Journey 10 · Surrender
Helplessness, Revisited: What Animals Learn Is Control
A review of fifty years of animal research on helplessness concluded passivity is the default under prolonged, inescapable shock, and learning control can overcome it.
Learned helplessness was first explained as something learned: given shocks they could not escape, animals were thought to learn that nothing they did mattered. In 2016, Maier and Seligman reviewed fifty years of research, including the neuroscience, and concluded that account got it backward. In the animal studies they reviewed, passivity was the unlearned default under prolonged, inescapable shock, and learning control could overcome it.
A separate study of religious coping drew a similar line: leaving a problem entirely to God went with lower competence, while a collaborative style, doing your part in partnership with God, went with higher. Neither paper measured surrender exactly as the journey defines it, and the coping study shows a link, not a cause.
Journey 10, Surrender, with Liv as its guide, keeps the effort and releases the outcome. Its sort has two bins, mine to tend and never mine to hold, so letting go becomes something you practise rather than a slide into giving up. What is one thing this week that is truly yours to tend? In the US, call or text 988, any hour.
The research
Growing evidence Real research that's still building — results are promising and still being tested.
- Maier, S. F., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2016). Learned helplessness at fifty: Insights from neuroscience. Psychological Review, 123(4), 349–367.
- Pargament, K. I., Kennell, J., Hathaway, W., Grevengoed, N., Newman, J., & Jones, W. (1988). Religion and the problem-solving process: Three styles of coping. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 27(1), 90–104.
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