 I need to apologize to all of you loyal rewired soldiers out there, I have failed you. What is up everybody this is Chris from the rewired soul where we talk about the problem but focus on the solution and if you're new to my channel, my channel is all about mental health and what I like to do is pull different topics from the YouTube community to try to teach you how to improve your mental and emotional well-being. So if you're into that make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell and before we get started man thank all of you so much first off all you new subscribers you're amazing but you guys are helping me get to 10,000 followers on Instagram we're at like 8,200 that's only 1,800 more I get the little swipe up feature so if you're not following me yet follow me now at the rewired soul and you can see cute pictures of me reading books with my cat Maya how cool is that alright so anyways anyways the most popular video on my channel is the video I did well one of the videos I did about Illimation the the truth about Illimation and and yeah I need to make this this final video I have to because I felt bad I felt so bad so all of you who have watched that video I talked about Martin Seligman and the psychology of learned helplessness and I asked the question I usually ask questions to see if you can relate to see if I'm connecting with you on some level with these videos and so so so many of you in the comments said that you could relate to learn helplessness which is great because you interacted and you let me know but I screwed up because here at the rewired soul we talked about the problem but focus on the solution but I didn't provide you with a solution so I wanted to bring it back and talk about Illimation situation and talk about learned helplessness since I know a lot of you have struggled with that in one way shape or form alright so today we're going to be focusing on the solution and how Illimation went from hopeless to hopeful those of you who aren't caught up to speed learned helplessness it is something that many many many people deal with and basically just to sum it all up it's the way our brain rewires itself when we keep trying something and it doesn't work right one of the examples that we use was like you know Illimation trying to get out of her relationship you know she tried talking to people she tried going to the cops and you know these other things and she started to feel helpless for other people it might be you know I know a lot of you mentioned like looking for a job and getting turned down and all that so one of the solutions for learned helplessness is just finding this little glimmer of hope alright that's one of the reasons I named my first book hope because like that's all it takes that's all it takes and if any of you have been around for like a minute I don't think anybody is hopeless I have never ever ever met somebody who is hopeless alright so a lot of it has to do with perspective but in this video I'm also gonna give you some solutions but before I do that I have a very special guest kind of so because of my videos that I've done about Illimation Illi actually saw my videos and like whoa super cool so me and Illi we're buddies now and yeah I was talking to her on Twitter today in DMs and yeah I wanted to see if she had any kind of standout moments in her recovery or in her you know healing process that kind of helped her get out of learned helplessness and give her some hope so here's what she sent to me gotcha okay I guess this isn't a moment exactly but rather yes support system the people who are there with me during it all and tried to help or even had no idea they stayed with me after that it's one thing to be supportive a supportive friend or family member during a bad situation but on top of that it's amazing to stay so supportive after that bad relationship ends because when the relationship ends sure this physical danger is gone but it's not quote-unquote over at all there begins a bit the very long process of healing and a lot of times victims end up in more abusive relationships or go back to their abusive partners I'm not a licensed psychologist or anything so I can't say why that is but thankfully that didn't happen to me so yeah abusive relationships turn your entire world against you but the constant in your life who stay consistently kind and understanding with you whether you're being abused or having 20 or having nightmares 20 years later about being abused they deserve so much credit it's like having a role model to see how strong you can be for yourself and to be that person for others one day how let Luria like that is so awesome like so really right there is talking about a support system which is something that I can definitely relate to as well and there's something that I talk to you guys constantly about all the time is finding support finding people who have been there been through the same thing or people who will just be there for you but I'm glad you touched on that point that like the healing process like takes a while it doesn't just go away after the relationship ends and how she talked about like if we don't have that support system around us we can fall back into a similar abuse of relationships that's why some people have a pattern of bouncing from one relationship to another even if it doesn't reach that level of abuse maybe it's like falling for people who are verbally or mentally abusive you know what I mean but anyways before Ili left she she had one more thing to say so I'm not making this up she said tell him I said to like and subscribe so you guys heard it Ili herself who just hit one million subscribers on YouTube just told you to like this video and subscribe to my channel thank you Ili but yeah so for me I can definitely relate I can definitely relate to learn helplessness and so you know one of the great books I read that helped explain learned helplessness as well as ways to get out of it is this book right here it's called the happiness advantage it's by a professor of positive psychology at Harvard University his name's Sean Aker I highly highly highly recommend everybody check this book out I'll link it down in the description and in the pinned comment it's an amazing book I got it on the audio version but anyways talks about a lot of that stuff but for me learned helplessness took its biggest form with my addiction all right and this is something a lot of people with addiction struggle with but I