wait, what? wait, WHAT?!

This whole time, everyone who's ever spoken to me about "learned helpnessness" has had their conception of it exactly backwards? The problem isn't a thing we have to UNLEARN, but rather an entirely different thing that NO ONE EVER TRIED TO TEACH US.

we don't & never needed to "unlearn helpnessness," we do & have always, instead, needed to be taught HELPFULNESS, we needed to be taught how to take agency over & make changes to our own lives, we needed a foundation of success and encouragement in that agency that was denied us!

The way out of it is still the same, you have to start making small changes in your life, preferably with a supportive and encouraging environment (but first, find one in 2020), but either way, making changes and observing the results and owning them as much as you can

but just, overwhelmingly, the difference in attitude and framing - my whole life, i have been taught that "learned helplessness" is MY problem, MY fault and MY failure, my bad response to bad circumstances - AND THAT IS FLATLY UNTRUE. It is, in fact, the DEFAULT, NORMAL RESPONSE.

Agency, confidence, security - they have to be TAUGHT. It is the responsibility of parents to provide and model these things for their children, and ours DID NOT. In many cases - in mine - they intentionally withheld these things, to *create* dependency.

Like, at the end of the day this does not change the fact that we are now the adults with this problem, and we must be the ones to both want to change it and do the work of changing it, neither of which is easy - but it FEELS so transformatively different to me, this perspective

We never "learned" helplessness. But we CAN learn helpfulness, even if it's a thing we have to learn later than other folks. We absolutely *can* learn it.

(particular screen captures taken from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4920136/ though the thread is drawing on broader reading)