Learned Helplessness vs. Acceptance

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“What is the difference between true acceptance and learned helplessness?” a reader asks, In January 2022 in my post Learned Helplessness, Brain Injury, and the Pandemic, I wrote that Maier and Seligman defined “learned helplessness” as our brain’s default state; the learned state occurs when we discover we can escape shock.

According to the Oxford Languages Dictionary, acceptance is agreement with or belief in an idea, opinion, or explanation; also, it’s the willingness to tolerate a difficult or unpleasant situation. My reader said that in mental health recovery, clients are told to accept the past and move forward—move forward meaning learning to heal and live in a healthy way.

As Sophie Hannah wrote in How to Hold a Grudge, “I’m sorry it happened—I wish it hadn’t—but I have benefited from the experience in the following way.” Acceptance here is acknowledging what happened without accepting helplessness, instead learning from the experience, learning that you can escape shock.

In brain injury recovery, health care professionals encourage patients to accept both their injured state and standard medical care as the way to live with unhealed or partially healed brain injury. Standard care usually leaves neurons injured and rarely includes a comprehensive diagnostic workup, neurostimulation, and neuromodulation treatments, either at home or as first-line treatment in the clinic. Acceptance here is acknowledging what happened while embracing the default brain state of helplessness, that is, learning you cannot escape shock.

“Definitions of acceptance converge around the idea of experiencing thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations as they are—without trying to control, avoid, or change them," writes clinical psychologist Anne P. DePrince. "That is, without fighting reality, as Marsha Linehan, DBT’s developer, put it in her memoir, Building a Life Worth Living (Linehan, 2020).”

When I was first diagnosed with brain injury, although I found the whole idea melodramatic and unreal, I accepted the diagnosis as true. My previous health care experiences had taught me how to acknowledge reality as the first step to escaping shock. I didn’t fight the reality of my thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations, but I dug into changing the horrible reality from injured to healed. After all, how could I return to writing Lifeliner if I refused to accept my injury? Denying reality would lead me to reject the offered therapies and being stuck in hellacious brain injury.

Acceptance lead to analyzing, understanding, and devising actions to escape shock.

As DePrince put it, “radically acknowledging the reality of our inner experiences or the world around us is key to understanding and building a path forward.”

Yet standard brain injury care builds a path of living with yourself permanently changed for the worse.

“…health-care professional after health-care professional told me to accept my injury. This advice confused me. I could understand it if I had not sought out treatment for my brain injury, avoided the prescribed homework, didn’t adjust my life to accommodate it. But I felt like I had to not only follow their prescriptions but also agree with their attitude that brain injury is inescapable, and full recovery unlikely. I had to learn helplessness in the face of my catastrophic whole-brain diffuse axonal injury.”

This type of acceptance also expects that, although you cannot heal brain injury, you must control the emotional sequelae, which is an oxymoron.

You can attain healthy emotional control and affect only through neurostimulation treatments.

Experiencing repeated meltdowns, loss of emotional control, and/or no affect while being both berated for that and denied treatments that restore healthy control and affect reinforces the brain’s default state of having no control and no ability to escape a shock event.

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According to Medical News Today, cognitive rehabilitation therapy (CRT), which forms part of standard medical care after brain injury, “helps a person practice skills so that they can improve. It builds on the idea of neuroplasticity, which suggests that the brain can change with practice.”

This is a limited idea of neuroplasticity. Stimulating the brain with brain biofeedback, audiovisual entrainment, tDCS, among other neurostimulation methods, harnesses the power of neuroplasticity leading to rapid, dramatic improvements after brain injury. Practice comes after neuromodulation or in concert with it, not before or as a substitute.

While clinics lead you to expect better functioning both during treatment and years afterwards, the exercises they provide are insufficient to heal injured neurons. The reality of a treatment's effectiveness becomes apparent in the months and years after discharge, for it’s easier to function when working with a therapist than on your own. The question to ask yourself: Does better functioning in the clinic transcribe to daily living on your own year after year? On the surface, perhaps you accept such clinical wishful thinking as your reality (it’s truly impressive how the human mind can rationalize and distort reality to fit another person’s definition).

The problem with such learned helplessness is that it reinforces accepting inadequate treatment as the only way. Health care professionals who scoff at research-backed neurostimulation reinforce a person’s learned helplessness that then feeds back into accepting their health care professional’s (expert) opinion that you cannot achieve full healing; thus leading people to reject neurostimulation or at-home neuromodulation therapies.

Accepting that you have an injured brain is key to building a healing path back to health.

But also accepting what usually passes for concussion care leads to a disconnect between your inner experience—that your brain remains unhealed and life remains extremely challenging—and a clinic's claim that their therapy gives you the life you want and need. Accepting the expert’s opinion as a substitute for acknowledging your own experience reinforces the default brain state of helplessness.

Clinics that include brain biofeedback dovetail with patient expectations of full healing or reaching their full potential healing. Those clinics prevent learned helplessness. They show the patient a way to “escape shock,” thus changing their default brain state to one in which they see they can act to change their reality to the one they desire.

Healthy acceptance is acknowledging reality that leads to action. Learned helplessness is acquiescing to an expert opinion that leads to passivity.

Copyright ©2024 Shireen Anne Jeejeebhoy