Healing from Learned Helplessness
As we continue our series on healing , I want to make sure I address how our work itself can be part of the healing process.
When I hear the word “healing,” my mind goes to contexts outside of the workplace: the hospital, the therapist’s office, and the church sanctuary. These are all important places where healing can take place, and where I’ve personally found grace to take back with me into my work.
But we sell the Holy Spirit short if we imagine healing happens only in these contexts. Like Jesus spitting in the dirt to make mud for healing a blind man’s eyes (see John 9 ), God can use the stuff of everyday life to work healing for us. That includes our jobs.
[Thanks for reading. This post continues our series The Work of Healing. Check out our other posts on faith and work and emotional health for more resources on living an integrated Christian life. Subscribe to get the next post in the series in your inbox.]
In particular, one psychological and spiritual malady that we can find healing from at work is learned helplessness. Because this kind of helplessness is learned, it also has to be unlearned. Healing comes in the form of learning to do things that we thought we couldn’t do. This makes the workplace an ideal environment for the healing process.
For disciples of Jesus, this healing is all about coming to know, in the most practical terms possible, that “the Lord is my helper” (Hebrews 13:6 NIV). He’s the one who helps us unlearn our helplessness.
[A heads up in case it’s helpful: This post discusses animal experimentation, childhood abuse, and domestic violence.]
What is Learned Helplessness?
Sometimes reading the results of psychological studies makes you feel bad for the animals involved in the experiments (even if they were carried out in an ethical manner). That was my experience when reading about the foundational experiments that established the concept of learned helplessness . The poor dogs.
In 1972, psychologists Martin Seligman (who would later catalyze the positive psychology movement) and Steven F. Maier published a study about electric shocks administered to dogs.
In Part 1 of the experiment, some dogs could press a button to make shocks stop, while other dogs had no control over the shocks they received. Nothing they did made a difference.
In Part 2 of the experiment, the same dogs were put in an environment where they could all jump a short wall to escape shocks. But the dogs who couldn’t do anything about the shocks in Part 1 didn’t even try to escape in Part 2. They just laid down and whined.
In other words, the dogs who had learned that they were helpless in Part 1 continued to act as if they were helpless in Part 2—even though they weren’t.
Childhood Trauma and Learned Helplessness
It’s not hard to see how this experiment created a paradigm for how we human beings can learn helplessness. All of us have had Part 1 experiences: situations where things were out of our control.
For many of us, those experiences came early enough in life that they formed our personalities. Early childhood abuse, neglect, or other traumas can severely affect someone’s sense of personal agency. If nothing you do can make the bad things stop, why try to do anything?
The difficulty is that we take the lessons we learned in our Part 1 experiences and then apply them to Part 2 situations. If our parents weren’t trustworthy, it’s hard to believe that our bosses, friends, and colleagues might be trustworthy now. If nothing we did back then could save us, it’s hard to believe that it’s worth making an effort to improve our situation now.
Consider this description on Reddit from a survivor of childhood bullying:
I was relentlessly bullied by both fellow students and was always singled out by the staff and teachers for defending myself. How this applies to my now 34 year old self is I’m constantly worried about being fired at my job. It’s a tough thing to get over. I’m worried about how my coworkers see me, and I’m scared to death to ever take time off or make any sort of mistake that might paint me in a bad light.
Those of us who did not experience profound trauma in childhood may have a hard time empathizing with just how compromised another person’s sense of agency can be. We can look at someone else in a Part 2 situation who seems to be lying down and taking the shocks when they have an option to leave, to make it stop, to escape: A friend who won’t leave a destructive relationship, a family member who won’t get help for an addiction, a coworker who indulges in self-sabotage. Just jump over that wall, we think. It isn’t that tall!
Trying to Do the Right Thing
But it’s not about how tall the wall is now. It’s about that Part 1 experience, when there was no way out.
It might seem obvious to an outsider what the right next step is to overcome helplessness: Doing the thing that you can do to help yourself. Leave the destructive relationship. Sign up for addictions counseling. Give your next work project your best effort!
