Why A Magical Stranger
May Not Be Enough
To End Learned Helplessness

Learned helplessness keeps people stuck in time and space living a life they hate.

“Most men,” said historian, philosopher, and leading transcendentalist, Henry David Thoreau, “lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with their song still in them.”

Today, we can translate his words “quiet desperation” to mean “learned helplessness.”

What is this invisible psychological constraint?

It’s the absence of life force. Both past and current events deplete it. As its victims move into the future they continue to dissipate energy, hope, and possibility.

Learned helplessness is current immersion in a past situation. It’s a conditioned response to a past control. When young elephants are taught to stay tethered to a rope tied to a peg, they continue, when adults, to believe that they aren’t strong enough to uproot the peg. They aren’t willing to test their enormous strength. Similarly, a childhood restriction in humans can restrict their talents and abilities as adults.

Those who are afflicted with this debilitating emotion are wrapped in the inertia of their life drama. They’re stuck in their emotions of frustration and despair. They feel incapable of reaching a liberating thought because they’re too enmeshed in confirming their hopelessness.

Learned helplessness is a cycle that continually spirals downward. Like quicksand, the more helpless people wrestle with it, the more they sink into it.What they’re hoping for is an intervening event: a magical stranger that snaps them back into their essential nature. The magical stranger is often a person, but can also be a source of new information or some liberating event.

For a magical stranger to be enough to pull a person out of their distressing life situation, preparation is necessary. Preparation is developing a strategy for regaining life force and entertaining possibility thinking.

Sadly, in most life stories, even a magical stranger is not enough to end learned helplessness.

Although possibility thinking can save them, they let opportunity after opportunity slip through their fingers.

The opportunities that emerge don’t look like opportunities because they come disguised as ordinary events.

The opportunity is a receptive friend who could add clarity if asked for perspective.

The opportunity is an hour or a day of extra time that could be used for embracing healing or empowerment.

The opportunity is a nocturnal dream that outlines a solution.

Failing to grasp the little opportunities that emerge, they find themselves completely unprepared when a magical stranger does appear.

Unless a person makes an effort to develop possibility thinking by cultivating enough awareness to notice the small opportunities that emerge, they’ll stay stuck in their limiting ways even when the magical stranger does appear. They’ll be unable to grasp the offer of a new world because of their low life force. The opportunity that could have freed them passes away like a cloud blown away by a gust of wind.

Learned helplessness can be overcome with psychological healing and developing possibility thinking. It does take tremendous effort to break out of this cycle, but nothing else is more worthwhile.

Return from Learned Helplessness to Achieving Success