had many many many relapses and where I got to was you know a little over six and a half years ago I was laid up in the hospital with a 10% chance of living and I was telling my family to give up on me just let me die right and that's a terrible place to be but I was struggling with learned helplessness I had tried to get clean before I had tried to do that before and it never worked so my brain was saying why even try again why even bother right so thank thank goodness that I did you know what I'm saying because here I am today over six and a half years clean you know my life is amazing I got my son back in my life all that kind of good stuff so here are some tips I want to give you if you're somebody who is currently struggling with learn learned helplessness or you know somebody who might be struggling with learned helplessness and maybe these are some tips that can help them the first one is listen to stories okay like this is something that helped me so so so much because our brain our brain toes and said it's impossible the first thing that you need to get over is what we call terminal uniqueness so many of us think oh no my story is different right I used to think that like if you understood how I grew up if you understood my messed up childhood if you understood what I've been through in my life you would know you would know that there's no saving a guy like me right we call that terminal uniqueness because you think that you're so special and nobody will ever understand you that is actually going to kill you all right so what I had to do was I started having to listen to stories and I was absolutely blown away when I actually started listening to people who had been through what I had been through but their life had gotten better right so for example if you're somebody who's ever been in a relationship like he was in like use her story as hope right because when I hear other people sharing a story I'm okay well that person can do it maybe I can too like some people got upset at my video which is really weird I didn't think that would be a controversial video some people got upset at my video about the youtuber burnout myth right and what what I want to get wanted to get through with that video is if a guy like me can do it then maybe you can do it too right but it's it's all different scenarios okay so if somebody's been through a similar situation you got to find those people that's why I keep telling you guys like go join the discord server and or the Facebook group they're always linked down in the description okay it's where members of you know you know the community here we have different chats and just share our experiences and you guys you don't even have to talk you don't have to talk like I can't express to you how much power there is from just shutting your mouth and listening right you don't have to say anything you could just go lurk in the Facebook group go lurk in the discord server and maybe just reading the post or conversations you will start to get some hope that you don't have to keep living the way that you're living anymore the next tip for learn help helplessness is this and so old cliche saying but it doesn't matter how many times you get knocked down it matters how many times you get back up right like I said I never ever ever in my entire life have has met a hopeless case in any scenario whether it's addiction or whether it's mental health whether it's an eating disorder whether it's borderline personality disorder never met a hopeless case now again it's about getting back up and trying again one of the biggest misconceptions that I see from people is they tried something once and they think it's never gonna work again right like think about that like let's let's related to this is there a food that you absolutely hated when you were a child and now you love it right like maybe a vegetable or something like this can be similar to mental health so maybe when you were like a teenager you tried therapy and it didn't work well now that you're a 20 or 30 year old adult maybe it will work okay maybe you just had a bad therapist maybe you weren't ready for therapy maybe you are now broken enough to accept the suggestions that a therapist is giving you you see what I mean maybe you have more willingness to change now than you did back then I see it happen with a ton of people also medications okay see a doctor talk about medications maybe you had you know bad results with a medication in the past that by no means means that every medication to help with like depression anxiety or cravings for addiction or whatever it is won't help you by the way non-narcotics that's what I preach okay but anyways just know that you are evolving all the time and just because something didn't work back then doesn't mean that it won't work now so never give up and the last thing is something that my beautiful amazing mother taught me the psycho the professional psychologist um she taught me about this thing called the miracle question so I did some research on it and basically that question is if you went to sleep tonight and some miracle happened and your your entire situation changed ask yourself or journal about it and say what would that look like what would this thing look like and now start start working backwards from there see what you have to do this is also something I recommend when setting goals you start at the ultimate goal and then work backwards right but basically you work backwards and you see what is the first step in getting there so so that miracle question it's part of solution based therapy okay so I highly suggest that you check that out um my mom's gonna be doing some worksheets and stuff like that in the near future but you can google it and all that stuff but anyways I hope this video helped out thank you again illy for being a part of this video and all of you all of you let me know down in the comments below share your stories about how you thought you were hopeless or something wasn't gonna work out and then it did alright but anyways that's all I got for this video if you like this video please give it a thumbs up if you're new make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell because I make a ton of videos and a huge thank you to everybody supporting the channel over on Patreon you're all amazing and if you would like to become a patron and get some extra exclusive stuff click the top right there alright thanks again so much for watching I'll see you next time