But what feels obvious to one person often feels impossible to someone else. No one is saying to themselves, “Well, I know very well I could do that; I just don’t want to.”
What they’re saying is, “If I do it, I doubt I can stick with it.”
“I don’t know if I can take that risk.”
“I’m afraid of what might happen if I try.”
It’s quite likely that people have tried to do the right thing only to feel defeated by the same old patterns. According to the National Domestic Violence Hotline , “survivors of abuse return to their abusive partners an average of seven times before they leave for good.” Similarly, the Recovery Research Institute cites a study showing an average of five “serious recovery attempts” before achieving long-term recovery from drug or alcohol addiction.
Learned helplessness is only one piece of the puzzle for recovery from experiences of abuse or from substance abuse. But it’s a common thread to many people’s experiences. Learned helplessness can also hamstring our efforts toward personal growth even if it comes in less severe or dramatic forms. Regardless of the circumstance, coming to believe you can do what it takes to make a change is no small thing.
Unlearning Learned Helplessness
There is good news: Learned helplessness can be unlearned.
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The process of unlearning is slow. In Part 2 of the original experiment with the dogs, researchers literally had to pick the “helpless” dogs’ feet up and move them over the wall to give them an inkling that it would be worth moving their feet themselves.
We have to take responsibility for ourselves, but we also sometimes need help. Maybe God is reaching down and showing you how you can move your foot over the wall. It starts with taking a first step.
We can ponder what “jumping over the wall” would look like in our context. If we’re facing an abusive relationship or an addiction , it might mean making that phone call to a hotline to hear a human voice helping us take the first step toward leaving or quitting. If we’re facing a sense of helplessness at work, it might look different. What’s a step that you feel like you just couldn’t take?
It’s not just self-advocacy that suffers from learned helplessness. On the other side of the equation, so to speak, there are forms of sacrificial service that also require a strong sense of personal agency:
Any of these steps will require courage. You have to entertain the idea that you would do it, and consider the possible consequences.
Of course, there are situations where considering those consequences will lead us not to take a certain course of action. Sometimes wisdom dictates we leave our circumstances as they are.
But it’s also worth noticing that sometimes the voice of fear convinces us it is the voice of wisdom. We may persuade ourselves it’s forces beyond our control keeping us where we are, when really it’s the memory of that Part 1 experience, when we really didn’t have control.
In other words, you’re not as helpless as you feel you are.
Change comes slowly, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t come at all. Just start with a first step today.
The Lord is My Helper
Changing any kind of habit is difficult. Learned helplessness is essentially a special case of habit. It’s a mental, emotional, and spiritual habit of believing I can’t. To shift something that’s been reinforced so profoundly over time—to even take that first step—we need help.
The writer of the letter of the Hebrews knew how hard it can be to take risks. Particularly when money questions are involved, the voice of fear whispers in our ears incessantly. And all of the examples we’ve given of steps toward unlearning learned helplessness involve decisions that could have financial consequences, for good or ill. Here’s our Spirit-inspired guidance on this point from Hebrews:
Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said, “Never will I leave you; ? ? never will I forsake you.” So we say with confidence, “The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can mere mortals do to me?” Hebrews 13:5-6 NIV
The writer cites the promise of God from Deuteronomy to never leave his people, as well as the confidence of the psalmist that the Lord will come to his help. That is how we keep our lives free from the love of money. We trust that God will be with us, that he will help us.
That’s also how we keep our lives free from the deceits of learned helplessness. When we look at that step that feels impossible, we don’t have to take it by ourselves. The Lord is right there with us, holding our hand, helping us swing our legs over the wall.
That’s what can make our work a place for healing. We see the opportunity lying open before us: The next meeting with our boss, the upcoming phone call, the job listings on LinkedIn. Then, right in the moment when we feel so strongly I just can’t do it!—we take a deep breath, welcome the healing grace of the Holy Spirit, and pray, “The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid.”
And then we take the next step.
Reflect and Practice
Take a moment to consider your own heart.
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