Learned Helplessness

Let’s play an imagination game.

Picture little Jimmy, fifteen years old, grade eight. He’s at his first high school dance. Jimmy is slightly overweight, and has acne. He’s also a bit shorter than most other kids at school.

His Mother divorced his Dad when he was six. She’s an alcoholic. She is rarely home, and he has no big brothers, sisters or role models. He is not into sports, or any activity other than video games. He is shy, submissive and passive.

His friends, who are nerds, like to tease him playfully about his insecurities. They do so in hopes of lifting him up, but instead this compounds his self-consciousness.

Jimmy has a crush on little Wendy. She’s a fox. He watches her in the hall as she flirts with older kids. He masturbates to her Facebook picture nightly. Tonight he decides he will approach her and ask for a dance.

He walks up, shaking, sweating, and stutters, “D, d, d, do you want, www, want to d, d, dance?”

And she laughs at him, ignoring his request, and pretends he isn’t even alive. She turns her back on him and rolls her eyes at her girlfriends, who also laugh at Jimmy.

Little Jimmy dates no girls his entire high school career, even though several have shown interest. By grade twelve he has grown tall, his acne has cleared, he’s lost weight—yet he’s still insecure and afraid of women. Wendy destroyed him. He will never approach another girl because he knows what will happen: Humiliating rejection. He decides there’s no point, he learned his lesson.

He marries his first girlfriend whom he meets through friends at the office, and although he’s really, really nice to her, at the age of 37, she leaves him for her gym instructor who she likes because he’s aloof, dominant, cocky and makes her have squirting orgasms.

Jimmy locks himself in a hotel and blows his head off Kurt Cobain style.

Jimmy was suffering, amongst many things, from Learned Helplessness.

Here is an excerpt from Wikipedia.

Learned helplessness, as a technical term in animal psychology and related human psychology, means a condition of a human person or an animal in which it has learned to behave helplessly, even when the opportunity is restored for it to help itself by avoiding an unpleasant or harmful circumstance to which it has been subjected. Learned helplessness theory is the view that clinical depression and related mental illnesses may result from a perceived absence of control over the outcome of a situation.”

So basically, we learn from past experience that there is no option other than what is forced upon us. Things just are the way they are. Oh well…

In a rather cruel study on learned helplessness, scientists took three groups of dogs. Group 1 was harnessed and then later released with no electric shocks. Groups 2 was harnessed and randomly given electric shocks which they could end simply by stepping on a lever. Group 3 was tied in tandem to Group 2 and given the same shocks, only they could not end the shock by stepping on the lever. They had no apparent control (unless they were to rise up like in Planet of The Apes).

The Group 3 dogs developed symptoms of depression and anxiety due to their helplessness. They eventually gave up even trying.

In the third part of the experiment, the dogs were placed in a room where to avoid shocks, all they needed to do was jump over a low partition. When shocked, Group 2 would get up and jump the partition to freedom, where the Group 3 dogs would simply lay down and whine. They had been trained that no matter what they did, they would still be shocked. The Group 2 dogs had learned that through action, they could remedy their suffering and avoid shocks.

This is what happens when men learn to be helpless. They lie down and whine, even though their situation is entirely escapable.

When I was an insecure wreck of a man, I discovered the seduction community and applied, “Learned Optimism.” Thus resulting in the glorious specimen you know read and admire (crowd cheers).

All little Jimmy needed was some proper guidance. If Wendy had been nice to him, and taken him under the bleachers and let him feel her boobs or something, he wouldn’t have acted like a helpless dog in an electric shock experiment. Maybe if he had a big brother or mentor to whip him into shape, he wouldn’t have ended his life…poor Jimmy.

Don’t be Jimmy.

To summarize, you may have built yourself a mental prison based around the concept of helplessness. You may feel like the strings of fate are dragging you down instead of up. But realize that your internal dialogue is a learned behaviour that can be unlearned.

The first step to rehabilitation is admitting you are capable of molding your belief system. What you should be striving for is, “Learned Optimism.”

In a study on learned optimism, at random a class of high school students was formed, and presented to a random group of teachers. The students were told they were gifted, and the teachers were told they were hand-picked because of their ability to teach the top students in the school.

Of course this was all bullshit. The teachers were common, as were the students random.

Yet at the end of the school year the class outperformed all other classes in all areas of study. They had higher grades and more accolades because they believed they were special. The students described increased self-esteem and over all happiness.

So yeah…there you go. You are all special snowflakes that can learn to be powerful human men. The transformation isn’t easy, but hey, you’ve got a few years before you’re wormfood. So get to work.

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