In one book I read about childhood trauma, it related an experiment they did where they put two rats in side-by-side cages, but they couldn't see each other. One rat had a lever; when they pushed the lever, both rats would get an electric shock, and both rats would receive a pellet of food. The rat with the lever quickly figured out the deal: Whenever I push the lever, I get shocked, but I get food: painful, but predictable and under its control. It adapted to the situation completely fine.

The other rat's physical sensations were exactly the same: it was shocked at exactly the same painfulness and degree as the rat with the lever, and received the same amount of food. But its psychological sensations were very different: It had no control over when the shocks would happen, nor any way to predict them. It basically withdrew and became a nervous wreck.

The point was: We can actually endure an awful lot of suffering if we can predict when it's going to happen, and particularly if we have some control over when it happens.

The author described the experiment to explain the behavior of one of the children in the book. A girl's mother started dating a man who began, occasionally, to get very drunk and then sexually molest the girl; after which he would be very apologetic and remoreseful, until the next time he got drunk. In response, the girl started getting the boyfriend drunk on purpose. The idea (surmised the psychologist author) was: I can't stop it from happening, but at least this way I can control when it happens, which makes it much more tolerable.

If they'd given people the option to either sit in a chair and be randomly shocked without warning, or to stand, I'm willing to bet that far fewer of the men would have sat in the chair.