What is helplessness?

The concept of helplessness is frequently applied in judicial and psychological settings, and, in general, refers to a state of vulnerability, passivity, and lack of protection in which the person does not recognize any tool or possibility to get out of their situation. Helplessness is the vulnerability that has been taken to the extreme, insofar as it has exhausted the subject's resources to deal with what is presented to him.

As the term itself marks us, Defenselessness, implies the lack, the lack of defenses, of resources to defend ourselves against attacks or aggressions. Although rather it is not that they are lacking but that they have suffered much wear and tear that they cannot be recognized.

It is common to find the term Learned Helplessness coined by Martin Seligman, which implies that this lack of tools occurred due to a prolonged experience of vulnerability. According to the indication of this term, situations of continued lack of protection would lead to certain learning of helplessness. Frustration, passivity, resignation, fatigue, illustrate this state.

Helplessness is a raw state that reflects loneliness, abandonment, social and/or bonding violence, lack of containment that ends up stripping the subject of their own defensive resources.

From the point of view of health, the state of defenselessness sometimes manifests itself through physical illnesses, which translate through the organic body the maintenance of a prolonged illness. Helplessness implies in many aspects an experience of stress and extensive survival that ends up wearing down and destroying the individual.

Learned helplessness implies that the subject repeatedly faces the frustration that their actions do not show the expected result. In this particular case, reference is made to situations that are somewhat critical, in which the subject who learns, no matter what he does, there is no possible change or impact on his reality. Over time he stops trying since experience has taught him that he has nothing to do, that there is no resource of his own that can change his situation.

This feeling of desolation that emerges in many cases places him in a place of lack of defenses because he has lowered his guard, he no longer tries to produce any change, and he has lost hope.

The helpless position implies that the person no longer actively carries out any action to try to avoid pain. Rather, he suffers passively and without showing signs of urgency or desperation to get out of that place.

Institutional, social, family, partner violence... when it is fundamentally gradual, it wears down the subject's resources and can trigger states of defenselessness. Psychological therapy is very important in these cases to be able to work on the defenses and help restore some of that confidence in one's own psychological resources.

The situation is not decisive for helplessness. In situations of extreme vulnerability, different people act and respond differently. There are many people with resilient characteristics, who even in the face of fateful scenarios manage to come out again and again over time. However, this is not massive, and in general, a repeated situation of violence or abuse tends to wear down the defenses of those who suffer it, even more so if their initial attempts to avoid or defend themselves have not shown favorable results.

 

Thank You