What do you do when you experience the electric shocks in your life?
Most of the dogs (gods spelled backward) from group 3 learned to be helpless. When they could have easily escaped, they simply laid down and experienced the painful electric shock.
Many of us grew up in very vulnerable families where our basic needs for safety were not met. We felt fearful about one of our parent’s moods or what they might do after drinking too much. We were physically, emotionally, or sexually abused.
You could say that any of these traumatic situations would be similar to the exposure to painful electric shock causing the dogs in group 3 to learn to be helpless.
Children have very little power in their relationships with their parents. How can a child control how much their parent drinks or whether the parent is depressed or suffers from some serious type of mental illness?
Likewise, children can’t control whether they are abused or mistreated in some way. This is why adolescents run away or commit suicide so often. The developmental changes of adolescence enable more independence and autonomy.
Some teenagers just say, “I won’t take this anymore, fight back and/or leave home for protection.
To recover from these complicated situations, children need to begin to understand what has happened to them and their family, express their feelings, and then learn new and more effective coping skills to escape the viscious circle of learned helplessness.
If recovery is not possible during childhood, maybe some perceptive teacher or social worker will notice a troubled adolescent and offer a helping hand.
Or no one will notice until that troubled teen is an adult facing a serious life crisis.
What might be helpful to this adult? Of course, we hope that the crisis will lead them into a therapist’s office who is competent to do a thorough evaluation and develop a treatment plan.
Think of the crisis as an event that is big enough to cause the person to lose their ability to cope. They become lost and experience depression and, yes hopelessness.
If they are perceptive enough, they may realize that they have “been here, done this” before. This is the repetition compulsion part of the problem.
Just when they may have thought they were doing well enough, something throws them back into the abyss of darkness.
They may think to themselves, “Why is this happening to me (again)?
The learned helplessness research shows us that people, like the dogs, can be so brutally pushed down, that they believe themselves unable to cope.
They can become paralyzed with fear, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, depression, low self-esteem and a deep sense of shame and unworthiness.
The first thing a therapist would do is to begin the process of helping the client explore the connection between prior history of abuse or neglect, and the formation of irritational, automatic beliefs.
Much of these beliefs and thinking are below the awareness of the client, so it is very important for the therapist to begin helping the client discover for themselves, how this irrational thinking keeps getting them in trouble.
Here is an example:
If a person believes it is important for others to like him, he may become guarded in what he says to others.
Telling the truth to people who don’t want to hear it can lead to conflict and, in his mind, threaten the relationship.
Let’s call this “peoplepleasing.”
Having some experience with this personality type myself, I can tell you that peoplepleasers often get in trouble with others.
Listen, if you don’t tell the truth, it will definitely get you in trouble sooner or later.
Where might someone learn not to tell the truth?
If your father comes home every night drunk and threatens to beat you if you get in his way, you learn pretty quickly to keep quiet and get out of the way.
Imagine how ludicrous it would sound if someone said,
“...yea, my father came home really drunk last night and started threatening my little sister. I stepped between them and tod my father he was drunk and he should leave her alone. He realized I was right and apologized to my sister, me and my family and told us he would stop drinking immediately.”
I and hopefully you will agree that this is irrational thinking. However, adults who grew up in alcoholic homes will admit that they confronted their alcoholic parent a lot.
It’s like we are trapped in the belief that we really can do something, but what we do ony creates more heartache for us in our lives.
We become more and more convinced that there is no hope, so why not just give up.
This is where the treatment plan becomes a “conceptual map” for a client.
One of the most important gifts a therapist can give is a plan that offers a client a way out of the repetitive problems, like the one that brought them to therapy in the first place.
Perhaps the most important part of the plan is to explore, evaluate and change faulty, irrational beliefs and thoughts.
It is true, change your thoughts and beliefs, change your life.
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