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