Learned helplessness is defined in the dictionary as “a condition in which a person suffers from a sense of powerlessness arising from a traumatic event or persistent failure to succeed.” For example, a person might grow up in a demanding or controlling household but due to the fact of being a child, they have no control over their circumstances or environment. The child then internalizes this sense of powerlessness, so that even when circumstances change and there is an opportunity for escape or the child becomes an adult and can make their own choices, the person does not try because they believe on a deep, felt sense that they are unable to. A felt sense of helplessness becomes inextricably viewed as part of their identity or as an unchangeable fact of the external world.