Do self-help books really help?

This year the world celebrates 150 years of self-help books but do these books really work? I myself am a sucker for many of these books, as my groaning book-shelves will attest to, but I choose what I read carefully, as I believe there are many who jump on the self-help bandwagon and in the words of Tony Bates, writing recently in the Irish Times, “when they come at us with seductive titles that promise speedy and assured solutions to what we know are complex and deep-seated conundrums in our lives, they can leave the reader feeling like a failure when the liberation they promise fails to materialise.”

Bates conceds that ” many of these books do help a great deal. They can enable people to be more honest with themselves and guide them in their struggle to make sense of why they may be feeling and acting the way they are.

One person, quoted in Charlie Taylor’s article last week, described the considerable benefit she derived from the self-help books she had read: “The books I found gave comfort were those that recognised how bad emotional pain can be, that it was OK to feel that pain and that gave me encouragement to believe you could get through it.”

This wonderful tribute is one that any self-help writer would hope to hear from a reader of their work. What struck me was how the person speaking had never lost sight of the fact that she would be the one to “get through” her problems. And the recognition she had that her recovery would take time.

Because the truth is that these books can never, as some of them promise, part the waters of confusion and lead us to the promised land.

A person may give up an addiction, address their fears, ease up on being a control-freak or relinquish harmful and destructive behaviours, but this is likely to place them at the beginning of a journey, rather than at its end.

Free from the grip of our compulsive defensive behaviours we stand poised to begin each day to live our lives in a more open and honest way. To do this requires inner strength and a lot of patience. Very few self-help books tell us about the territory we all have to cross between giving up negative ways of coping with our inner lives and rebuilding our identities and our relationships without them.

Poets know how tough it can be for humans to find themselves in that twilight existence where we are no longer hiding from the truth, but where we have are yet become reconciled with ourselves.

Their writings can touch us when we need encouragement to keep going. I am reminded of the words of Brendan Kennelly:

“Though we live in a world that dreams of ending,

That always seems about to give in,

Something that will not acknowledge conclusion,

Insists that we forever begin.”

Source: Irish Times

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