Consider the following two sentences.
One of them represents a fantasy. The other one is reality.
Pay attention to the differences.
What doesn't kill youmakes you stronger.
That's a fantasy, of course.
And here's reality.
What does not make you stronger sometimes kills you, or at the very least, weakens you considerably.
What is better? To be embedded in fantasy as a kind of defense or escape or to adhere to reality, to remain with an intact reality testing.
Sometimes people say, reality is too much for me. It's intolerable. It's unbearable. It's unpleasant. It's humiliating. It's discomforting.
And I'd rather live in a daydream or a fantasy. Because there I'm the master of my own destiny and fate and I can hope there is hope.
But you see, reality is not hopeless. Every cul de sac, that's the correct pronunciation, not caldesac. Every dead end is an opportunity to explore a bypass.
Hope and hopelessness are both counterfactual fantasies. There is the Polyanish view of the world through pink tinted glasses or rose tinted glasses.
Everything is going to be okay. If I only put my mind to it, I will succeed. My thinking can change the world around me. I can attract success and money and power to my heart's content.
All these forms of magical thinking encouraged by unscrupulous con artists online and offline.
But this is not hope. This is self-deception. This is a pathology.
When it goes to extreme, it could be construed as a form of mental illness. Hope is fantasy-based.
And as such, is not a good guide to how to manage your life, what goals to set, how to pursue them, how to realize that you've accomplished something.
Hope is an ever-receding northern star.
But hopelessness is the same. It's not real. It's not grounded in facts. It's a form of dystopian despair.
They're both wrong.
Remember what I said earlier? Every cul de sac, every dead end is an opportunity, an opportunity to explore a bypass.
And all these hope and hopelessness, both of them, represent learned helplessness.
When you hope, you're depositing your life at the hands of destiny, of fate, of God, of other people, you have an external locus of control.
And when you're hopeless is the same. It's as if you're not the master of your own fate. It's as if you're not in control of your life. As if everything is coming from the outside you are just a hapless inert passive object bobbing on the waves of misfortune.
Both hope and hopelessness are therefore the wrong view of the world, the wrong way to look at the world, a wrong way to gauge your life, let alone set purpose, inject purpose into it, direct you somehow.
We are all traumatized to this or that extent. Most of us endure, luckily, only mini traumas. Some of us are heavily traumatized.
Responses to trauma all involve helplessness and a regression to an impotent, infantile style or state.
So when you say, I hope, it's as if you're a baby. It's as if you're a baby waiting for something good to happen.
And when you say, I'm hopeless, it's hopeless. You're the same. You're a baby. You're an infant, awaiting your doom and gloom.
Helplessness is a major problem, and you need to learn, you need to unlearn your helplessness.
Helplessness is a state of incapacity, vulnerability, powerlessness. It is associated with a worldview, with a theory about the universe, a theory about other people's minds, this is known as mentalization, and a theory about relationships. This is known as an internal working model.
So there is this perception that you cannot do much to improve negative situations, that you have no agency, that you're not independent, example you're powerless you don't have any way to affect change or influence your environment human and non-human, there's this perception of impotence.
And of course it's learned, it's acquired, it's not real, it does not reflect you or reality.
Helplessness is at the core of phenomena such as anxiety, dependence, constriction of life, withdrawal, demoralization, and essentially paralysis.
And so you need to cope.
The antidote to helplessness is coping. The antidote to depression is action.
You need to do something. Even if this something is not embedded in a long-term plan, if it's not a long-term goal, even if it makes no sense to you, you need to get up and act.
Action negatesdepression, action ameliorates or reduces anxiety.
And action is the best antidote to helplessness because it ipso facto, automatically, involves some level, a modicum of control and mastery over yourself and to some extent over your environment.
This coping is crucial.
You have a coping potential. The coping potential is your evaluation of the prospects of successfully managing environmental demands or personal commitments.
You need to get rid of your external locus of control. You need to develop an internal locus of control.
The locus of control, you need to understand, is not real. It's not something that is absolutely proven. It's not scientific. It's a belief. It's an article of faith. It's not something that you need to adhere to for good, for life.
So there is definitely a way to get rid of an external locus of control.
