#learned helplessness

[sunlit-mess]

I don't hold grudges, that anger feeds into self-loathing instead.

#messyr #vent art #vent post #just confusing things I wanted to get out #as much as i want to 'hate' them- i cant #no matter how bad they get- i always forgive them and it hurts. But why does it feel wrong to feel hurt- that i'm not supposed to feel hurt #my mind has been altered so much idfk what to think and feel abt sometimes LMAO #one of those birds in a gilded cage AHAHA #learned helplessness #bpd #sometimes i wonder if i get out of this cycle of abuse

[isaacsapphire]

It occurred to me today that learned helplessness and sadism can be functionally identical in some cases.

You see this a lot with parenting advice in particular; someone says something like, "My kid really doesn't like being in a car seat/wearing shoes/brushing their teeth/some other thing that is required for safety, health, and/or legally, what do?" and there's ALWAYS someone who says, "Your kid has to suck it up and do the thing, and you as a parent have to suck it up and deal with forcing your kid to do the thing". Meanwhile there's other people trying to suggest why the kid might not like doing the thing and how these issues could be addressed ("car seat cover too scratchy? Sun in eyes? Uncomfortable shoes maybe, this other type of shoes would be better? Milder toothpaste or a second toothbrush so the kid can choose between the red and blue toothbrush?")

The "not even going to think about problem solving, just going to tell you to suck it up" approach could be motivated by a learned helplessness, "problems cannot be solved, only endured" or "I am not capable of solving problems" or it could be motivated by a sadistic approach to others discomfort "I don't give a single shit why you are miserable and wouldn't do a single thing to even try to understand why you are miserable" or "you deserve to be miserable".

#learned helplessness #i don't tag for that anymore #malice #original post #needs more tags

[mostlysignssomeportents]

At long last, a meaningful step to protect Americans' privacy

This Saturday (19 Aug), I'm appearing at the San Diego Union-Tribune Festival of Books. I'm on a 2:30PM panel called "Return From Retirement," followed by a signing:

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/festivalofbooks

Privacy raises some thorny, subtle and complex issues. It also raises some stupid-simple ones. The American surveillance industry's shell-game is founded on the deliberate confusion of the two, so that the most modest and sensible actions are posed as reductive, simplistic and unworkable.

Two pillars of the American surveillance industry are credit reporting bureaux and data brokers. Both are unbelievably sleazy, reckless and dangerous, and neither faces any real accountability, let alone regulation.

Remember Equifax, the company that doxed every adult in America and was given a mere wrist-slap, and now continues to assemble nonconsensual dossiers on every one of us, without any material oversight improvements?

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/20/equifax-settles-with-ftc-cfpb-states-and-consumer-class-actions-for-700m/

Equifax's competitors are no better. Experian doxed the nation again, in 2021:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/30/dox-the-world/#experian

It's hard to overstate how fucking scummy the credit reporting world is. Equifax invented the business in 1899, when, as the Retail Credit Company, it used private spies to track queers, political dissidents and "race mixers" so that banks and merchants could discriminate against them:

https://jacobin.com/2017/09/equifax-retail-credit-company-discrimination-loans

As awful as credit reporting is, the data broker industry makes it look like a paragon of virtue. If you want to target an ad to "Rural and Barely Making It" consumers, the brokers have you covered:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#axciom

More than 650,000 of these categories exist, allowing advertisers to target substance abusers, depressed teens, and people on the brink of bankruptcy:

https://themarkup.org/privacy/2023/06/08/from-heavy-purchasers-of-pregnancy-tests-to-the-depression-prone-we-found-650000-ways-advertisers-label-you

These companies follow you everywhere, including to abortion clinics, and sell the data to just about anyone:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/07/safegraph-spies-and-lies/#theres-no-i-in-uterus

There are zillions of these data brokers, operating in an unregulated wild west industry. Many of them have been rolled up into tech giants (Oracle owns more than 80 brokers), while others merely do business with ad-tech giants like Google and Meta, who are some of their best customers.

