Addiction and Learned Helplessness
How does one learn to be helpless?
Learned helplessness…sounds like an oxymoron, right?
The idea of ”learned helplessness” originated from experiments on animals. Researchers would put a hapless creature in a situation where they were faced with unpleasant stimuli from which they tried but could not escape. Eventually, they just accepted their situation and stopped trying to escape. Even when researchers added a means of escape, they would fail to make use of it. They had learned to be helpless.
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