It happens to meet people who require help to improve their condition in therapy, who have tried alone to solve their inconvenience. They thought about it, but the conclusion was: “I can’t do it, my condition is this, I am done so, I just have to learn to live with it, I can’t do anything about it, I have no hope …”.
Very often these reasoning are the result of a conception structured in their known mind as Learned Helplessness (sense of learned impotence).
Cherry (2014), he defined the learned impotence (Leard Helletssness) as a mental state in which a living being, after it has been exposed to frequent opposing stimuli, that is, painful or in any case unpleasant, becomes incapable or reluctant to avoid the subsequent encounter with these same stimuli, even if they are avoidable.
This presumably happens because he has learned that, despite his efforts, he cannot control the situation. If this condition of impotence It continues to occur in multiple contexts or spheres of life, the brain can learn (learn precisely) that in that particular situation or event there is nothing we can do if not expecting the outcome in a completely fatalistic way.
Therefore, when you are faced with similar situations or tasks in the future, you can give up a priori to the hope of achieving success and therefore divest on attempts to achieve it.
Helplessness It therefore indicates a condition of extreme impotencethe conception that, at the expense of all that can be done, the situation will never change. We are at the mercy of fate, we are on a raft and what we see around is only water as far as the eye can see: not only I can not do anything to avoid the inevitable, but no one else can do it, my destiny is marked.
Leaded (learned) instead means that it is not an innate trait, but that we were not structured and made it automatic. Is a learned behaviorconditioned by experiences in which the subject really has no control over his circumstances or simply perceives that he does not have it.
In fact, this condition is as a consequence of unpleasant life events and an automatic tendency to interpret them in a fatalistic way.
The sense of helplessness: from animals …
The learned impotence is a phenomenon that we humans also share with other animals: when these have been conditioned to expect pain, suffering or discomfort without a way to escape them, after a sufficient number of exhibitions, they will completely stop avoiding pain, even if there is an opportunity to do it.
When they start believing that they have no control over what is happening, they begin to feel and act as if they really were powerless.
This phenomenon was initially studied by the psychologist Martin Seligman and his collaborators around the 70s. Their experiments, at the time still deemed to be sufficiently ethical, to date would undoubtedly raise great indignation.
In fact, to simulate stressful and uncontrollable life events, the two scholars used light electric shocks that applied animals such as dogs and rats (Seligman & Groves, 1970; Seligman & Beagley, 1975).
The purpose of the experiments was to observe if there were differences in two behaviors groups of animals subjected to different experiences. A group to which no possibility had been given to avoid adverse stimuli, the other with this possibility.
In the last experimental condition, both groups of animals were given the opportunity to act to avoid electric shocks: those who had already had this possibility had taken it immediately, those who instead in the first condition had learned that despite their efforts the painful stimulation would continue, did not implement any escape or reaction behavior, but remained powerless to suffer the events.
… to man
Similar studies were also carried out on human beings, fortunately replacing the electric shocks with a strong and annoying sound. The effect was exactly the same.
Following these observations, Seligman and colleagues proposed that in the participants, who had experienced the phenomenon of similar impotence, three could be identified Specific deficits: motivational, emotional and cognitive (Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978).
- Cognitive: the subjects perceive circumstances as uncontrollable (lack of control)
- Emotional: the subjects experience a depressive state resulting from the fact of being in a negative situation on which one cannot intervene (lack of hope)
- Motivational: subjects do not respond to potential methods to escape the negative situation (lack of reaction)
Factors and connections with depressive aspects
It is easy to associate with the light of all this, the Learned Helplessness with depression conditions as a more or less structured mood disorder, and it was what Seligman and colleagues did. However, they distinguished the impotence learned in two subtypes to explain variance within the various depressive events.
With Universal Helplessness (Universal impotence) They meant a sense of impotence in which the subject believes that nothing can be done for the situation in which he finds himself. Nobody can relieve pain or discomfort.
There Personal Helplessness (personal impotence) is a much more localized sense of impotence. The subject believes that others, placed in the same condition, would be able to find a solution or would know how to avoid pain or discomfort, but is convinced that he, personally, is unable to do it.
Both types of impotence can lead to one depressive statebut the events will have different qualities. Those who feel universally powerless will tend to find external reasons both for their problems and for their inability to solve them, while those who feel personally impotent will tend to find internal reasons.
Although cognitive and motivational deficits are the same both for people who suffer from universal impotence That staff, those who suffer from the latter will tend to have a greater and greater impact emotional deficit: they could in fact experience profound problems related to low self -esteem due to the belief that others, in the face of their own problems, would know how to get by, thus underlining their greater personal inability.
