Unlearning helplessness by Rebecca Crichton

In 1967, Martin Seligman and his team of researchers made an unexpected discovery. They identified the concept of learned helplessness in their laboratory work. Seligman, called the ‘Father of Positive Psychology,’ wrote the ground-breaking book Learned Optimism in 1990, using some of the conclusions from that work to look at issues like depression and pessimism.

They discovered that animals, when given inconsistent feedback, would eventually stop making the effort to achieve their goals. An animal taught to press a lever for food, stops doing so when the expected results don’t happen. Sometimes it gets shocked. Sometimes it gets nothing. Sometimes it gets food.

Over time, the animal gives up. Why bother when the goal — food — can’t be guaranteed and something unwanted happens? The animals learn to be helpless.

Up until that initial work, it was thought that you couldn’t ‘teach’ people to ‘unlearn’ something. Now we know that we are always unlearning things we thought were true. Being able to adjust to changing conditions with new strategies is critical.

Guess what? There is a massive movement in the current world to teach us to be helpless! The Trump administration’s lack of consistency, constantly shifting focus, and sudden pronouncements undoing what we have taken as unshakeable givens, is resulting in many of us retreating and deciding there is nothing to be done.

Why bother when….  You fill in the blank. I know I feel an instant flood of stress hormones as soon as I hear what new egregious behavior has changed the world for the worse.

I am Reframing and Recalibrating how to respond to our current changing reality. I am questioning what Resilience looks like for me. I am confronting my own inner fearful being and reminding myself that I can still make choices.

I am heeding the consistent message from my activist friends who have committed themselves to working for change for the greater good.

• Choose what social issue means the most to you personally.
• Find the group or groups dedicated to addressing it and join them.
• Stay through the predictable and inevitable group dynamics to develop the plans and actions needed to push back against what feels hopeless.

While things can feel hopeless, we don’t have to become helpless.