If little sister learns helplessness in this situation, who is at fault—the brother (who after all, is just a kid), the mother, or the sister?
How about the person who taught the mother that? Her mother? Her mother’s mother? Evolution? The universe?
What makes you assume that somebody has to be “at fault” here, and how is it helpful to make that assumption?
But it occurs to me, that if helplessness can be learned (but shouldn’t be), then it can also be taught (but shouldn’t be). And it also occurs to me that the brother in my story, if coupled with a mother who counsels the daughter to work out the problem for herself with the brother, … these two are effectively conspiring to teach helplessness to little sister.
Please note that my advice is for adults, not children. For a parent to give their child only the bare advice, and not the listening, support, and assistance needed to carry it out, would indeed be cultivating a sense of helplessness along the lines of, e..g “what happens to me doesn’t matter/my preferences don’t count”, or some variation thereof.
Certainly, that’s what happened in my case, when my parents told me to “just ignore” the people teasing or harassing me!
However, that doesn’t mean I consider my parents “at fault” for the shame and self-hatred I developed as an indirect result of their choices. In fact, fully understanding how my feelings came about actually let me drop the resentment I previously felt towards them for this.
Ironically, it is the very idea of blaming people for things that reinforces LH in the first place. If I think it is my parent’s “fault” that I developed a particular instance of LH, then clearly, I am a helpless victim!
So, in order to drop emotional LH of this form, it is necessary to also drop judgment and blame.
When I coach people on letting go of past victimization, one of the more difficult steps tends to be letting go of the judgment of who’s “at fault”—and it doesn’t matter whether you blame someone else (e.g. your parents) or yourself (as I did in the case of my parents’ attitude about teasing). The fact that you blame anyone is like a deadbolt locking the LH itself in place.
Conversely, refusal to acknowledge hurt is also a problem: when somebody tells me something is not their parents’ fault, because of extenuating circumstances, my next job is to get them to realize that even if it’s not their parents’ fault, this doesn’t mean they didn’t still get hurt, or that they don’t have the right to feel bad about it!
In both directions, it is the very idea of “at fault” moral accounting that blocks the resolution of the person’s actual hurt, whether they are putting the blame somewhere in particular, or trying to pretend that nothing happened because someone shouldn’t be “at fault”.
That’s why I consider the notion of “fault” to be a most unhelpful red herring when one is discussing the origins of an instance of LH.
(Clarification: just in case it’s not clear, I do not try to persuade people to blame their parents for things; acknowledging a hurt is not the same as saying it’s somebody else’s fault! If you can’t say, “they did X and I felt hurt” without feeling like the other person is a perpetrator and you’re a victim, then you’re not over the LH yet. As the years go by, I myself feel an increasing compassion and understanding of my parents’ own pains and heartaches, that I wish I could’ve achieved when they were still alive. Indeed, I wish now that I could have given them all the praise, support, attention, and more, that I previously wished they’d given me!)
How about the person who taught the mother that? Her mother? Her mother’s mother? Evolution? The universe?
What makes you assume that somebody has to be “at fault” here, and how is it helpful to make that assumption?
Please note that my advice is for adults, not children. For a parent to give their child only the bare advice, and not the listening, support, and assistance needed to carry it out, would indeed be cultivating a sense of helplessness along the lines of, e..g “what happens to me doesn’t matter/my preferences don’t count”, or some variation thereof.
Certainly, that’s what happened in my case, when my parents told me to “just ignore” the people teasing or harassing me!
However, that doesn’t mean I consider my parents “at fault” for the shame and self-hatred I developed as an indirect result of their choices. In fact, fully understanding how my feelings came about actually let me drop the resentment I previously felt towards them for this.
Ironically, it is the very idea of blaming people for things that reinforces LH in the first place. If I think it is my parent’s “fault” that I developed a particular instance of LH, then clearly, I am a helpless victim!
So, in order to drop emotional LH of this form, it is necessary to also drop judgment and blame.
When I coach people on letting go of past victimization, one of the more difficult steps tends to be letting go of the judgment of who’s “at fault”—and it doesn’t matter whether you blame someone else (e.g. your parents) or yourself (as I did in the case of my parents’ attitude about teasing). The fact that you blame anyone is like a deadbolt locking the LH itself in place.
Conversely, refusal to acknowledge hurt is also a problem: when somebody tells me something is not their parents’ fault, because of extenuating circumstances, my next job is to get them to realize that even if it’s not their parents’ fault, this doesn’t mean they didn’t still get hurt, or that they don’t have the right to feel bad about it!
In both directions, it is the very idea of “at fault” moral accounting that blocks the resolution of the person’s actual hurt, whether they are putting the blame somewhere in particular, or trying to pretend that nothing happened because someone shouldn’t be “at fault”.
That’s why I consider the notion of “fault” to be a most unhelpful red herring when one is discussing the origins of an instance of LH.
(Clarification: just in case it’s not clear, I do not try to persuade people to blame their parents for things; acknowledging a hurt is not the same as saying it’s somebody else’s fault! If you can’t say, “they did X and I felt hurt” without feeling like the other person is a perpetrator and you’re a victim, then you’re not over the LH yet. As the years go by, I myself feel an increasing compassion and understanding of my parents’ own pains and heartaches, that I wish I could’ve achieved when they were still alive. Indeed, I wish now that I could have given them all the praise, support, attention, and more, that I previously wished they’d given me!)
Excellent answer. Thank you. I will try to learn something useful from our exchange.