Learned Helplessness Quotes

When a creature is exposed to violence, it will tend to adapt to that disturbance, so that when the violence ceases or the creature is allowed its freedom, the healthy instinct to flee is hugely diminished, and the creature stays put instead.

Poor people choose to play the role of the victim.

Learned helplessness is the giving-up reaction, the quitting response that follows from the belief that whatever you do doesn't matter.

Children who are treated as if they are uneducable almost invariably become uneducable.

To keep a man a slave you do much the same as the cruel circus masters did to the elephant around the turn of last century. Clamp heavy chains around their legs and stake them to the ground. Then beat and terrorize them. After a while you no longer even have to stake the chain; the elephant gives up and just the mere rattle of the chain convinces the elephant there is no hope, so they give up and do whatever it is the circus requires.

Failures . . . believe that their lives are shaped by circumstances ... by things that happen to them ... by exterior forces.

There are a whole host of psychological phenomenon humans have developed to protect ourselves from the sting of failure, from holding ourselves less accountable for our failures than we do other people, to letting our fear paralyze us and keep us from even trying.

When you are used to the kind of life -of never getting anything you want- you stop knowing what it is you want.

Servitude degrades people to such a point that they come to like it.

Oh, the holiness of always being the injured party. The historically oppressed can find not only sanctity but safety in the stateof victimization. When access to a better life has been denied often enough, and successfully enough, one can use the rejection as an excuse to cease all efforts. After all, one reckons, "they" don't want me, "they" accept their own mediocrity and refuse my best, "they" don't deserve me.

I come from a very dysfunctional family, so I was comfortable in misery. So I would create more misery for myself because I didn't know anything else.

Nothing is more deadly to achievement than the belief that effort will not be rewarded, that the world is a bleak and discriminatory place in which only the predatory and the specially preferred can get ahead.

Being a victim doesn't take much. There are built-in excuses for failure. Built-in excuses for being miserable. Built-in excuses for being angry all the time. No reason to trying to be happy; it's not possible. You're a victim. Victim of what? Well, you're a victim of derision. Well, you're a victim of America. You're a victim of America's past, or you're a victim of religion. You're a victim of bigotry, of homophobia, whatever. You're a victim of something. The Democrats got one for you. If you want to be a victim, call 'em up.

Enabling is the enemy of motivation.

There's a learned helplessness for a lot of people who are leaving Westboro because you're not allowed to have any kind of independence when you are there so a lot of people don't have practical life skills.

Whining about your own, others', or the world's failings is a main element in what we usually call neurosis.

Bite us once, shame on the dog; bite us repeatedly, shame on us for allowing it.

I've heard that people stand in bad situations because a relationship like that gets turned up by degrees. It is said that a frog will jump out of a pot of boiling water. Place him in a pot and turn it up a little at a time, and he will stay until he is boiled to death. Us frogs understand this.

Consistent failure to attain goals throughout life results in defeatism, low self-esteem or depression.

There is a dependence in the region that breeds a culture of defeatism.

A state of chronic powerlessness eats away at a person

We voluntary participate in things that we know are causing us harm because we believe we're powerless to do anything about it.

I grew up believing that I was fundamentally powerless.

Scalded cats fear even cold water.

People who are optimistic see a failure as due to something that can be changed so that they can succeed next time around, while pessimists take the blame for the failure, ascribing it to some characteristic they are helpless to change.