The Helpless College Student
Years ago, I worked with a college student with a learning disability. Our sessions were a mixed experience; some were more productive, while others were just scheduled vent sessions from the student. Venting was a way to list every way the student felt slighted, put down, or wasn’t receiving “enough” support from their professors, tutors, etc.
The common theme in our sessions was how much the student needed a sense of ownership or responsibility for their work, grades, or any outcomes they experienced. Their locus of control was external - it was everyone else’s fault or dumb luck when things went well.
Our sessions were not always productive, but our conversations began to shift toward the internal and external mechanisms at play when it came to the student’s sense of ownership and agency.
Over time, the student commented that they were in a rut, directionless in their selected major, and were begrudgingly in college to appease their parents.
It became more apparent from our chats that this student was most likely experiencing a higher degree of learned helplessness due to simultaneous high expectations placed on them to go to college and pick a “respectable” major and low expectations because their parents did everything they could to make a clear lane for the student to succeed.
You might know this as “helicopter” or “bulldozer” parenting.
The underlying problem is reduced self-knowledge, self-determination, and resiliency because of unmet challenges in life.
Self-advocacy faulters, too.
When real adversity occurs, the child/young adult crumbles.
Let’s unpack learned helplessness and see if we can’t retrospectively help this student.
Conditioning Learned Helplessness - Response to Situations
Learned helplessness is a (lack of) responsiveness to repeated stressful encounters with situations that result in diminished personal agency toward change or control.
In other words, you become conditioned based on prior bad experiences to assume you have effect no tangible change in future ones, resulting in lowered motivation, hopelessness, and despair.
Learned helplessness is even more frustrating for those experiencing it or their supporters because the sensation of helplessness CAN be overcome.
Past performance becomes indicative of future results due to this conditioning process.
A self-determined person becomes a self-defeatist.
How we are raised can play an important role in how we view our sense of agency in our decision-making and outcomes.
Structured choices (this shirt or that shirt), encouraging follow-through through difficult times, and providing support specific to the child's needs.
Unresponsiveness or inconsistency in parenting or boundaries can foster anxieties regarding one’s safety and autonomy (over time).
Avoidance of adverse situations, becoming passive, poorly motivated, and having low frustration tolerance.
When children experience these situations repeatedly, they begin to internalize a sense that no one can or will help them and that there is nothing that will fix the problem(s). However, this does not happen only at home. Schools can also become a barrier to learning and growth – for students with disabilities, their limitations become more visible to others and themselves.
Erikson’s fourth stage - industry vs inferiority - speaks to ongoing social and academic comparison during elementary years (7-11).
Assessments and measuring abilities have become commonplace, making some students see themselves as inadequate.
These feelings are compounded by external feedback from teachers if constructive feedback is not provided.
Impact of Learned Helplessness on Mental Health
Learned helplessness can be a vicious cycle of low self-esteem and self-efficacy toward tasks, avoiding those tasks or relationships, feeling hopeless, and unresponsive to support. Experiences with learned helplessness can also contribute to anxiety or depression. Feelings of hopelessness may be a sign of depression or chronic anxieties may lead to succumbing to these worries and giving up.
The longer these feelings persist, a vicious cycle of helplessness, hopelessness, and despair begins to take hold; willingness or responsiveness to support can diminish.
If a child lacks exposure to difficult but attainable outcomes, there is a higher likelihood of poor adaptability to new stressors.
Unlearning Conditioned Helplessness
Classical Conditioning
Learned helplessness is an adaptation to situations through conditioning (“learning”) through associations. For context, check out this explanation of conditioning.
Reward and punishment serve to reinforce a behavior or the avoidance of that behavior.
We associate reward or punishment with a behavior and learn what is acceptable or unacceptable.
The strength of the connection between associations and what is learned can weaken over time, primarily if that connection is directly associated (extinction). For instance, in Pavlov’s work, the pairing of the dog food and the bell (neutral stimulus) was done simultaneously. However, when the food is removed, the conditioned response (salivation) from the ringing bell weakens when no food is presented.
