Learned Helplessness and How Sometimes the Best Way to Help a Struggling Loved One is by Not Helping
- Brainz Magazine
- May 20
- 5 min read
For nearly 14 years, I've helped individuals navigate the complex landscape of addiction in order to achieve recovery. Nicknamed "The Casual Counselor", my approach is unconventional, but undeniably effective.
Long ago, a colleague of mine recounted a story about his son, who was then probably 20 or 21 years old, and who was in a period of his life in which he was abusing drugs and alcohol. My colleague awoke one night at about 3am to a ringing phone, his son on the other end of the receiver, and loud voices yelling in the background.
“Dad,” he said, “I’m in a serious jam. I got into some trouble down in Mexico, and they’ve got me locked up in a Tijuana jail on a drug charge. I need your help. I need you to help me get out of here. Dad, I’m seriously fucked.”
His voice was shaken. Safe to say, this young man was all-around-shook.
My colleague told him, “Son, it sounds like you got yourself into quite a mess, and I have all the belief in the world that you can get yourself out of it. Gotta go.”
He hung up the phone.
He described it as one of the most difficult and painful calls of his life. He never fell back to sleep that night or the following one. He loved his son unconditionally, but he also knew something very important. If he were to drop everything he was doing, book a flight to Mexico, and go to rescue his son, he would be doing his son a grave disservice.
What he was trying to transmit to his boy on that fateful night was that he believed in him. Despite being afraid for his son’s safety and his life, really, he knew that if he went to go “fix” the situation, he would be telling his son, without saying it, “You can get yourself into an awful mess, but you need me to get you out of it.”
He would be teaching his son how to be helpless. The details do not really matter regarding whatever happened next. Ultimately, his son wasn’t held for too long and emerged from lock-up relatively unscathed, if not somewhat traumatized from whatever misguided choice had landed him in the clink that night.
He had to pay a fine, or something, and then he got the hell out of Mexico, speeding up the Pacific Coast Highway back to his apartment in Los Angeles. I don’t think he ever made another trip down to TJ. Things could have gone a lot worse for him that night. He got lucky. It’s never advised to bank on luck. Sometimes it goes our way, sometimes it doesn’t.
I was talking once to another healthcare worker about our respective careers.. When I described to them what I did for work, they made a quick assumption that many of my clients had to be cases of neglect, and people who came from generally unsafe environments bad neighborhoods, that sort of thing. Funnily enough, it’s actually the opposite.
The primary demographic that I tend to work with tends to come from very affluent communities, and they are often the byproduct of over-parenting, not neglect. We have all heard the term “helicopter parents”. I sometimes refer to them as “snowplow parents”. They are the type that hover over their sons and daughters, making sure that they never encounter dangerous situations, and they are always stepping in to fix a problem that the young person might be having in order to protect them from danger, consequence, a bad grade on their report card, and so on. They plow aside anything that might otherwise get in the way of their child’s positive, forward progress.
While well-intended, what this does is it robs a young person of the opportunity to evolve. We actually experience our strongest moments of growth through moments of hardship, conflict, and difficulty. Heartbreak, betrayal, rejection, losing a friendship, failing an important exam and missing the honor roll. Though all of the aforementioned things suck and hurt, they help us learn how to survive, cope, and figure out how to best move forward in the way that makes the most sense for us as individuals.
When we survive hardships like these, we come out the other side more battle-tested, with a thicker skin, and able to realize that we can bounce back from even the most dire of challenges that this life can, and will, throw at us. When a parent steps in to try to prevent them from happening, or, worse yet, tries to fix them when they do, they are unwittingly and unknowingly teaching their young one that “they can’t do it on their own” in their own way, on their own timeline, and in accordance with their own preferences.
Some of these hardships that we experience in life will leave scars. Some are visible, some ain’t. But scars tell important stories. They tell stories of survival. Though survival stories aren’t fun or breezy, they are undeniably important, and they offer us the chance to gain new knowledge, wisdom, resilience, and courage.
If a caretaker hovers over us, only to do the heavy lifting or micro-management of their belief of how we should survive the situation in question, they are stealing away from us an opportunity for important growth.
Look, what it comes down to is this: life isn’t always going to be hunky dory. This is true for children, pre-teens, adolescents, adults, and all of us. We need to get knocked down from time to time in order to learn how to pick ourselves back up, dust ourselves off, tend to our wounds, and keep moving.
The alternative? We will internalize the belief that without a fixer at the ready, we will not be able to solve our own crises when they occur. We will learn to become helpless in the face of hardship. And this life? Man, can it ever get hard sometimes!
So, in closing, sometimes the best way to help someone who is struggling with something is to not step in to help. Rather, it is to step back, so that the individual in question can step forward to empower themselves to clean up whatever mess they’ve gotten themselves into.
They can start to believe in themselves. When they ask us, “What should I do?”, we should always respond to them, “What do you think you should do?”
Read more from Joshua Bennett-Johnson
Joshua Bennett-Johnson, Licensed Addictions Therapist
After working for 7 years in an amazing clinic, I launched into private practice in 2018. I love my job. I can say that without reservation. Watching people rebuild their lives is something that is worth more than any dollar amount.
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