Learned Helplessness
By Rev. David Wilson Rogers | July 11, 2015
Nearly a half-century ago a team of researchers conducted studies on dogs and their ability to respond to, and avoid pain. Thankfully, such research would be illegal now. It is a tragic reality that the unrelentingly cruel nature of their research is beyond imagination.
During the study which took place in the late 1960s, dogs were subjected to a non-lethal, yet painful electrical shock. Some of the dogs learned that the pain could be ended by something as simple as jumping over a small barrier in their cage. Yet other dogs in the test group never had the opportunity to learn that jumping over the barrier could bring relief. Prior to those studies they had been subjected to earlier studies where there was no escape from the electrical shock.
Unwittingly, the researchers concluded that the dogs who endured the most pain and torture had developed a tremendous sense of what would later be termed as learned helplessness. It is a situation where after repeated trauma, the victim feels so incapacitated to do anything to relieve the pain that he or she simply hungers down and endures the misery and hope that someday it may go away.
The application for humanity in general, and Christianity in particular, is critical. There are within our world, untold human lives that have learned to be only helpless victims. There are families trapped in the endless spiral of poverty, crime, and societal ostracisation. Jesus encountered many such souls in his ministry. From the woman that he met at the well in John 4 to the healing of blind Bartimaeus in Mark 10, as well as the countless lost souls that met life and renewed hope in Jesus Christ, his was a profound ministry of empowering the one without hope.
As a church, there is a lot that we can learn both from the horrific experiments in the 60s as well as the grace filled ministry of our Lord and Savior as recorded in the Bible. In First Thessalonians 5, First Corinthians 8, Romans 14, and Ephesians 4, Christians are called to encourage and build each other up for God’s greater good. The fundamental underlying principle is to do so in the love of Jesus Christ and richly extend the grace with which we are all saved.
Yet so often the church mistakes the positive actions of building up with the destructive actions of tearing down. With accusatory judgments and a profound pontifications of punishment, Christians tend to preach a message of blame and shame rather than hope and empowerment. To the one already beaten down by life’s rough edges and wrong turns, it is no different than turning on the electrical charge on the battered soul that has learned to be helpless in the midst of affliction.
Those early researchers learned that no amount of coaching or cajoling could convince the helpless dogs to take the action necessary to relieve themselves from the unending torture. Even watching other dogs freely and easily liberate themselves from the profound pain was insufficient to demonstrate the safety that was within their grasp. It was only when the researchers reached down into the cage and physically moved the dogs from peril to paradise that the helpless animals began to understand there was hope. Even then, it often took multiple interventions to retrain their beleaguered minds.
The implications for the church are far-reaching. Too often we find it easy to preach the truth and tell people what they’re missing while we shake our heads at the mess their lives have become. Then we wonder why they don’t fix themselves. Yet our call is not to preach them to hope, but to reach into the depths of their shattered lives and carry them with the love of Christ.