Hi, my name is Father Mike Schmitz and this is The Sentient Presents.

So years ago I remember reading in high school or college about how when people were raising

elephants but not in the wild but in captivity like in a circus or something like this,

how they would train them to stay put essentially, what you do is you take a baby elephant and

you tie a rope to the elephant and then you take the other end of the rope and tie it to a

stake pounded into the ground. Now the baby elephant because it's not as strong as a full-grown

elephant would would strain against the rope and strain against that stake and be unable to move

so that what the elephant did was when they when it grew up it wouldn't pull against the rope,

wouldn't pull against the stake even though as a full-grown elephant it could easily pull the

stake out of the ground as a full-grown elephant it could easily basically walk wherever it wanted to

but it had learned when it was a baby elephant that no no matter how hard you work no matter what

you do you're stuck here they had learned helplessness what will happen is a lot of times I'll run

it to people who kind of go through life with this same mentality because of their situations

because of things that have happened to them because they meet because they tried again and again

and they haven't experienced any kind of change what they've learned is no matter what I do

I'm always going to be the victim no matter what I do I'm always going to have a lack of power no

matter what I do nothing changes and they've learned helplessness and some people who have learned

helplessness begin to have this thing they call a pessimistic explanatory view of the world

and the pessimistic explanatory view of the world is oftentimes permanent it's personal and it's

pervasive it's permanent things will never change it's personal it's probably all my fault

and it's pervasive everything I touch turns to dog poop you know kind of that's the idea it's

it's permanent it's personal it's pervasive now someone could say well then the way out of this is

...