually have the opportunity to do it and do it. Don't continue in this rationalization thinking that, "I'm a bad person. I don't read because I'm not being forced to," and then not read. Actually realize that "No, the whole time I would have loved reading and I simply wasn't because I was being forced to read certain things."

So, these are the 3 captivities I have braved in my life, those of nature, my parents and public school. I think other people have often been caught in situations where they're stuck at their job but then when the opportunity to change jobs comes along, they don't change, so look into that. I think an awful lot people sign up for the military not knowing what they're getting into and instead of realizing that they were just part of a very bad organization, actually start to respect and believe in that world view of Mars.

You're job is to do some self-exploration. Figure out when have you been a captive, when have you rationalized abuse against yourself instead of recognizing who was really at fault, accepting, maybe even forgiving that. Thank you for listening, as always.