And you need to find it. you need to find it because if you don't find a way to internalize your local locus of control you will always feel that you are out of control or that someone else or something else, circumstances, environment, other people control you.
Locus of control is a construct. It's a construct. It is a categorization of people's motivational orientation and perceptions of how much control they have over the conditions of their lives.
If you have an external locus of control, you tend to behave in response to external circumstances. And you tend to perceive your life outcomes as arising from factors out of your control, and that includes other people.
And if you have an internal locus of control you tend to behave in response to internal states and intentions you perceive your life and its outcomes as arising from the exercise of agency, your own agency, your own abilities.
This was the pioneering work done by Julian Rotter.
And so the transition from external locus of control to internal locus of control is mediated via coping and actions.
As I said, your coping potential is the way you evaluate how likely you are to successfully manage the demands of your environment and your personal commitments.
But coping potential is not the same as coping.
Coping potential deals with the prospects, chances, probabilities of successful management rather than with actual deployment of your resources.
Before I go into various forms of coping and so on, before I provide some tips, I want you to understand the five pillars, the five pillars of hopelessness, the five pillars of learned helplessness.
Number one, the world is hostile, the world is dangerous. I am too small, too insignificant, not equipped, inadequate to cope with the world. It's a jungle out there. And it's going to consume me. It's going to devour me. It's going to destroy me.
That is not true.
Repeated studies have demonstrated that the vast majority of people are actually good or well-intentioned. I wouldn't say good, but well-intentioned. They are much more likely to help you than to hinder you.
Pessimistic worldview that everyone is an animal and it's dog eats dog which by the way I've never seen a dog eat another dog but okay this pessimistic worldview is wrong is ill-founded it's counterfactual in other words it's a myth. It is a fantasy. A nightmarish fantasy, but a fantasy all the same.
The world is not hostile. The world could be dangerous and risky if you put yourself in dangerous and risky situations and environments. Otherwise, the vast majority of the time, it's not dangerous and it's not risky.
Number two, catastrophizing.
Remember, we are dealing with the five pillars of learned helplessness.
The second pillar is catastrophizing. The tendency to create scenarios in which everything goes bad. Everything ends with a catastrophe.
And when you catastrophize, you exaggerate the negative consequences of events and decisions. And the emphasis on exaggeration. Catastrophizing is a caricature.
People catastrophize when they think that the worst possible outcome is also the most likely outcome, which is never the case.
And they think that this bad outcome, this horrible scenario, this inevitable doom will occur from a particular action or a particular situation.
They feel as if they are in the midst of a catastrophe in situations that could be, of course, serious or upsetting or even threatening.
But very, very rarely do we come across a disastrous, calamitous situation, an apocalypse.
And yet people who catastrophize, regard everything, even the most minor issues, hindrances, obstacles, problems, difficulties, they regard them as the harbingers of a total collapse of their world and their life.
It's a form of paranoid ideation.
The tendency to catastrophize, it increases the level of anxiety and generates maladaptive behavior, we awfulize. And this was first described by Albert Ellis by the way, who is also responsible for a lot of work in the early study of narcissism.
The five pillars of learned helplessness.
Number one, hostile world.
Number two, catastrophizing.
Number three, no agency. A sense that you have no impact on your world, that you, there is no way, you can change anything.
That you, while you are active, trying to somehow accomplish a goal, trying to produce an effect, try to exert an influence, trying to extract a benefit from your environment or circumstances or situation or other people, you keep failing.
It's a sense that you're a failure, that you are constitutionally and structurally inadequate. It's a part of an internalized bad object. It's an introject that keeps telling you, there's no way you're going to succeed. Don't even try.
And so, a lack of agency.
Number four, a compromised sense of self-efficacy. When you believe that no matter what you do, you're unlikely to make things happen the way you want to.
Now, there's a difference between efficacy and agency. Agency is the power to act.
And people who believe they lack agency experience themselves as utterly powerless, utterly passive, utterly impotent.
Efficacy has to do with competence. They believe that you're competent to perform in a certain way, to behave, to choose a course of action, especially to the perception of this performance capability.
So there's a perceived self-efficacy.
