On the making-friends thread, I remembered this phenomenon, which my mother reminds me of in response to an alarming percentage of the problems I mention to her.
A behaviorist named Martin Seligman was doing experiments that involved -- sorry Katie -- shocking dogs. At some point he and his colleagues noticed situations in which dogs that had been shocked often enough would just lay there and accept the shock, even if they could avoid it by doing something as simple as moving to another location. They'd essentially "learned" that the shocks were inescapable, and there was no point in even trying to avoid them. Similar patterns of behavior are common enough for humans, as well. I often do this, in a low-level but awfully pervasive kind of way; thankfully I'm probably much better about it now than I used to be.
Do you do this? Have you ever? What helps you stop it? Seligman was a big proponent of the cure of positive thinking, but he didn't have to try and pull that off during the mid-90s. Now people say it's less about instituting the positive thinking and more about unlearning the negative thinking -- the self-defeating dialogues that go "oh, I've failed again, what's the point."
― nabisco (nabisco), Wednesday, 4 September 2002 20:10 (twenty-three years ago)