As bad as these two sectors are, they're even worse in combination – the harms data brokers (sloppy, invasive) inflict on us when they supply credit bureaux (consequential, secretive, intransigent) are far worse than the sum of the harms of each.

And now for some good news. The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, under the leadership of Rohit Chopra, has declared war on this alliance:

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/08/16/cfpb-looks-to-restrict-the-sleazy-link-between-credit-reporting-agencies-and-data-brokers/

They've proposed new rules limiting the trade between brokers and bureaux, under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, putting strict restrictions on the transfer of information between the two:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/15/tech/privacy-rules-data-brokers/index.html

As Karl Bode writes for Techdirt, this is long overdue and meaningful. Remember all the handwringing and chest-thumping about Tiktok stealing Americans' data to the Chinese military? China doesn't need Tiktok to get that data – it can buy it from data-brokers. For peanuts.

The CFPB action is part of a muscular style of governance that is characteristic of the best Biden appointees, who are some of the most principled and competent in living memory. These regulators have scoured the legislation that gives them the power to act on behalf of the American people and discovered an arsenal of action they can take:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

Alas, not all the Biden appointees have the will or the skill to pull this trick off. The corporate Dems' darlings are mired in #LearnedHelplessness, convinced that they can't – or shouldn't – use their prodigious powers to step in to curb corporate power:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

And it's true that privacy regulation faces stiff headwinds. Surveillance is a public-private partnership from hell. Cops and spies love to raid the surveillance industries' dossiers, treating them as an off-the-books, warrantless source of unconstitutional personal data on their targets:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/16/ring-ring-lapd-calling/#ring

These powerful state actors reliably intervene to hamstring attempts at privacy law, defending the massive profits raked in by data brokers and credit bureaux. These profits, meanwhile, can be mobilized as lobbying dollars that work lawmakers and regulators from the private sector side. Caught in the squeeze between powerful government actors (the true "Deep State") and a cartel of filthy rich private spies, lawmakers and regulators are frozen in place.

Or, at least, they were. The CFPB's discovery that it had the power all along to curb commercial surveillance follows on from the FTC's similar realization last summer:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/12/regulatory-uncapture/#conscious-uncoupling

I don't want to pretend that all privacy questions can be resolved with simple, bright-line rules. It's not clear who "owns" many classes of private data – does your mother own the fact that she gave birth to you, or do you? What if you disagree about such a disclosure – say, if you want to identify your mother as an abusive parent and she objects?

But there are so many stupid-simple privacy questions. Credit bureaux and data-brokers don't inhabit any kind of grey area. They simply should not exist. Getting rid of them is a project of years, but it starts with hacking away at their sources of profits, stripping them of defenses so we can finally annihilate them.

I'm kickstarting the audiobook for "The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation," a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and make a new, good internet to succeed the old, good internet. It's a DRM-free book, which means Audible won't carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/16/the-second-best-time-is-now/#the-point-of-a-system-is-what-it-does

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #privacy #data brokers #cfpb #consumer finance protection bureau #regulation #regulatory nihilism #regulatory capture #trustbusting #monopoly #antitrust #private public partnerships from hell #deep state #photocopier kickers #rohit chopra #learned helplessness #equifax #credit reporting #credit reporting bureaux #experian

[gayleafpool]

i think a big thing people get wrong w leafpool’s character is thinking her passivity comes from like fear or insecurity or being shy or something when really it comes from like. defeat. she’s been burned so many times so now she just accepts it there’s no point in fighting back

#learned helplessness #in tnp she’s very much like a rulebreaker and kind of a little shit lol #she likes going out on her own and making friends with cats from other clans and getting involved in things cuz she’s bored #she’s rebellious and craves having deep connections with others which is why being a medicine cat starts to weight on her and makes her #impulsively decide to run away with crow #esp because she’s also watching her best friend sorreltail grow up and move on. and she’s watching her sister grow up and move on #AND SHE FEELS STUCK SHES LIKE OH. BUT THIS IS IT FOR ME ISNT IT? #so she just reacts she needs to get away!! and then everything comes crashing down and she spends the rest of her life getting punished for #that choice #which slowly crushes her fire and teaches her that her desire for something ‘more’ was never going to work out #and she’s too tired to keep fighting so she accepts that #but she’s miserable about it and this misery makes her even more exhausted #so then she just kinda ends up numb #there’s no point! #SHES SO INTERESTING TO ME AAAAAUUUUGHHHHHHH it’s been so long since i’ve rambled about leafpool….. my girl……

