In 1967, American psychologist Martin Seligman conducted an experiment on learned helplessness in which dogs were divided into two groups.
In Group A, a switch was placed to turn off the electric shock; in Group B, there was no switch and the electric shock was played.
The dogs in Group A learned and turned off the switch when the electric shock came; the dogs in Group B learned that there was no point in doing anything and became irresistible.
The dogs in Group A and Group B are then moved to a room where they can escape from the electric shock by simply jumping over a partition.
The dogs in Group A jumped over the partition, whereas only 2 out of 8 dogs in Group B jumped over the partition to escape the electric shock.
In the case of the over-adapted type, what caused the electric shock to become learned helplessness?
If you were consistently abused by your parents at an early age, who called you “disappointing” or “despicable” and so on, that would be treated the same as an electric shock, and you would have learned helplessness.
Even in a state of abandonment, where a young child is not accepted by his/her parents no matter how much he/she seeks acceptance from them, the dislike for the child that is the source of the parent’s abandonment is an electric shock that causes learned helplessness.
However, in many cases, when looking at the over-adapted type, there is no memory of so much flagrant abuse or neglect from the parent. If anything, the parents are codependent types who are concerned about their children. If the parents were codependent types, the child would be a regressive type or show the same codependent type response as the parents, so why would the child be an over-adapted type with learned helplessness? This is an interesting question.
The condition to become an over-adapted type is that the difference in intelligence between the child and his/her parents must be more than 20. Generally, the average intelligence quotient is between 90 and 100. When a child’s intelligence quotient is 20 higher than that of the parent, the phenomenon of “not being understood by the parent in their own sense” occurs (an intelligence quotient 20 or more higher than the child’s is like if the parent has an IQ of 100, the child has an IQ of 125).
The ages of 2 to 6 are the period when children are able to distinguish and recognize things using their own images, and when children ask their parents many questions. This is a period of rapid intellectual and emotional development.
If parents who have a difference in intelligence from their children get irritated when their children ask questions, it will be an electric shock and lead to learned helplessness.
The reason why parents get annoyed is because they are having fits of jealousy over their intelligent children. The fits of jealousy occur on the condition that the person is “in a lower position than me, but has something better than me”. The child is born of the parent, so there is a parental perception of “being in a lower position than me”.
It is common knowledge that parents have no way of knowing the intelligence of their children. But if you get annoyed at a child’s question and have the feeling that you are “bothering” or “making fun of the parents,” you are having a fit of jealousy because you perceive from the child’s question that the child is intelligent.
Why do we call it a ” fits of jealousy”? Because a “fits” is an animalistic reaction, something that the parents cannot control. And the person having the seizure is often unaware that he/she is having a seizure. Furthermore, the seizure switches to a destructive personality, and the young child may be told, “You’re so clingy!” and “Shut up!” and other hurtful words to young children, and sometimes they unknowingly become violent.
The difference in intelligence between parents and children causes parents to have fits of unintentional jealousy. So, a codependent-type parent might worry, “Will this child, who asks me so many things so persistently, become mentally ill in the future?” They worry that the child will become mentally ill in the future. You would think that if you were the parent, you would have every right to worry like that, but the parent is giving the child an electric shock of fear that he will become mentally ill, because the parent is having fits of jealousy and becoming a destructive personality.
The child thinks that the parents are better than them, so the electric shock from the parents becomes fear because they have no idea that the parents are attacking them by transforming into destructive personalities through unaware fits of jealousy of their own intelligence (all written in the narrative).