"Taught" Helplessness [and the Risks of Assertiveness] - Part One

The Washington Post recently featured an article I've longed to see for years - no; make that decades; I've been a dissenter at the altar of self-help since the early 1980s. Which probably seems ironic, given the nature of this blog, but bear with me and all will be made clear.

The Post article, by Jennifer Niesslein, was titled "Take This Advice and Shelve It". In two succinct Web pages, she gets to the heart of the matter.

The premise of much, if not all, popular self-help literature is that the individual seeking help is somehow to blame for having created their problem in the first place.

The proffered solutions are rarely anything more than variations on a theme of self-deception.

The purpose of the self-deception appears to be to prevent people from realizing that there are, truly and actually, situations in which adult human beings are essentially powerless.

In other words, much of the game is rigged, and a successful outcome for the game-rigger depends upon keeping the marks from seeing or believing this simple truth.

I call this "taught" helplessness, to distinguish it from the term "learned helplessness". "Learned" helplessness, after all, assumes that your perception of helplessness in a given situation is largely illusory - and that you are somehow at fault for creating the illusion. Thus, it is only you - your outlook and perception - that is in need of repair. Once you unlearn the fallacy that you are helpless [the theory goes], you can seize control of the universe, or at least those parts of it that are currently bothering you.

Sounds familiar, doesn't it? And isn't it convenient for everyone around you! You take all the blame, they get to feel superior, and they need not lift a finger to help you.

Reframing this concept as "taught" helplessness places the appropriate share of responsibility onto the school system, family of origin, workplace, abusive spouse, etc. Rather than presuming that the person who feels helpless isn't really helpless at all, and merely desires to feel that way, it implies, much more accurately, that other persons, groups, or systems may be, consciously or subconsciously, actively or passively - or passive-aggressively - encouraging the target to feel helpless.

Let me give you a personal example. Two, in fact.

I developed a dental abscess recently. For a day or two, I wasn't sure whether it was an infection or a neuritis, but I soon had no doubt as to what was going on. I called the dentist, and was fobbed off with no antibiotic, an appointment scheduled 24 hours later, and advice to take ibuprofen while enduring the wait.

I tend not to seek medical help until I NEED it. So by the time I made this call, I was experiencing electric shock type pain all along both the lower and upper mandibles on one side of my face - referred pain through the cranial nerves. My poor tooth was screaming for help, with all its friends and neighbors joining in. Moreover, due to the risk of gastric bleeding, I need to avoid NSAIDs [aspirin, ibuprofen, etc.] whenever possible, and because of an enzyme deficiency, Tylenol [acetaminophen] isn't an option.

I carefully and clearly described all this, in a calm and gentle - but by no means falsely cheerful or Pollyannaish - tone of voice, without drama. None of it was apparently heard, processed, or responded to in a constructive way.

Several hours later, at the point where the pain had become literally head-bangingly unbearable, I tried again, and this time aspirin was recommended.

The following day, the abscess finally received the recognition it deserved, and I was referred to an endodontist for emergency treatment ASAP. I was helpfully encouraged to call them myself and make the appointment, thus assuring that it would be less likely to be taken seriously than if the dentist's office placed the call and requested immediate assistance. I made three calls to the endodontist's office over a 75-minute period, waiting until after their official 'opening time'. As you might have predicted based on the rest of the story so far, none of my calls were returned.

This is not one, but two "taught helplessness" scenarios.

I asked, repeatedly and in an appropriate manner each time, for assistance that was desperately needed.

I asked precisely the persons I should have asked.

I asked in an adult, self-controlled, calm and competent fashion.

I described symptoms, without proffering a diagnosis, and I did not minimize my discomfort, nor did I exaggerate it.

I behaved, in other words, exactly as a responsible adult is - theoretically - supposed to behave in this type of situation.

The result, each time, was that my problem was trivialized, dismissed, or ignored outright, and I was thus given the clear message that I deserved nothing better than I was receiving - which was to say, almost nothing, or nothing at all, in the way of help.
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No, I didn't accept this, and I'll explain how I handled it in a moment.

It's important at this point to shift the focus from the specific to the general. Because this type of situation, and this type of message, isn't something that just happens to middle-aged bloggers with abscessed teeth. It occurs all over the landscapes of our adult lives.

-Your child is bullied at school, and when you contact the principal or other administrators, you are told that your child must somehow have instigated the bullying. None of these behavioral masterminds was present during the actual incident, but they are unanimous in foisting the blame onto your child. Nothing is done to the bully. Your child, however, is targeted even more ferociously once the bully finds out that an intervention was attempted.

-You are bullied at work by an arrogant new hire, and when you attempt to discuss the problem with your supervisor [who of course hired the jerk and is more invested in defending that decision than in protecting your wellbeing], you are told that you "take things too personally", that you should "just let it roll off your back", that you "need to learn how to work with difficult people". When you attempt further resolution, for example via on site mediation, you discover that the 'impartial' mediator sides with the bully, and that your efforts to describe the pattern of bullying behavior are dismissed as 'an unhealthy preoccupation' on your part. If anything happens to the bully, it is probably a promotion.

-Your adult daughter marries a man you consider overly controlling and potentially vicious. She can't see this; he's playing up his controlling as fascination with her, his potential viciousness as sensitivity and neediness. They marry and move out of state, and when he begins to batter her, their church - and yours - takes the position that she is not being sufficiently submissive to his God-ordained 'headship'.

None of these scenarios is exaggerated, and I can assure you that none of them is fictional. These things happen, to real people, every day; and to take the position that the people to whom they happen have somehow conspired against themselves to cause these things to happen to them is obscene, if not frankly blasphemous.
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[Part Two of this post follows immediately.]