And so someone with no agency and a compromised sense of self-efficacy is someone who tells himself, I am powerless to act, and even if I were to act, I would probably fail.
And this of course generates phenomena such as repetitioncompulsion, where you keep trying the same thing, hoping for different outcomes.
And finally, the last pillar of learned helplessness is perennial pessimism, hopeless the beliefs that things will inexorably ineluctably go badly and end badly.
Now you need to negate and you need to reverse and you need to confront each and every one of these five pillars. You need to reverse and you need to confront each and every one of these five pillars.
You need to educate yourself that the world is not hostile, not dangerous, and not risky if you behave in a way which is reasonably wise.
You need to realize that catastrophes and disasters and cataclysms and apocalypses happen extremely rarely and that the overwhelming vast majority of things end well. Or with no outcome, no adverse outcome. Adversity is a rare event.
You need to realize that no matter how small you are, how invalidated you are, how abused you have been, how traumatized you are, how mentally ill you are, no matter who you are, you always have agency. You're always capable of obtaining and securing at least some results, some outcomes, some accomplishments.
There is no human being alive, even prisoners, in maximum security, in solitary confinement. There are no human being alive, even prisoners in maximum security, in solitary confinement, there are no human beings alive with no agency and no self-efficacy, no such thing. Even in solitary confinement, in maximum security prison, even there, you have agency in the sense that you control your mind. You have agency over your mind. No one can take away your mind. No one can take away your mind.
And that renders you self-efficacious. You just have to redefine your goals and targets and reap the resulting accomplishments you reap what you sow.
So we all have agency and self-efficacy. No one can take it away for us unless and until we die or we are executed.
And finally perennial pessimism is wrong. It doesn't describe the world accurately, it leads to maladaptive behaviors, it reduces self-efficacy, it's simply wrong. It's a wrong scientific theory.
So is optimism. The world is somewhere in the middle.
If you are pessimist, you're splitting the world. You're saying the world is all bad.
If you're an optimist, you're splitting the world. You're saying the world is on good.
The world is not all good. The world is not all good. The world is not all bad.
The world is somewhere in the middle. The world is painted in hues and shades of gray. It's subtle, it's nuance.
Once you got rid of these five pillars, you will have gotten rid of your helplessness. You will have unlearned your helplessness. You will have unlearned your helplessness.
Now there are two ways to cope.
Emotion-focused coping is the first way. Emotion focused coping.
Coping generally is a way to manage stress, manage tension, manage dissonance, deal with anxiety. That's what coping is all about.
Because the world in reality, in other people especially, tend to produce in us these outcomes of inner conflict. I mentioned dissonance. Dissonance is very common.
So coping is a stress management strategy.
And emotion focused coping is when you focus on regulating your negative emotional reactions to stressors and stress.
You don't take actions in order to change the stressor. You don't take action in order to affect the world, to induce a transformation in your circumstances or your environment. You don't try to change other people.
It's a hopeless quest. This is the only place where hopelessness is accurate. Changing people is a very difficult task. Ask any therapist.
Rather than do all these and get frustrated time and again and maybe become aggressive, rather than do them always, what you need to do is you need to take control over your feelings.
You need to use cognitive and behavioral tools, including meditation, including relaxation techniques, prayer if you're religious, positive reframing, wishful thinking, support, social support, or maybe social withdrawal if you're embedded in a toxic environment.
You need to talk to others, including mental health care professionals, and you need to talk to people who are positive, you need to avoid people who are negative.
There's so much you can do. There's so much you can do in order to gain control of your emotions, to re-regulate your emotions, because learned helplessness invariably involves dysregulated emotions. That's why people with borderline personality disorder feel helpless. It's intimately connected.
Your emotions are forms of cognition, we now know. And your emotions, whereas cognitions usually provide information about the outside world, your emotions provide you with information about your internal space, about the internal world.
And when you put the two together, your cognitions, your emotions, you get a total picture. You get a theory of the world, a theory of the universe.
If your emotions are dysregulated, if they threaten to overwhelm you, to drown you, to disable you, then they're counterproductive. They become a problem rather than a solution.
And you need to take care of this.
