HELPLESSNESS, AGENCY, AND NEW MUSCLES

Morning View

"I am in a really terrible situation, but there is nothing I can do about it. I don't have any choice."

According to Merriam-Webster.com, one definition of the word agency is: "the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power," such as "the agency to bring about change." Synonyms include power, means, and incentive. Antonyms to agency include words such as helplessness, powerlessness, and passivity.

Learned helplessness, according to Psychology Today, is "when an individual continuously faces a negative, uncontrollable situation and stops trying to change their circumstances...The perception that one cannot control the situation essentially elicits a passive response to the harm that is occurring." If I am helpless, nothing I can do has any affect on the negative things happening to me, so I just...well, do nothing. When you live in a prolonged state of learned helplessness, you eventually start feeling like you are not even a real person anymore, but only a hollow shell or a shadow.

Have you ever been in a situation where you thought: "There is absolutely nothing I can do to fix this. I have no choice but to struggle through one more day and hope something will eventually get better."? I don't know about you, but I am over here raising BOTH hands: been there, done that...for a long, long time.

Thankfully, after many years, agency is something I am trying to develop and become more comfortable with. When you have lacked agency for a long time, when learned helplessness has become entrenched, even small decisions and initiatives feel HUGE and SCARY and UNCOMFORTABLE.

Sometimes, you feel like you have no good options and the temptation to retreat back into passivity looms large.

Sometimes, there really aren't any good options. Every possible solution to a difficult or harmful situation comes with its own set of challenges and problems, and you find yourself stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place. 

Just doing nothing seems so tempting. What difference will my choices make anyway?

But here is something I am learning: Choosing over and over to stay in the same destructive cycle of learned helplessness is still a choice.

Even when faced with two (or three or four) unappealing choices, I DO actually have agency:

• I can choose Scary Option A - or - 
• I can choose Scary Option B - or - 
• I can choose to do nothing (i.e. learned helplessness).

This leads me to another thing that I am learning: Agency is a muscle that gets stronger with exercise.

Every time I make a choice not to stay in the cycle of learned helplessness, the choices in front of me look less and less scary.

In fact, some of them look downright exciting.

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(I want to say a big THANK YOU to all the wonderful people in my life who have walked alongside me during a prolonged season of learning to make difficult choices. These prayer warriors and cheerleaders have made the BIG SCARY THINGS so much less scary. THANK YOU. THANK YOU. THANK YOU.)