I have a cousin William. Although we’ve grown up separately only seeing each other a few times in our youth, we’ve lived mirror lives, unbeknownst to us. Charismatic, intelligent and warm hearted, with the same desire to leave the world a better place for having graced it, he’s burdened with the same anxiety, sense of inadequacy, and unguided driveness that fuels impulsivity and foolish mistakes. While his physical features resemble that of his father and not my aunt, my features are strikingly more similar to our grandfather, but yet we share our grandmother’s mental DNA.
Like a scientific study of twins separated at birth, the similarities between us speaks to the power of genetics and the impact of family dynamics. Our mothers, who were sisters, recreated the same environments and family dynamics with out ever really speaking. To what degree things were different or worse for either of us really doesn’t matter, because we both hurt just the same. Begrudgingly, we’ve become products of our environments.
In the the 1960-70’s famed psychologist, Martin Seligman coined the phrase “learned helplessness” to describe the phenomenon in which animals give up their attempts to avoid adverse experience because they believe there is no way to avoid it. Locked in a room with no escape, they suffered electrical shocks again and again. Believing they were utterly helpless to escape their pain, they eventually stopped trying to avoid pain or escape, even when a door was wide open before them. Instead they just adapted and braced themselves for the painful stimulus, rolling over on their back and placing their feet up in the air because electrical shocks hurt their back less then it did on the tender pads of their paws. They adapted to survive but failed to see the opportunity to escape. This term applies to humans as well, but in humans our minds take things one step further and we tend to blame ourselves when the things go wrong. We suffer pain and it is our own fault. Learned helplessness. It should be a diagnosis that exists in one of those big manuals used like a cookbook to label individual inflictions.
Voices in my mind rage at me right now: “What do you mean I could have made a different decision?” “What?! I had other options?” “You mean I could have avoided all this pain and I didn’t have to be this way?” So many times the doors to escaping my madness was open before, me but I just lay on my back, hands in the air waiting for my electrical shock. Separated by thousands of miles, growing up not knowing me, William’s done the same thing.
While our addictive behaviors and actions aren’t connected to illicit drugs or alcohol, we both developed unhealthy ways to cope with our distress. Speaking to him yesterday made me understand why people in recovery from addiction need to find a sponsor, someone who has walked the path and can hold out their hand, supporting and encouraging, without judging when we fall.
Changing is uncomfortable and usually hurts, but so does getting shocked when you do nothing about it. I remember how it felt when I started to understand this. My world and reality swirled around me, feeling groundless with nothing solid beneath my feet. I began to understand that I had a choice and could change. The world and others in it were not the way I thought, and it turned out that my survival behaviors actually made the situation worse. Slowly I’ve began to realize how and why I hurt and that allows me to learn how to stop and change. The thing I never understood was that every time I gave up and allowed myself to endure the electric shock, it wasn’t just me who felt the pain, it hurt those around me.
Late in his career Seligman began to add to his theory and identified the flip side of helplessness and described what he called learned optimism. The notion that things are not always our fault, but yet we are still responsible for getting ourselves out of the situation that we are in. So, I’ve learned that when a door is wide open, take a step outside. Do not be frightened by the vastness of the world beyond your cage. I know it hurts to stretch your arms and it takes time for your eyes to adjust to the bright light of the new world that you will see, but if you take advantage of the chance you’ve been given, your hurt and anxiety can start to subside and that will bring comfort to those you love as well.
leighcannon 