The Price Of Passivity

The Price of Passivity

You must have the same attitude that Christ Jesus had.

Philippians 2:5

Whether it be in a hospital, a nursing home, a college classroom, a concentration camp, or even a marriage, helpless, oppressed people often perceive control to be beyond them, and this perception deepens their resignation.

This is precisely what researcher Martin Seligman and others found in experiments with both animals and people.^a When dogs were strapped in a harness and given repeated shocks, with no opportunity to avoid them, they felt helpless—obviously. But later, when placed in another situation where they could escape the punishment by merely leaping a hurdle, these same dogs cowered without hope. Faced with traumatic events over which they have no control, people, too, come to feel helpless and hopeless. This was discovered near the end of World War II when death camp prisoners were being released, only to discover they could have easily escaped on their own through holes in fences and unlocked gates. It’s what researchers call “learned helplessness.” And it’s the price we pay for giving up control.

Whether we are in control or not does not seem to be the ultimate issue. It’s whether we believe we have control that really counts. Think about it: since we can reduce the intensity of our stress by simply thinking about our problems in a more positive light (without “catastrophizing” them), we must have within us the ability to control the effect that adversity has on us.

Jill Kinmont, who was once the country’s top female skier, is a great example of the choice we have over not our circumstances but their effects on our spirits. She became quadriplegic when she fell and severed her spine in a race just before her twentieth birthday and a year before the 1956 Olympic games, for which she had been a top prospect. Jill went on to graduate from UCLA, pursue a lifelong teaching career, become an exhibited painter, and marry. Interviewed when she was forty-one, she was asked what accounted for her bright and positive outlook on life. Was it, the questioner suggested, because she had nineteen great years in the beginning? “I beg your pardon,” she replied. “I’ve had forty-one great years.”

Can you imagine the price Jill would have paid if she had given up her ability to choose her attitude along with her ability to walk? Can you imagine the price any one of us pays when we surrender our life—or our marriage—to fate? John Milton was right when he said, “We can make a heav’n of hell, or a hell of heav’n.” The choice is ours.

Could you choose to make more of a “heav’n” out of a situation in your marriage?

The mind . . . can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.

—John Milton

^a 83