Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Chapter 3
Learned Helplessness
Faced with inescapable situations, such as physical extermination, cultural genocide and colonial
subjugation, individuals and groups often exhibit what social psychologists label “learned helplessness.”
According to Peterson and Seligman (1984), this kind of behaviour occurs when an individual (or a
group) perceives that his or her behaviour cannot control events and that no action on his or her part
will control outcomes in the future. Moreover, if the traumatic experience should endure across time
(in the Aboriginal context, through three major periods of colonization and four hundred years of
epidemics) and should be applicable across settings (or areas of impact: physical, economic, cultural
and social), then failure in the present should create generalized expectations for failure in the future.
Eventually, via the learned helplessness phenomenon, the trauma enters into the psychological makeup
of people. In consequence, even if a person finds herself or himself in a situation where she or he could
act and react to outside pressures, she or he fails to make any attempt to do so. A person or a group
becomes passive, inactive and hostile, ascribing social failures to personal, internal causes and blaming
themselves for their helplessness (internal attribution). It is this internal attribution of failure that
results in decreased self and social esteem. Peterson and Seligman (1984) also state that individual
differences in how people typically account for negative events in their lives will affect how they will
generalize the traumatic event to affect their subsequent behaviour. Thus, those people who typically
draw upon global, stable and internal explanations for the undesirable things that happen to them are
said to be vulnerable in the face of adversity to becoming depressed. The propensity to make these
kinds of attributions for negative outcomes is labeled the “depressive attributional style.”
Learned helplessness affects the following psychological processes: motivation (which becomes reduced
as there are no incentives to try new coping responses, there is passivity and a lack of response initiation);
cognition (with an inability to learn new responses to overcome prior learning that trauma is
uncontrollable and cognitive representation of uncontrollability); and emotion (the helpless state
resembles depression with feelings of worthlessness, guilt and thoughts of death or suicidal attempts).
Socially learned helplessness may become a prerequisite for social invisibility: people unable or unwilling
to act according to dominant social standards and passively (instead of actively) resisting assimilation.
There are many examples from different parts of the colonized world that show acculturation (and a
loss of the social self) is often associated with alcoholism, drug addiction, family disintegration and
suicide. The dominant society perceives the passively aggressive group as socially undesirable, as “invisibleby-necessity”
and, thus, as needing the knowing subject to represent it.
Internal Versus External Locus of Control
Learned helplessness causes people to ascribe social failures to personal internal causes and to blame
themselves for their helplessness (I got sick because I deserved it; it is my fault that I got sick). On the other
hand, in inescapable situations that are beyond one’s control, internal locus of control (or the perception
of events as being a consequence of one’s own actions) becomes drastically reduced (My sickness is
beyond my control; I cannot do anything about it). If levels of internal locus of control are diminished,
levels of social motivation also diminish and an inability to initiate social behaviour increases (Rotter,
1966). The subjugated social and cultural group will experience a loss of the sense of self-sovereignty
and may react with obedience, passivity and passive aggression. Gershaw (1989) compiled a list of
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