Emotion focused coping is very useful when you have developed, learned helplessness, when you became convinced, counterfactually, became convinced that somehow the stressor or the stress or the anxiety, or the tension, or the dissonance, or the conflict are beyond your capacity to change.
When you feel that you have no agency and so on so forth, by controlling your emotions, by regulating them, by sorting them out, by modulating them, by fine-tuning them, you regain control.
And by regaining control over the inner world, you regain control over the outer world.
This was first described and identified by Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman in 1984.
Emotion focused coping involves a technique called reframing which we use a lot in therapy, in psychotherapy, certain treatment modalities, especially cognitive behavior therapies.
Reframing is an exceedingly powerful tool. Reframing is when you see something, a problem for example, you see it in a totally new way from a totally different perspective.
You're used to seeing someone, you're used to seeing circumstances, you're used to observing situations, you know, in one way. And then someone proposes to you via insight, someone proposes to you to look at it, analyze it, regard it, and assimilate it in a totally different way.
And this change in perspective, this changing position is very crucial.
Because by changing perspective, you alter, you transform the conceptual or emotional context of the problem.
And consequently your perception of the problem, the difficulty of the problem, the extent of the problem, the likelihood of the problem, your perceptions of the problem change.
And the minute your perceptions of the problem change, suddenly you see a host of solutions which hitherto were invisible because you were standing there and the solutions were there and you needed to shift, you needed to change perspective, you needed to take a few steps, you needed to walk the walk and then you see, you discover the solutions which were hiding in plain sight.
In psychotherapy, usually a client comes and they frame a problem in a certain way. They say, hello, I have a problem, and this is how I see my problem.
And the therapist response and the therapeutic process in itself is about reframing the problem.
It's about telling the client, listen, the way you're looking at this problem is legitimate and validating you. I understand you.
But it's only one way of looking at a problem. Let me propose to you another way. Or let me propose to you a way to find another way, an insight.
And then the client says, oh, I never thought about it this way. Let me think for a minute. Oh, now that I see it this other way, I also see some possible solutions.
The therapist reframes the problems and the thoughts and the feelings that the client associates with the problem. And consequently this provides or elicits alternative ways to evaluate the problem, to perceive it.
So reframing is an integral part of emotion focused coping.
But there's another strategy and it's known as problem focused coping. It's also been described by Lazarus and Folkman in 1984. Problem focused coping is also about reducing stress. All forms ofProblem focused coping is also about reducing stress. All forms of coping are about reconciling internal dissonances and conflicts, reaching a state of ceasefire or peace, internal peace.
But problem-focused coping is a strategy where rather than avoiding the stressor and dealing with your feelings or emotions or perceptions of the stressor, rather than do this, in problem focus coping, you confront the stressor head on. You look the stress, the anxiety and the tension in the eye. It's a war. You declare a war in order to decrease or eliminate the inner conflict and enhance your well-being and inner peace.
So what you do, you regard the problem. Maybe you reframe it as well, but that's not always necessary. You regard the problem and you focus on the solutions.
If you were to get stuck on contemplating the problem, analyzing the problem, re-gaggagitating the problem, revisiting the problem, that is pathological. This is known as rumination, and it's a form of obsession compulsion.
In problem focus coping, the client is taught to confront the problem from the solution side.
Not so much to deconstruct the problem to its minutest atoms and elementary particles, not that, but to regard the problem as holistic as a whole situation and then come up with solutions.
The emphasis is on the solutions, on the solutions, I'm sorry.
So for example, you're encouraged to confront people who are responsible or associated with the stressor. You are egged on to adopt what is known as instrumental action. You are encouraged, taught to realize that every problem is actionable.
In other words, to get rid of your helplessness in the face of the problem.
So if you are anxious about a job interview, prepare for it. If you're afraid that you will fail in an exam study more attend every class, these are examples of problem focused coping solutions.
Problem focus coping is very helpful when your helplessness is limited.
So when your helplessness is total, when you say, I have looked at the problem, I have studied the problem, is nothing I can do about it, then if you can do nothing about the problem, focused on your reactions to the problem, there's nothing I can do about it, then if you can do nothing about the problem, focused on your reactions to the problem, your emotions, your cognitions, your behaviors, your choices, your decisions.