[serenityquest]

#dr glenn patrick doyle #trauma #learned helplessness #survivor #victim mentality

[astrogriffin]

Learned helplessness is being given job offerings that would 100% improve your current living situation but you don’t respond because you have convinced yourself that it’s all going to go to shit somehow anyway because you know from experience that every time you have made a big life decision it got worse so you don’t trust yourself anymore.

#learned helplessness #social phobia #social anxiety #autism #neurodiversity #neurodivergent

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Salome Sibonex: I had that same example of adopting ideas that I was told were good for me because well, you know, feminism or like Latin American issues or whatever it might be. They're told to you as, "this is for you. This is, we're we're going to help you. We're highlighting all the ways that you're being hurt, and that's how we're going to help you."

But I found that it did the same thing [as you]. It got me to focus primarily on who's out to get me, what obstacles are around me, and it comes with this baked in notion that the real problem is bigger than you. The real problem, the real obstacle is always something that is bigger than you. And as an individual, you're kind of at the mercy of that.

And it pushes this identification with your groups as well, as opposed to this kind of like focus on our shared humanity or individuality."

--

Full video:

How Social Justice Is Exploiting Us ft. Kimi Kaititi & Salomé Sibonex

==

Victimhood sold as "empowerment."

#Salomé Sibonex #Salome Sibonex #Kimi Katiti #social justice #social justice activism #victimhood #victimhood culture #woke activism #wokeness #woke #wokeness as religion #wokeism #cult of woke #shared humanity #individuality #helplessness #learned helplessness #religion is a mental illness #Youtube

[amyintherapy]

Trauma and learned helplessness

My partner and I started listening to The Body Keeps The Score together, one of the books on trauma that I see recommended most often. In a part we listened to recently, it mentioned Segilman's dog experiment. It involved the mistreatment of dogs, unfortunately. They took dogs and put them in cages, and administered painful shocks to them.

Then they unlocked the cages, and shocked the dogs again - and they didn't leave.

When they took new dogs and placed them in cages but with the doors open, and shocked the dogs, those dogs immediately ran out of the cages to escape the shocks.

The only way they could get the original dogs to leave the cages when shocked, was after dragging them out of the cages, to show them through physical evidence that they could escape the cage and the shock.

They call this behavior of staying in the unlocked cage and tolerating the shock "learned helplessness" that has resulted from the original mistreatment in a situation where they couldn't escape.

In people, it's believed that sometimes learned helplessness sticks to just one part of their life. So if they were physically beaten as a child, they might stay in a physically abusive marriage, but if they are emotionally abused at work, they might quit as they may not have learned helplessness in all areas. However, for some people the learned helplessness does become a general belief that they have, where they see themselves as widely lacking any meaningful control over life. They think all they can do in life is tolerate/absorb/survive whatever comes their way.

Common statements people with high levels of learned helpless might use are things like "nothing will ever change" "there is no point in trying" and "I can't do anything right". There's a lot of overlap between people with learned helpless and depression, but also PTSD, CPTSD, and others.

I've been thinking about this a lot. It explains so much about some aspects of human behavior in my opinion.

#the body keeps the score #trauma #learned helplessness #depression #mental health #my posts

[local-redhead-bookworm]

I don’t see people talk about learned helplessness in regard to Billy as much as I think we should. I think that Billy has come to believe that with Neil, it doesn’t matter what he does because he’ll still get beaten for it. He pushes back if he has the energy, but most of the time he just waits for it to be over. And as hard as we see him fighting in the mall, it’s almost like by that point he’s given up fighting the Mind Flayer.

