Oof! This was really powerful. I’m a coach, so it also got me questioning myself, and yet the thing is — you can’t tar anyone in the ‘self help’ industry with the same brush. There are a lot of quacks out there who just parrot mantras and pseudo-science and do, indeed, push the agenda of “you just have to work harder, while not questioning the systems you’re in”. But I don’t know how much time you’ve spent reading self-help books before you stereotype them all with a few cliché lines about doing hard emotional labour by yourself. It’s not always the case — even though I do wonder whether mindfulness might be the new ‘opium of the masses’… especially when it’s brought into workplaces.
At the same time, my secret approach is to move any clients who come to me towards a more universal consciousness. To question their own desires and dreams and dig down into what is truly important to them — and 90% of the time, especially from the women who are drawn to working with me, it turns out that they are really passionate about making a positive difference in the world that extends far beyond their own personal goals.
Really effective self-help can make people more mindful of their consumption patterns and the narratives they’ve swallowed up from society and the media, e.g. capitalism and hyper-individualism. At least, that’s my hope…
Let’s compare it to physical ‘self-help’ for a moment, though. It would be wonderful if the US didn’t put corn syrup in everything, sell “cheese product” instead of actual cheese, or had some regulations on what could be called organic. At the same time, if I’m a nutritionist who advises people on how to make healthy dietary choices, is that self-destructive BS? Would I not be somehow empowering people to make choices that benefit them? Yes, I think it’s any coach or therapists’ moral duty to ALSO challenge the systemic issues that exacerbate these problems in the first place, and to gently bring their clients’ attention to them (although not straight away, because it can be pretty overwhelming to make someone feel responsible for changing an entire system when they’re already struggling), but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t give people tools to make themselves feel better right now.
If we come at systemic change from a place of frustration, anger and despair — having had zero “self-help”, it’s going to look very different from the kind of changes we’ll make if we come from a grounded place of intelligence, awareness, and deep connection to the people around us and our planet. It’ll be a messy, short-lived revolution where nobody has any real ideas for what to put into place, and globally we see that this allows extremist groups to usurp power quite quickly. Self-help books alone aren’t going to make everyone magically more rational and grounded, but if we want positive social change, then it’s surely part of the picture…. but, as I said, it totally depends on who you’re looking at when you say ‘self-help’ ;) — there IS plenty of BS out there.