And this is emotion-focused coping.
But if your helplessness is limited, either because you are grandiose or because it's really a manageable problem, then problem focused coping is much better.
Coping is the use of cognitive and behavioral strategies to manage the demands of situations.
You appraise the environment, the actors and agents in the environment, you predict, you create predictions, in other words, you create a scientific theory. You create predictions, you test these predictions. And all this requires an investment of resources and so on so forth.
You realize that the circumstances present exigencies and demands on you. You ask yourself whether you are willing or able to comply with these demands, you isolate the emotions attendant upon this situation, usually negative emotions, conflicts caused by stress, all this is part of coping.
Back to learned helplessness, which is at the core of hopelessness and giving up, essentially giving up on life, giving up on others, giving up on activities, dating for example, giving up, just giving up, withdrawing, isolating, becoming solipsistic, Netflix, two cats, and microwave meal. That's my life, constricted, becoming narrower by the minute, until it crushes me.
So, this is learned helplessness. It's where repeated exposure to uncontrollable stressors, especially in early childhood, results in a failure to use any control options that become available later in life.
So as a child abused, traumatized, ignored, mocked, ridiculed, humiliated, and so on, you've experienced situations where your control was minimum or even non-existent.
Because children really have limited control, their external locus of control is justified, they're at the mercy of adults, of peers, of role models, of parental figures.
So if you have learned helplessness as a child and you grow up to be a helpless adult, that's when it's a pathology.
Because as an adult, your palette, your array of possible control mechanisms is much bigger. You have many more control options as an adult than as a child and it would be wrong to import, to bring over your child-like learned helplessness and superimpose it on your adult life, to say, actually, in essence, to say, because I've been helpless as a child, I'm helpless as an adult.
It's infantile regression. It's a regression. It's unhealthy.
Individuals of this kind, they learn that they have no behavioral control over environmental events. They have no agency.
And this undermines the motivation to make changes or to attempt even to alter the situation somehow, even minimally.
Now, learned helplessness has first been described in 1967 by Bruce Overmier and Martin Seligman.
And they conducted experiments. They exposed animals, non-human animals to electric shocks and they discovered that the animals gradually, because the electric shocks were unpredictable, arbitrary, inescapable, inexorable, and so the animals learned. They've learned to escape these shocks initially but then gradually gave up and they stopped trying they ceased trying to escape the shocks. They have learned to become helpless.
Learning and the acquisition of traits, behaviors, and mindsets is a whole huge field in psychology and it is important to understand that learning is adaptive. And when we learn to be helpless, it's because we are truly helpless.
The problem, therefore, is not in the fact that we have learned to be helpless. It's in the fact that we apply this learning in wrong environments, in wrong situations, in wrong environments in wrong situations in wrong circumstances and with the wrong people later on in life for example.
So this is what happened to these animals I think there were rats but I'm not sure mice. This is what happened to these animals. They have learned that they are helpless.
And they have learned the right thing.
Because the cruel sadistic experimenters were torturing them with electric shocks for no reason known to the mice. For no reason that could have been known to the mice.
So they gave up however when the mice were transferred to another device when they were transferred to another apparatus they didn't even try to explore the new surroundings, to learn whether they could control something here. They gave up. They imported, the mice imported, their learned helplessness from one environment to another.
They could have actually terminated the shocks in the next apparatus in the new apparatus but they didn't.
So the experiment was described this way non-human animals exposed to a series of unavoidable shocks, electric shocks, later failed to learn to escape these shocks when tested in a different apparatus, whereas animals exposed to shocks that could be terminated by a response did not show interference with escape learning in another apparatus.
A syndrome with three features develop.
A, a motivational deficit characterized by a failure to respond when challenged with further aversive events,
B, an associative deficit characterized by impairment of learning from successful coping,
and C, an emotional deficit characterized by apparent underreactivity to painful events, although later research revealed that so when you study cortic or steroid levels, animals remain very stressed. So the stress carried over, even when they changed apparatus, the stress carried over.
And this is exactly learned helplessness. You carry the traumatizing, abusive, stressful situation in your mind with you. The stress is long gone. The abuse is long terminated. The trauma is a thing of the past. Everywhere outside, except in your mind.