Other factors of distinction
As well as on Universal vs. Personnelthe learned impotence can also be distinguished on the basis of other factors: Generality (global VS. Specific) And Stability (chronic vs. transitory)
There Generality refers to the pervasiveness of the phenomenon in different sectors. THE’global impotence will have a negative impact in several areas of life of those who suffer from it, who will also have more likely to experience a serious depression than those who suffer from specific impotence.
In the same way the Stability can affect the gravity of the depressive event: those who experience chronic impotence will be more likely to feel the effects of depressive symptoms than those who suffer from transient impotence.
Learned and psychological discomfort impotence
Even if the concept of learned Helletlessness It was born and was developed to be cohesive to the depressive one, to date we can speak of impotence learned in a much more enlarged and general way.
The inconveniences and suffering of the people we were talking about in the introduction of the article, are not necessarily linked to depression.
It is good to emphasize that the structuring of an learned impotence conception necessarily leads to a Low mood tone And therefore depressive, but the latter is not the cause, but a aggravating potential of the belief.
Any stressful living condition that is lost for a long time and of which we cannot free ourselves with our usual frontal strategies, could be the trigger for the construction of a conviction of impotence.
The behavior patterns
Often our schemes lead us to act, think and experience sensations automatically and now structuredly: in the face of any type of obstacle we put in place of favorite and preferable strategies to overcome it. The latter, with the habit, frequency and rigidity with which they are activated, risk becoming the only ones available in memory, both semantic and procedural level.
Thus, when the environment request would require a different strategy of solution, and we do not have others available, we implement the only one currently usable, but not adequate to solve our problem. The header to use the same unsuitable strategies against that certain type of discomfort, will inevitably make us meet the bankruptcy.
Experimenting with failure on each next occasion, could easily lead to structure belief of impotenceaccompanied by poor self-esteem, personal self-effectiveness and following lowering of the mood.
This “syndrome” does not allow us to react adequately, but it instilates the idea of having no other possibility of intervention in us if not to care and hope that the storm passes without causing too much damage. The discomfort increases when everyday life becomes rich in challenges, obstacles or simple requests that we have learned not to be able to respond.
Resources and interventions
A way certainly recommended and used in psychotherapeutic paths, to intervene on this condition, is the concept of “agency“(Agency)
Synofzik and colleagues (2008) refer to this as a “feel of agency”, that is, an implicit basic sensation of possess agent (be an element that can intervene on your world) that allows us to start and control actions to influence external events.
The sense of agency refers to the subjective awareness of being inhabited by desires, intentions and purposes, and by the ability to start, perform and control actions aimed at achieving them.
Patients with poor agency remain passive, they feel prey to external forces, for example the will of others or the system of moral rules and duties to whom they feel that they are obliged to join, and struggle to start behaviors born from them ideas, desires, and intentions (weight loss, round of 16, people et al. 2019)
It will therefore seem somewhat obvious, but The best way to get out of this cognitive impasse is to act!
Obviously there are paths and steps that can and must be carefully planned by patient and therapist. Identify step by step actions that can be easily acted and from which a certain degree of satisfaction is reached, subsequently pass, and gradually, to other more complex ones that go to affect the cognitive, emotional and behavioral scheme that binds us to the condition of discomfort.
Bibliography
- Abramson, Ly, Seligman, Mep, & Teasdale, JD (1978). Learned Helletssness in Humans: Critique and Reformulation. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 87, 49-74. DOI: 10.1037/0021-843x.87.1.49
- Cherry, K. (2014). What is learned Helplessness and Why Does it Happen? Verywell mind. Retrieved from https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-learned-helplessness-2795326
- Dimaggio, G., Ottavi, P., Popolo, R., Salvatore, G. (2019). Body, imagination and change. Raffaello Cortina Editore
- Moore, JW, Middleton, D., Haggard, P., and Fletcher, PC (2012). Exploring Implicit and Explicit Aspects of Sense of Agency. Conscious. Cogn. 21, 1748–1753. DOI: 10.1016/J.Concog.2012.10.005
- Seligman, Mep, & Beagley, G. (1975). Leard Helletssness in the Rat. Journal of Comparation and Physiological Psychology, 88, 534-541. Doi: 10.1037/H0076430
- Seligman, Mep, & Groves, DP (1970). NonTransient Learned Helplessness. Psychonomic Science, 19, 191-192. Doi: 10.3758/BF03335546
- Synofzik, M., Vosgerau, G., & Newen, A. (2008). Beyond The Comparator Model: A Multifactorial Two-Step Account of Agency. Consciousness and cognition, 17, 219–239. DOI: 10.1016/J.Concog.2007.03.010