Enter El. In order for a person to unlearn learned helplessness, someone usually has to help them. El helped Billy realize that life doesn’t have to be a constant cycle of pain; she reminded him that he used to be happy. And that one little nudge is enough for Billy to break free of that learned helplessness.

#stranger things #billy hargrove #stranger things analysis #learned helplessness #tw abuse #my posts

[unwelcome-ozian]

#learned helplessness #trauma response

[sunlit-mess]

lost

#is it just perfectionism or the fact that ive been invalidated most of the time and i just keep finding- doing ways to make it up for them #messyr #doodle #vent art #burnout #mood #learned helplessness #chronic emptiness

[funeral]

(a) Original learned helplessness model; (b) Attributional reformulation 

James J. Gross, Handbook of Emotional Regulation

#james j. gross #emotional regulation #learned helplessness #psychology #diagram #p

[babyspacebatclone]

Responding to the following note from @papyrus126 on this post:

The original post about Anxiety referred specifically to remaining in a “freeze” state, an unconscious and automatic response to perceived threats in order to protect the individual:

Fight: facing any perceived threat aggressively.

Flight: running away from danger.

Freeze: unable to move or act against a threat.

Fawn: immediately acting to try to please to avoid any conflict.

Again, when one feels threatened, the body rapidly responds to imminent danger. The underlying goal of springing into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, is to decrease, end, or evade the danger to return to a state of calm and control. (taken from the article from “Simply Psychology” below)

In the chart’s context, it describes how the stress from being constantly anxious (or suffering from a related condition, such as PTSD, or having a disorder with high comorbidity for anxiety, such as ADHD) means that the individual feels like everything has to be perceived as a potential threat, and the only reliable coping strategy left for this omnipresent sense of danger is complete submission.

However, what you are describing with feeling “empty” can best be considered a symptom of Anhedonia:

Anhedonia is the loss or a decrease in the ability to feel pleasure from things we once enjoyed. And it's a common symptom of mental health disorders like depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Since the onset of the pandemic, there has been a rise in these disorders, so it's likely that anhedonia is affecting more people—and to a higher degree. (taken from article from “Real Simple” linked below)

You most likely have a combination of both, because as said Anhedonia is common in the same type of disorders the chart directly relates to.

A way of contextualizing it is the term “learned helplessness” - there’s nothing you do that makes anything feel better, so there’s no reason to try, leaving you just numb.

It’s important to recognize that learned helplessness and Anhedonia have a physical component: your physical brain stops either producing or responding to important chemicals.

The brain regions use a chemical called dopamine to communicate with each other. Dopamine is used to decide what's rewarding and how you want to attain it. It's also used to decide whether something is threatening. Felger explains that these reward circuit regions may not interact as well with each other in people with anhedonia. And therefore, this weakened communication between regions suggests unbalanced levels of dopamine, says Tiffany Ho, Ph.D. (taken from article from “Real Simple” linked below)

It’s not just a case of “trying harder,” your brain has to repair itself to get out of a cycle of learned helpless, constant anxiety, or Anhedonia.

The first step, therefore, is giving your body a chance to repair, primarily with better sleep because poor sleep is so highly correlated with all the related conditions.

Now, as someone with a divergent circadian cycle (my awake cycle is approximately noon until 4am), I’m going to emphasize: You need to find a sleep routine that is healthy for you.

If this means you need to be up at a set time, due to school or work or other obligations, than this may require a very strict pre-sleep routine in order to meet these obligations.

But please, please, see this as “I need to work on my sleep schedule so I can be healthy.” And not “I need to conform to society’s expectations of my sleep.”

Because those are two very, very different things.

The second is to use cognitive behavioral psychology to train your thinking away from “helplessness” or despaired thinking.

The first step here is to replace negative self talk with neutral self talk.

That’s right, we’re not going to go straight to the “positive happy happy stuff.”

You want to focus on objective observations about yourself, the situations you find yourself in, and your reactions. It is a move away from catastrophic, all-or- nothing thinking:

Instead of “I don’t even enjoy anything, I’m not even human” it’s “My brain is not working properly; it’s not giving me the rewarding responses it should.”

