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The thing I hated most about my mother was her learned helplessness. She used it to get everything she wanted (and a lot of things she didn’t).

She would sit on the couch and literally allow her life to fall apart around her. She would sit in waste and rubbish until those closest to her would, overcome with pity, scoop her up out of her misery and give her money, jobs, or any other manner of opportunity.

It was the pattern she relied on most in every relationship she had. Instead of doing for herself, she expected others to do for her. Everyone was a puppet, existent only to nurse the trauma and wounds she shouted about to anyone who would listen.

This learned helplessness fed into the narcissism that, in the end, destroyed her.

My mother died alone at 63 years old. There was no one there to rescue her, no one there to help her. She had few friends, no family living nearby, and a stressful hourly wage job that didn’t even realize she wasn’t coming in that day.

Ultimately, my mother ended up an invisible woman…and her learned helplessness helped bring her there.

What is learned helplessness?

Seeing the trajectory of my mom’s life, it was no surprise that she ended up the way she did. Raised in a world of the most brutal trauma you could imagine, the only genuine power she had (for a long time) was holding her pain above others. She learned how to be helpless when she saw the power it gave her over everyone else’s emotions. And that’s where she got lost.

Learned helplessness occurs when we face stress we do not believe ourselves capable of overcoming. With that belief in mind, we learn to resign ourselves to failure and stop trying to do anything to improve the situation. We apply this over-and-over again any time we face similar stressors.

When you resign yourself to failure you resign yourself to a life that is not entirely your own.

You can think of it like a kid of repeatedly fails a math test. No matter how much they study, they keep getting a poor grade. Eventually, the kid internalizes that experience and tells themselves that they’re useless. They stop trying to improve their math skills, and give up altogether — taking “F” after “F” on all their tests.

This helplessness builds. Becoming a victim in one space, you can adopt the same mindsets in a range of other experiences. Eventually, you learn to give up on yourself so that others will rescue you.

It’s a slippery slope to be on. For my mother, learned helplessness leads right into a mess of covert (or vulnerable) narcissism. She loved the power in it, and the mechanisms that made her feel good. Makes sense when you’re tired of being tested by the challenges of life. Flirt too closely with this learned helplessness, though, and it can ruin your life.

How learned helplessness contributes to covert narcissism.

There’s a fine line between accepting our victimization and becoming someone who weaponizes that victimization. That’s the risk of learned helplessness. It can teach you that there’s genuine power in wielding your trauma over others. That’s where covert narcissism is built. Quietly, you learn that your pain gives you precedence over other people.

Power in victimhood

It seems impossible. How could learned helplessness possibly feed into covert narcissism? The ties are obvious when you allow yourself to follow the threads logically. First, you must consider the power dynamics.

Playing the victim and giving up can come with a lot of social power.

Initially, the people who love you are intent on helping you. They don’t want to see you suffer, so they will swoop in and do anything they can to keep you from dying in your own feces on the street.

Over time, a narcissistic person realizes that their victimhood actually gives them power to control others’ behavior and emotions. They figure out they can sabotage others, influence their emotions, and even change the core decisions they make for their lives.

Pity brings a lot of power. To the person who already thinks poorly of themselves (like the covert narcissist) there are no qualms of ego here. They are happy for others to see them as a victim, because they know where they’re really putting themselves on top of the pile.

Running on idle

One of the most frustrating things about covert narcissists is the sheer laziness with which they operate. Perfectly capable of becoming any positive thing they set their minds to, they choose not to. They get a greater supply from manipulating others and tricking them into cleaning up their messes.

And that’s one of the real dangers of learned helplessness. It can make you lazy. When you realize victimhood gets you handed things, our human nature can take over. We like getting things easy, but it comes at a high cost for our emotional health and wellbeing.

Covert narcissists are not happy with the state of their lives. There’s no genuine joy that comes from getting other people to clean up their futures. The more lazy they become, the harder their life and relationships become. In the end, like most other narcissists, they end up alone.

Skirting accountability

There’s a distinct lack of accountability that comes with learned helplessness. Sure, superficially, the idea sounds like someone who takes too much blame on their shoulders. They take so much that they give up on themselves altogether.

