Member-only story
How to Be Less Helpless
A plan for (finally) dropping the victim narrative
I use this term a lot in my work with coaching clients: despair mode.
I see folks slip into this place so easily. A mode of freak out. Of self pity. Of negativity. Of spiraling out about worst-case scenarios. Of what’s-the-point-ism. Of fear.
For most of my 40-plus years, this was my default, too. I was addicted to worst-case scenarios, of my own inability to change anything in my life, to my victim narrative.
What despair mode encouraged me to live in was two states: learned helplessness, and learned hopelessness.
The first, learned helplessness — well, if you read my Princess in a Tower Syndrome post, you have an idea what that looks like. I stayed stuck, using the excuse of not knowing how to do something perfectly to never do it.
In psychological terms, learned helplessness is the concept used to describe a state of not trying that from what I understand arose from an experiment done on animals. In this (uh, awful-sounding) experiment, the animals are given negative stimuli like a shock when they try to escape. After a time, they stop trying to escape completely, assuming that it is hopeless and they are unable to change the situation.
Then — and this is the real kicker — even when an escape is presented, they are unable or unwilling to take advantage of it.
Damn.
Learned hopelessness, to me, is different. If learned helplessness is “I don’t know how and I’m scared to try so I won’t,” learned hopelessness is less “I don’t know how,” but more the attitude of, “Why bother? Nothing matters, anyways.”
I think today we’re suffering an extreme crisis of both learned helplessness and learned hopelessness. This particular combination is toxic not only to our personal lives, but to the state of our country, and the world at large.
And it’s ruining us all.
We’re so convinced of our own powerlessness, so committed to our own cynicism, so dedicated to our cloak of fear and our avoidance of shame, so enamored with our casual, too-cool-to-care-and-therefore-too-cool-to-be-hurt attitude, that we are literally living our lives inside…
