🔼: [[Protector Strategies 🛡️]] ##### Learned Helplessness > "It's always impossible until it's done." > – Nelson Mandela I don't like the term "Learned Helplessness," because to me it suggests there was some kind of choice involved, which is [[💡 Shame|shaming]], but there wasn't. - Don't ask for permission - Don't defer to others - Don't wait for other people to make something possible for you - The Third Door. 'When one door closes, another opens,' but sometimes it isn't a door. Sometimes it's a window. Or a manhole. Sometimes you can pick up a hammer and break through the wall. - [[🔑 We have no obligation to cope with what we can change]]. - The flip-side of Learned Helplessness is individualism and isolation, trying to do too much on our own and not [[⭐️ Community Care#🦮 How to know when you need help, and how to ask|🦮 asking for help]] or even knowing we need to. Modulate your [[Locus of Control]] Passive Challenge happens to us. Active Challenge is what you pick. Passive Challenges > Active Challenges = Loss of agency, feel powerless, lose motivation. Take on more Active Challenges - The Western [[⭐️ Learning|Education]] system. - Helicopter, overbearing, over-protective, [[🛡️ Fixing and Advice Giving]] grown-ups who don’t let kids do anything for themselves ###### The Discovery of Learned Helplessness > [!warning] Trigger Warning: Animal Cruelty Scientists took dogs and divided them into two groups and one of the two were forced to endure some kind of punishment. For example, Group 1 may have received electric shocks that couldn't be stopped or avoided no matter what they did. Meanwhile Group 2 received electric shocks that could be stopped under certain conditions (pulling a level, hopping over a barrier). After that, they took the same dogs and tested them again in a setting where *everyone* could avoid the shocks by doing certain things. The dogs who originally couldn't do anything to avoid the shocks all seemed to resign themselves to the punishment and made no attempt to stop them – this is what we call 'Learned Helplessness'. I think what's most interesting about this is how the dogs who experienced 'Learned Helplessness' un-learned it. First they tried treats and encouragements, but they didn't work. Someone had to *physically move* the dogs away from the area that would provoke the shocks *at least* twice before the dogs learned that they had the power to control them. Of course, humans are not dogs, but [[🔑 we need each other|🔑 we still need each other]]. --- In another study, adult humans were put in a setting and given a task. Everyone had a distracting noise playing but only some of them had the option to turn it off. Turns out, even if they chose *not* to turn the sound off, the humans who had the option to performed better than those who didn't.