In your mind, they're still very real. And you're reacting to your mind, not to the environment, and this is the core of the pathology.
In the 1970s, Seligman continued his studies and he discovered that learned helplessness has a lot to do with clinical depression. And this led him to propose the famous learned helplessness theory of depression.
He said the depression is a kind of vulnerability.
According to his theory, people repeatedly exposed to stressful situations beyond their control, develop an inability to make decisions, or engage effectively in purposeful behavior.
And so much later in the 80s and 90s, we discovered a fit, a correlation, a very strong fit or correlation between learned helplessness and post-traumatic stress disorder.
And so this has a lot to do with trauma of all kinds, PTSD and later complex trauma.
Gradually in life, we develop a coping strategy. A coping or coping strategies, multiple actually. Coping strategies, of course, reflect the coping potential and reflect the assessments of the situation.
Is it a situation I can influence somehow? Something I can change, circumstances I can get rid of, people I can ignore. In other words, do I have agency, do you have an internal locus of control in this situation or not?
So the coping potential plus the assessments and everything feed into the development of coping strategies and coping strategies are not always adaptive.
Many coping strategies are actually dysfunctional or lead to dysfunction. They are maladaptive.
Coping strategy is therefore not a positive term, nor is it a negative term. It's a neutral term.
Coping strategy is an action, or of actions or series of thoughts and emotions that we use, when we come across stress, an unpleasant situation, a difficulty, a problem or a threat.
And these thought processes, these emotions manifest by modifying our reactions and dictating our course of action.
There's a conscious and direct approach to the problem.
Defense mechanisms are actually coping mechanisms but they are unconscious while coping mechanisms are defense mechanisms made conscious and externalized.
Many coping strategies or coping mechanisms involve aggression to some extent but I repeat again there are coping strategies and mechanisms which are essentially maladaptive.
An example is of course pathological narcissism where the coping strategy is fantasy and cognitive distortion known as grandiosity.
The coping strategy of the narcissist is to ignore reality, delete it, divorce it, invent a paracosm, an alternative reality within which is godlike.
Now that's a coping strategy.
The psychopath's coping strategy is defiance, recklessness, contumaciousness, rejection of authority, and generally externalized aggression.
The borderline's coping strategy is acting out.
So you see there are many examples of pathological or pathologized coping strategies and mechanisms which lead to coping behaviors involve a characteristic, often automatic action or sets of actions that people take when they are confronted with threats or with challenges or with stress or even with internal anxiety.
Coping behaviors could be adaptive. They could be positive.
For example, if you take time to analyze a problem, to meditate, to exercise in the middle of a day, that's a positive coping behavior.
But coping behaviors, as I mentioned, could be maladaptive, avoidant, negative.
For example, when you deny that something is wrong with your body and you don't consult a doctor, you have symptoms of a serious illness, they persist, and you ignore them, you do not consult a doctor. You have symptoms of a serious illness, they persist and you ignore them. You do not consult a doctor.
It's a form of coping behavior, but no one would say that it's a healthy coping behavior.
Coping mechanisms and coping behaviors involve conscious or unconscious adjustments, adaptations. They're intended to decrease tension, stress and anxiety. They're intended to somehow cope with stressful experiences, situations, environments, human and non-human, other people.
And modifying maladaptive coping strategies, maladaptive coping mechanisms, maladaptive coping behaviors, dysfunctional mindsets attendant upon these maladaptations.
This is the focus of psychological intervention.
There's only that much that you can do by yourself, but start somehow.
Start by focusing on the five pillars that I mentioned.
The world is hostile? Wrong. The world is not hostile.
Catastrophizing. Everything is going to end in a disaster wrong very few things end in a disaster
I have no agency there's nothing I can do about it wrong there's always something you can do about it
I'm not very good at what I do I'm inadequate I keep failing I have no self-efficacy wrong the more you try the more likely you are to succeed. Practice makes perfect.
And finally, I'm a pessimist. It's all bad. Wrong. Nothing is all bad. The world is partly bad and partly good.
You need to stop splitting. You need to integrate the world and realize that we all live in a twilight zone of gray, nuance and subtlety.
Good luck.