everybody said that I'm a chicken shit

In Seligman's (1965) studies of learned helplessness,
dogs were divided into 2 groups. The dogs in the first
group received a tone followed by a harmless but painful
electric shock and were harnessed so that escape was
impossible. An assumption was made that the dogs would
learn to fear the sound of the tone and will try to escape before
shock occurs. These dogs and another group of experimentally
naive dogs were placed into a box consisting of a low fence that
divided the box into two compartments. The dogs were later
unharnessed and could jump over to land on the other side to
escape from the shock if they wish to. Dogs that had no prior
experiences with being unable to escape from shock would
quickly jump over the fence as soon as the shock occurs
whereas the conditioned dogs were distress but they do not
try to escape the shock. Results show that the conditioned
dogs had learned in their prior experience that there's
nothing they could do to escape the shock. Therefore even
when escape is possible, they still stay on the side of the box
which shock occurred because they had learned to be helplessness.

*
like the conditioned dogs,
she has the tendency to fail to act to escape from a situation
because of a history of repeated failures in the past .