As you train your thinking away from feelings of helplessness, take note of things that are currently ok or even good. We tend to remember negative experiences more than positive experiences, which makes sense from a survival perspective.

But journaling - even mentally - about good things as they happen helps to reinforce that everything isn’t bad.

That there are things to be grateful for, even if you feel numb and overwhelmed.

Then, as you have a catalog of things that do bring positives to your life, you can use them to further counteract the feelings of numbness:

“That short walk made me feel good today. I probably won’t have time to do it again this week, but it’s nice to remember how it felt to hear the birds in the sun.”

Finally, give yourself something to be successful at. Puzzle games are great for this in my experience.

If you have a hobby you used to enjoy but don’t find pleasure in, work on improving a skill within that hobby.

Look at it as an investment for the future: “If I can master this stitch pattern, when I feel motivated it will be so much fun to knit a scarf using it later.”

Take note of the things you do that do move you out of a numb, overwhelmed feeling.

Reward yourself without guilt.

“I don’t want to read right now, but having this book by my favorite author feels nice. I’m going to buy it now, without any expectation to read it, but just so it’s right at hand for when I do have the spoons that I can read it!”

This already got long, but I hope some of it is helpful. I tried to find stuff that goes beyond the usual “practice coping strategies!” which of course is helpful but been told to death.

Linked articles for further reading below the cut.

#positive psychology #learned helplessness #anhedonia #actually anxious #actually traumatized #actually autistic #actually adhd #actually depressed #actually bpd #actually mentally ill #actually obsessive #actually neurodivergent

[machcharmer]

When I was a kid, I was often frustrated and something else - some other feeling I couldn’t quite name - due to a specific expectation in school: don’t be absent.

I was what folks called a “sick child” so I easily caught every cold that anyone else had and then it turned 10-20x worse due to my limited immune health and chronic asthma issues. I never got the award for no absences. I never had perfect attendance. And it was never my fault… but I was treated like it was a choice, as if I wouldn’t have been healthy if I could’ve been.

I was almost held back in 5th grade due to missing 16 and a half days of school… that was a record low number of absences for me. And I was nearly punished because I was a ‘sick child.’ Fortunately, the parent-teacher-whoever meeting to discuss me being held back (or not) went in my favor and I moved forward to 6th grade.

Recently, I think I found the words. I was being held to Ableist standards, when I was not Abled in that way. And I felt helpless.

It just hit me recently how that was (is?) an Ableist standard. I get why it’s there, why education is important and how tracking absences highlights truancy patterns which often leads to discovery of neglectful or abusive homes … and therein lies another issue, how families who are dysfunctional are more often punished than assisted BUT I digress…

It’s just Kinda Super Messed Up…Holding someone to a standard they cannot reach, and not for lack of trying, especially at such an early age.

Just some 2am thoughts pouring out ✌️

#thinky thoughts #how about that #school #absenteeism #learned helplessness #asthma #chronic illness

[feverdreamerofthestars]

all this defeatism (my apologies for originally referring to it as ‘learned helplessness’; i was not aware that that is an actual phenomenon caused by trauma) shit people spout online is fucking CRAZY to me because how are you people going to survive in the real world

i have motor control issues in my hands. i still learned how to draw. i found an artstyle that accomodates for my messy strokes and i found a medium that allows me to fix my mistakes and retry when my hands don’t work well.

i have severe executive dysfunction. so i practiced drawing and writing whenever my brain would allow me to for my entire life. and, believe it or not, those small amounts of times still helped me improve. i still learned.

i have autism. so when i go outside i wear soundproof headphones. i make step-by-step lists for how to do things. when i’m about to have a meltdown, i go somewhere quiet and dark to recharge.

i have adhd. so i do my schoolwork at home when i can’t do it at school. i take breaks in between my work. i put on music in the background so that i am not utterly understimulated.

some of you people online are just SO caught up in the ‘my disability will stop me from doing everything forever’ and like. yeah. sometimes you can’t do stuff. i can’t eat certain foods. i can’t write neatly. i can’t go to most shops. i can’t play sports. i can’t do a whole fucking lot of things.

but there will ALWAYS be things that you CAN do. and some of you guys (i am obviously not referring to the the people who genuinely cannot do certain things) are very insistent on not even trying to find alternative solutions to your problems.

