Immunized

"Perhaps human reaction to loss in general--rejection by those we have loved, failure at work, death of a spouse--could be understood through the learned helplessness model" (Martin Seligman, Learned Helplessness--my italics).

When I first encountered the concept of learned helplessness, I began to think about the connection to spousal loss.  If there is any experience in life that could teach one about the futility of one's actions, spousal loss would be a prime candidate.  There was nothing I could do that made any changes to the situation.  There was nothing I could do to reverse Anne's death.  I could be happy or sad, upright or in bed, working or weeping.  It didn't make any difference.

To read Seligman's almost offhand comment including "death of a spouse" was like touching a live wire.  It was jolting and a little bit nauseating.  That jolt, however, also helped me to make sense of so much of my experience.  In particular, this whole idea helped me to understand the depression that overcame me.  Seligman and his colleagues see learned helplessness as the laboratory model of the kinds of depression that we endure at times of failure and loss.  He describes depression in laboratory rats.

"Defeat and failure generated the same symptoms as uncontrollable events did.  Being defeated in a fight by another rat produced symptoms identical to those caused by inescapable shock...So learned helplessness seemed to be at the core of defeat and failure."

I experienced Anne's death as a massive personal failure and an utter defeat--at least in the first several months.  What didn't help was the reminders people unintentionally provided to me that I had failed and was defeated.  The ways in which our culture has trained us to sympathize with the grieving were, for me, those reminders.

More than that, I find myself now more allergic than ever to experiences of failure.  I also have far greater resources for overcoming the sense of depression that comes with a failure experience.  But I have very little tolerance for such experiences and do not go into them willingly.  For example, I look for ways to serve and work with people who are seeking solutions to real-life, everyday problems.  I crave that sort of work where hope the framework and improvement is the goal.

And I believe that bereavement therapy needs to be much more focused on re-training the bereaved to overcome the learned helplessness of spousal loss.  "Learned helplessness could be cured," Seligman writes, "by showing the subject his own actions would now work."  His research and that of colleagues such as Donald Hiroto demonstrates that we can be "immunized" to learned helplessness through experiences of competence and mastery.  In other words, we can be taught that we have choices.

This, of course, is why my journey with friends in twelve step programs has been such a personal boon.  Such recovery programs are positive psychology with hands and legs.  I can choose how to respond to a situation.  I can choose how to manage my momentary thoughts.  I have tools for moving from defeat to decisions, from loss to living.

And once acquired, this immunity is resilient and lasting.