EP 0009 - Learned Helplessness

It’s Not You, It’s Your Trauma - Trauma, PTSD, Abuse, Anxiety & Recovery - Joe Ryan

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Learned helplessness is a condition where a person suffers from a sense of feeling powerless. It usually comes from a traumatic event or series of traumatic events or persistent failure to succeed. It's one of the biggest underlying causes of depression. When you grow up with abuse and trauma, you learn helplessness, and it becomes an identity for you, it's the equivalent of being locked in an emotional prison cell. When you grow up, and you move out on your own, nobody is guarding you, the cell door is not locked, and you can walk out at any time, but you can't do it. You have been conditioned to be helpless. We've become unwilling to walk away from the pain. We accept it as our reality. That's why so many of us get stuck in life and can't move forward. It's like we're in this endless loop, where we sit in pain, and we don't know how to get out of it. It becomes our identity, and it becomes our way of life. We have never known any other way than to completely experience pain and accept that as the reality of our lives. When we realized that the prison doors open, and we can leave, the fear of living without the pain keeps us there because we don't know how to exist without it. We are just stuck. Nobody is guarding us. We are the only person that keeps us from the life that we want and deserve. Your learned helplessness is reversible. It's going to take time, patience, and practice to overcome. The more you venture out of that emotional cell and feel the fear when doing so, the more you are reversing your learned helplessness and teaching yourself that you no longer have to be helpless to survive.

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