#disability #disabled #learned helplessness #please dont take my words out of context dont pull a twitter on me

[dorianbrightmusic]

learned helplessness, & sweeping up internal/external hurricanes

i'd say one thing we don't discuss enough with mental health is the sheer terror of having something going on that you can't really describe, or that you don't comprehend well enough to be able to explain. so as a result, you end up dealing with some of the worst mental health symptoms you've ever had simply because you cannot describe them. a therapist, no matter how good, can seldom help if they don't know it's going on; and you can't tell other people that you're distressed, because if you don't get the wording right, they'll suspect you of something else, and then you'll have worried them without even getting help for the original distress.

when i first started having intrusive thoughts, i couldn't tell they were intrusive thoughts: i had an egosyntonic disorder at the time, meaning i couldn't really tell my own will apart from this other thing that was splitting my mind into little pieces. as such, i couldn't say 'i'm having violent intrusive thoughts', since i was scared that a part of me was genuinely turning violent. the result? i could only really articulate that i felt very afraid and unsafe, but not that 'i actually have this terrible feeling that i'm not in control of my body or mind'. trying to articulate 'i know it's irrational but every time i hear this song i wrote, i think i'm going to die, so i had to delete it from my computer and wipe the backup drives'?. couldn't do it, for it was something that could have made no more sense to anyone else than it did to me.

how do you articulate that your internal monologue doesn't feel like your own? you don't. it's not something that makes sense to you, so it'll certainly sound insane to anyone else. so you push it down and desperately hope it resolves. and it does, but the experience of not being able to talk about it, of not knowing what's going on and others never being able to understand when you try to explain – it's isolating, so isolating. so you learn to cling to any morsel of emotion, of validation, that you can get, and hence you learn to be disappointed, because you have an unspeakable conundrum. you hide each bit of yourself and then resent the fact that people complied when you instructed them not to go looking, and resent those who went looking and still never quite pieced you back together. nobody hurt you and nobody pushed you away and everyone was kind, but your experience is now fragmented, and if only someone could see that, could fix that.

i had a bad year last year—my memory gave out, and i lost a sense of joy. i saw static when i closed my eyes. at the time, this was called work-related stress. and sure, i was stressed; but 12 months later, i had a moment of sheer clarity in an elevator, where i finally could describe what'd happened. not just 'i was sad'. i had felt like i hadn't existed. my entire identity had ruptured and i was trying to pilot a body that didn't recognise itself. and that was the exact summation of it all, but had i been able to see that, let alone say that, at the time? no, and as a result, i learnt to be disheartened and afraid, and what was probably depression-adjacent at least and actual depression at most got brushed off as stress. which is fair, because overpathologising isn't necessarily helpful, but when you are lonesome, and you know there could have been an answer, a consolation————

that's the problem with mental health – you can't help someone who doesn't know what's happening to them, who thus can't communicate what's happening to them, unless you can somehow guide them to work out what's going on. and that's not something most people have time to achieve. the result is that we grow isolated and resentful because we didn't get the help that never could have been (but oh, if it could have been). and you stop trusting that people will hear you. given how many mental health symptoms are marked by that sense of not knowing what's going on – intrusive thoughts, dissociation, panic, demoralisation, anxiety, psychosis, trauma, detachment, despair – then it still is quite easy in today's world to feel a sense of becoming helpless to your own unspeakable terror.

#venting but also trying to make a point that hopefully someone else will feel heard out for #basically this is my way of complaining about mental health treatment as a whole rather than merely screaming my experience into the wind #(though i'm also screaming into the wind) #for the record i am much better now so please don't worry about me #tw ocd #(kinda? i never formally had ocd but there's enough adjacent content here that i don't wanna risk triggering anyone) #tw suicide #(i wasn't suicidal but again there's enough adjacent stuff that this could be triggering: hence the cw) #tw intrusive thoughts #intrusive thoughts #learned helplessness