self help books were my first resort before therapy and antidepressants. i really put my whole heart (and bank account) into reading them and digesting them. they did not help. they are just somebody else saying here’s what i went through and I got through it so I guess you can too. i’d often finish reading a self help book and think “damn, i’m really just a weak bitch huh”.
if anything, they just made me feel worse about myself because I hadn’t figured out what worked for me, but is it even possible to figure out what works for you whilst being so heavily invested in what worked for somebody else and trying to apply that to your own situation?
on one of my many quests through the self-help book section of my favourite bookstore in London, I came across a book that mentioned something along the lines of “think yourself out of depression”. I immediately laughed out loud, rolled my eyes and walked to the non-fiction romance section to get my next fix of the latest colleen hoover book. honestly, non-fiction novels probably help me get my shit together more than a self-help book ever could because at least they make me feel things other than worthlessness.
im willing to be challenged on my perception of self-help books as I am still yet to read ‘the body keeps the score’. however, for right now, self-help books do anything and everything but help. how am I meant to apply your solutions to my life when we have never even met? there is no way the author of said self-help books could even comprehend the multitude of lives of people that will come across their book, so how can they have this “one solution fixes all” body of work. in the same way that two people can be depressed but the same antidepressant and/or dosage of antidepressant won’t have the same effect. we’re all so different.
each one of us have had our own story. from the day we were born til now, we have experienced different things that make us the way we are. our lives have impacted how we process emotions, how our brain reacts to situations, how we express love and hate and pain. each one of us will have a different reaction to every stimuli in life so how can we even begin to believe we can read one thing that helped someone else and hold on to the hope that it will help us. at least preface every self help book ever written with “take this with a pinch of salt”.
hope seems to be where self-help books get you. I know that for me, self-help books made me feel hopeful (before I got to chapter 2 that is). you spend £15 on a hardback book that makes you think you’ll get your shit together and be happy and dance in grass and smile at strangers and never question why your brain decides to block your serotonin re uptake. hope is important. without it I don’t think many of us would’ve stuck around to experience the life we live right now. however, there is an extremely fine line between hope and delusion and self-help books seem to balance on that very very fine line.
I don’t want to read what worked for you and then read that you believe I should do that too. instead, I want to read your story and gain inspiration from it. that’s where the hope should come from. that I too can be okay but in my own way. its tough because the specificity and how personal self-help books are is part of what catches you. you feel this attachment to the writer, as if you know them. as if its a friend telling you their life story as a means to encourage you. but I don’t know the writer. we have never met. am I just a vessel to consume the writers trauma dump?
i’ve held some resentment to self-help books for a while now, clearly. because I get it. I know how it feels to feel so hopeless that you reach for a book that promises you the answer on how to not feel that way. but that’s not what happens. there’s a brief moment in time where I feel that I am cured. crippling anxiety? vanished. insecurities? never had one. imposter syndrome? pfft, I run this place. that vanishes very quickly. its almost as if you get this weird readers high at the end of self-help books and then it starts to crumble and you have to go back to your reality. you were so invested in somebody else’s reality that you temporarily took it on as your own but this isn’t a non-fiction book that you’ve become heavily invested in, this is a fiction book that is misleading you down the path of a life that you think you want. there are many blurred boundaries and confusions that arise with self-help books and i am retiring from that genre. you’re better off getting a therapist. at least they know you. the advice you get from a therapist is catered to you and the life that you have. no self-help book can give you the things you're searching for if they don’t know the things that you’ve been through.