There’s a different layer that’s not being considered, though: When you lean into learned helplessness, you’re really giving up on all future accountability.

If you’re helpless, you’re powerless. If you’re powerless, you can’t take the blame for what goes wrong in your life.

Break it down. By saying that you give up and you can’t do anything about something, you give yourself permission to stop acting. You walk away from your responsibility, or any other efforts that may have given you some onus of control.

Narcissists love to use excuses like this to avoid accountability. Refusing to be responsible for any aspect of their life, the covert narcissist (like my mother) will use their learned helplessness to throw their hands up in the air and deny any role in the mess they made.

Need for revenge

Revenge can be a big motivating factor behind a narcissistic person’s learned helplessness. We don’t always consider it, but narcissistic people are extremely insecure and envious people who rely on the validation of others in order to stabilize their desires and self-image.

If an envious narcissist can’t get attention any other way, they will manufacture a crisis and then stand helpless in the rubble. If they need to punish someone, they will use the same technique.

Learned helplessness feeds into passive aggressive behavior that a narcissistic person already has. They use their victim status to put those they dislike in a place where they can put them down and “destroy” them. It’s a creative path to revenge, which usually ends in self-sabotage for the narcissist.

Feeding the fantasy

Narcissists of every kind exist in a realm of fantasy. They create grand delusions in their minds, and they expect everyone around them to mimic and reflect that delusion back to them. Fail to do this, and you will get punished or discarded entirely from the narcissist’s life.

Learned helplessness feeds into the fantasies that you have about being the most important in the room. It feeds your desire to be the biggest victim, with the biggest following on and offline.

How? It’s simple. When you create a world in which everyone has to cater to your disasters, it makes you feel important. You come to learn that — even if you don’t like yourself — you are entitled to the emotional and physical labor of others.

You teach yourself, through your learned helplessness, that it’s up to other people to clean up your messes. The fantasy pervades until you push everyone of value out of your life.

Increasing inadequacy

While it feels good to have people cater to your needs in times of stress, it also increases your inadequacy over time. The less you do for yourself, the more you come to believe that you aren’t capable of doing for yourself. This low self-opinion is one that narcissists also hold about themselves.

This is where the learned helplessness flips and traps you in its claws.

Believing that you are worthless, you act as though you are worthless. Behaviors rooted in this belief bring you to bad careers, terrible relationships, and terrible life setups. These situations build, make you more miserable, and guarantees that someone else will have to rescue you from your mess.

Then the cycle starts again. Your learned helplessness becomes a learned lack of worth, and every aspect of your life will reflect that.

Why you should empower yourself to thrive instead.

Some of us are lucky. Some of us escape the patterns like that of my mother, and learn how to go another way instead. Because here’s the thing about narcissism: it comes from choice. Narcissists choose how they behave. They choose to hurt people around them, and they choose to hide the truth from themselves.

You don’t have to choose that life for yourself. Instead of becoming a helpless manipulator in your own life, you can step up to the plate and become a self-possessed adult who knows who they are and what they want.

If you want to avoid this pattern of narcissism and learn helplessness, then there are a few steps you need to take:

• Learn more about covert narcissism
• Get some professional help
• Increase your core of self-esteem
• Teach yourself emotional intelligence skills
• Adopt a new pattern of self-regulation
• Lean into discomfort and challenges
• Get emotionally invested in independence

When you come to a place where you value the power of your own presence, you will have the power to overcome your victimhood. Make no mistake. That’s the only way you create the happiness you’re chasing. No one is going to hand it to you. If you want to be rescued, you must rescue yourself.

***

You don't have to go the way of my mother. You don’t have to die alone, in the middle of nowhere, with the police kicking in your door and shattering your windows just to find your body. There is sadness in that path that is impossible to come back from.

Keep yourself connected to life. Stay connected to the people that you love, and open your heart up to a world in which you can grow and improve (on your own terms).

No one can rescue you from life because no one can rescue you from yourself. You are the hero in the story, the savior. If you want to be happy, if you want to be surrounded by love, or success, or family, then you have to be the one to build it.

Stop being lazy with your life. Start stepping up to the plate…even when it’s hard. Your future self with thank you.

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