Have You Accepted it or Is it Learned Helplessness?

Source: Photo by Sandy Millar on Unsplash

As someone who teaches death and dying—and as a person who has experienced loss (who hasn’t?)—I’m intimately familiar with the concept of acceptance. In these models, acceptance is the goal, I tell my students; it’s the result of healthily processing grief.

A Popular Model

Kübler-Ross famously explored and normalized the grief process with her five-stage model. When we experience loss, she argued, we go through the following process:

1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Denial
5. Acceptance

While Kübler-Ross’s model has been questioned and critiqued (as all theories are) for being too absolute, amongst other things, like many other models of grief, it ends with acceptance. This isn’t to say that acceptance is required—we don’t and can’t accept anything unless and until we are ready.

Moving Forward

Kübler-Ross’s model does, however, point out the importance of coming to terms with, or reconciling, loss. This doesn’t mean that the pain of grief ends, but it does mean the person continues living, continues functioning. As a popular TED Talk points out, we don’t “get over it,” but we do “move forward with it.” When this doesn’t happen, psychologists label the result “complicated grief.”

Beyond Loss

Of course, acceptance doesn’t only apply to loss, just as we don’t only grieve deaths. As a therapist once told me, before I taught the subject, we can grieve all sorts of things—really, anything that didn’t turn out the way we anticipated. It’s grief for, and therefore (ideally) acceptance of, what was or what could have been.

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So, What Is Acceptance?

One of my favorite synonyms for “accept” is “allow,” and it’s one we don’t often think about. When we accept, we are allowing something to take place. And in this case, there really isn’t another option here. It did happen. To continue to fight that thing’s existence would be a fight we can’t win.

Accepting something doesn’t mean we’re saying it’s good or okay. Acceptance could include that, but it certainly doesn’t have to. What happened could have been, and often is, utterly horrible and yet acceptance still applies. There is no value judgment in acceptance. Acceptance is simply saying that something just is.

What Is Learned Helplessness?

When, then, does acceptance cross the line into learned helplessness territory? As I’ve written before, giving up is okay (though not everyone agrees), but learned helplessness is more than that. Sometimes, giving up really is the best, most effective, most reasonable thing to do. When it’s not, however, that’s probably learned helplessness.

In learned helplessness, we basically think “there’s no point in trying” because something negative keeps happening and we don’t feel like we have any control over it. We stop trying to reach our goals, we stop taking care of ourselves—you name it. If it matters, we can make a difference, but we give up because we feel there’s no point in trying. That’s learned helplessness.

When we do have power over something—something that truly could change for our own sakes—and we throw our hands up in the air and walk away, that’s learned helplessness, not acceptance.

The Caveat

As I’ve written before, sometimes we really do not have power over our circumstances, especially when it comes to injustice. With an issue and experience like racism, for example, no one should be accused of learned helplessness, nor should anyone be pressured to accept it.

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Some phenomena simply are not acceptable and should not be allowed. Obviously. That fight will always be worth it. And exhaustion from experiencing it will always be understandable.

A loss like the death of a loved one is never welcome, but rather than give up on our own lives as a result, acceptance helps us keep going.

Healthy Acceptance

If we give up, have we accepted something? It may feel like that, but not really. Giving up may follow acceptance, but it’s an extra step—a step often too far. I can accept that I got some bad grades but if I give up on school altogether as a result, that’s not helpful or healthy.

Learned helplessness involves giving up on changing our circumstances when we have the ability to do so. Healthy acceptance, however, is moving forward despite something we cannot change. That’s why it’s so popular in death and dying studies.

The goal, therefore, is striving for acceptance as a healthy “coming to terms” and conducting realistic assessments of what we can and cannot change. Kübler-Ross’s first four stages are all about the opposite—rejection. Striving for something that just cannot be—in this case, beating death.

In learned helplessness, we are giving up on possibly everything, including moving forward or coming to terms. When related to loss, that’s complicated grief, and that’s why this type of grief is highly correlated with (major) health issues. So, in essence, crossing the line into learned helplessness really puts our own lives at risk here. The people we lose wouldn’t want that.

Source: Photo by Ava Sol on Unsplash

Moving Toward Acceptance

We have the power to accept. We have agency. It doesn’t have to happen overnight. It doesn’t have to be positive. But there’s a big difference between “I can’t change that” and “I give up.” The former helps us live. The latter prevents us from doing so. And while this applies beyond loss, the last things our loved ones would want is for us to give up on living because they can no longer do so.