The same is true with human behavior; routines not upheld through reward or punishment can cause a deconditioning process over time.
A three-year-old is taught to put her hat and jacket on a hook before coming into the house and is praised each time or reminded when she does not follow the routine.
If these reward/punishment systems are not upheld, extinction may occur.
Social Cognitive Theory
However, humans are more complex and use cognitive learning processes and environmental reward and punishment systems. Socialization also helps us understand how development occurs, including learned helplessness.
Attention.
Retention.
Reproduction.
Motivation.
If we use child-rearing and parenting styles as our context, the parent must model for their child how to complete a task, explain its process, and engage their child in opportunities to replicate the task’s completion. In addition, the child may observe their parent sweeping the floor and decide they also want to sweep or help.
This also cuts both ways - children observe how their parents approach difficult tasks or communicate their feelings about themselves.
Does mommy persist even though she’s struggling?
How does daddy talk about himself when he’s frustrated?
Can I give up when I can’t do something like others?
Attribution Approach
Lastly, we can include an attributional approach to unlearning learned helplessness. There are three primary factors:
Internal vs External (Personalization)
Stable vs Temporary (Permanent)
Global vs Specific (Pervasive)
It can be the difference between maintaining an optimistic or pessimistic viewpoint of events and occurrences and how they impact you and your outcomes.
Are troubling situations within your control (internal) or factors you do not control (external)?
What is the permanence of outcomes?
What is the context of a given circumstance, and is it consistent across all environments or specific to one environment?
A more optimistic viewpoint reflects processing experiences and outcomes as temporary, situationally specific, and externally related.
Difficulties with giving a presentation may stem from side conversations with audience members or poor sleep the night before.
Not all presentations go poorly, nor does a “poor” performance reflect poorly on the person.
An area of weakness does not reflect all aspects of the person globally.
S.M.A.R.T Goals
SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-specific.
At times, we may falter in our efforts toward progress because our goals are too ambiguous, lack relevancy, are too complicated, or do not have a determined timeframe for completion. Measuring progress or identifying milestones is impossible if goals are properly defined and contextualized.
Revisiting our Student
When we last left our student, they were experiencing a lot of frustration and feeling directionless in their efforts; output and personal accountability were minimal to non-existent.
Ongoing sessions with the student have come to an impasse: take responsibility and ownership or continue to face increasingly agonizing outcomes and diminished results.
Upfront, part of the problem is motivation, namely their major and the content they were studying. The student was pushed into majoring in business but only wanted to focus on English to become a writer.
We worked on self-advocacy skills through role-playing and modeling how to communicate with the student’s parents about changing their major.
We outlined the talking points and how to communicate them calmly but precisely.
We also outlined the student’s short and long-term goals and career interests and mapped out the coursework needed to graduate on time.
We also discussed the possible setbacks from this conversation and how to handle them productively.
The student decided they wanted to be an English major with a minor in business to keep their credits and demonstrate that those courses could be helpful with marketing/managing a writing career.
With these changes in their scheduling and future coursework, the student’s motivation increased, and their willingness to put in more effort was a night and day difference.
They also felt encouragement from speaking up and having an open, honest, and productive conversation with their parents.
Their parents were impressed by the planning and were supportive of these changes.
However, this did not clear up all of the student’s issues with learning, and switching to a major that required a lot more reading and writing presented increased challenges. Nonetheless, the student showed a desire to work through the difficulties, including scheduling time with tutors and their professors.
In Closing
Learned helplessness is an ongoing, slow-acting form of conditioning that diminishes a person’s willingness to take agency toward change and recognize the importance of challenges.
It is a conditioned response to “unchangeable” situations, but this acts as an artificial deterrent causing personal stagnation. Learned helplessness may stem from childhood experiences, but this is not always true.
A person can unlearn helplessness, but this takes time, positive reinforcement, and effortful control. High expectations must be maintained and reinforced for all people, both implicitly and explicitly in environments that foster self-determination and grit in the face of adversity.
To struggle to learn, and learning requires persistence.
a lot of courage