Before I say anything critical of the slew of self-improvement books one can find at bookstores or on Amazon.com let me acknowledge that in my early 20s, I was a voracious consumer of them who could never get enough. I markedly decreased my reliance of them once I began therapy with a professional because I found the therapy much more helpful. Since becoming a licensed therapist and seeing many clients in my own private practice, I have stopped reading them entirely. Why? For a variety of reasons. First, they presuppose you are not OK as you are and that you need to fix something wrong with you that is holding you back from attaining the peace, ease, self-acceptance, self-confidence, contentment, satisfaction or happiness you desire. They all appear to use a marketing strategy of promising a panacea in the form of special knowledge not available anywhere else, when the fact is they borrow heavily from well-established therapeutic approaches. Often the only detectible difference between what they say and what other books say is the author coining slightly different language to describe the problem and/or the solution. Second, they typically offer a one-size-fits-all prescription for achieving your personal goals. For example, a grieving client of mine was instructed by a book on how to grieve that she must never drink while grieving because it was an unhealthy coping mechanism. I found this silly since the client was neither an alcoholic nor a recovering alcoholic and she was only drinking one glass of wine in the late afternoon while sitting next to her husband on the patio reminiscing about their lost child.
Exact prescriptions with hard-and-fast rules gloss over the complexities and nuances that therapy can address. As a therapist I have learned that every client is unique and that adequate treatment must be customized and tailored to the client’s needs, goals, symptoms, phase of life, home/work environment, trauma history, medical history, addictions history, prior therapy experiences, behaviors in the therapy room (including sobbing, rage, panic, dissociation, blocked memories or saying things just to please the therapist that are not true) and core beliefs formed from her interpretations of life experiences. Third, they promise way too much. In my experience, significant personal transformation is hard work that requires lots of face time in therapy, and it requires ongoing teamwork by therapist and client to penetrate defenses, stimulate insight, prompt gradual adoption of new behaviors with therapist support, and overcome periods of stagnation or setbacks. No matter how well written a book cannot be a companion on the journey of self-change that requires a therapist to listen, provide empathy and support, observe, give feedback, ask probing questions, challenge distorted thoughts, reframe unhelpful client perceptions/thoughts/narratives, encourage, validate, and affirm a living, breathing client.
The darkest side of self-help books is inducing people to mislabel themselves with mental illnesses they do not have, risking ineffective and even unsafe treatments not approved by the FDA or the general consensus of the psychiatric and therapeutic community or advocating behaviors which are counter-productive or even harmful. When an orator urges people to do something – whether to take up arms, burn a symbol in protest, refuse to pay their taxes, harass certain politicians or officials or even to participate in well-intentioned non-profits or NGOs, the orator is not responsible for their actions and never finds out what actions they took or the consequences they faced. A licensed therapist is ethically and legally responsible for the welfare of his client. If he makes a negligent mistake he can be sued and face disciplinary action up to losing his license. This makes the stakes high. No such stakes exist for the authors of self-help books. Their authors, like the orator, know not what becomes of the people who listen to them. Should all self-development books be avoided? No, books by the likes of Gabor Mate, Daniel Siegel, and Peter Levine are goldmines of solid, useful information. What I am saying is that great care and caution should be exercised before buying, digesting, and believing self-help books, and even the best should be read in conjunction with psychotherapy if at all possible.
