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Self-Help Heresy

Years ago, after attempting to help myself deal with life matters by making use of the more popular self-help books available out there, I quickly came to the conclusion that they really didn't have much more to offer me other than temporary solutions. I know that many people swear by them but in all honesty, since I've never been one to ever accept being told that there is something inherently wrong with me as a person, and that I therefore need fixing and correcting, I was disappointed to discover that the average self-help book subtly does just that. If anything, I became even more convinced that any problems I had could be dealt with more easily if I simply assessed my feelings about a given matter, rather than judging them as right or wrong or blocking them out--and by internally accepting my feelings rather than attempting to change them or to act them out.

Very recently I came upon the book called "The Last Self-Help Book You'll Ever Need" by Paul Pearsall. I found the title curious enough to pick up but honestly expected it to be nothing more than just another addition to the long list of self-help books out there. Surprisingly, it wasn't. I have to admit, my distrust of self-help books goes deep, and so it took me a while to warm up to this author but at a certain point I found myself chuckling at his dry-humoured rationale. His "alternative" point of view certainly made a lot of sense to me and I thought it was high-time that more people were exposed to what I deem a persuasively, logical perspective.

The following is an important passage from this book. The author begins with a true clarification of addiction and goes on to encourage the reader to adopt a mindful approach to matters that are too often taken on faith. Finally, that all self-help ought to be a creative activity, not a one size fits all approach.

Demitra M.N.

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THE ADDICTION FICTION

The concept of addiction is one of the arms of the self-help good-life trinity. It is the classic method by which we locate the cause of a human failure in external factors. Because of the seductiveness of that proposition, there has been an almost total acceptance of the ideas of addictive personalities, multiple addictions, and even a range of intensity in addictions from soft to hard. We assume we can be addicted to things, behaviors, and people, be they alcohol, work, sex, chocolate, a lover, or television watching. If addiction really existed as self-help says it does, we would be in danger of becoming addicted to addiction.

A Japanese proverb is often quoted in addiction recovery centers: "First the man takes a drink, then the drink takes the man." This statement suggests that addiction is caused by outside forces that we just can't deal with, a view that is unsupported by research. Lots of people take a drink, but few are taken for life by it.

Real addiction tortures souls, ravages bodies, and destroys families. It's important to remember, however, that "addiction," as self-help defines it, is an invention. It doesn't "exist" in the same way that a virus or a bacterium exists. As the maverick addiction researcher Bruce Alexander pointed out, there is no such thing as a substance that causes addiction. Addiction is not a fact of life but a description abut how we are choosing to live.

In the 1960s, the physician E.M. Jellineck was one of the first to label alcoholism a disease. This biomedical bias asserts that alcoholism is an inherited tendency toward physical dependence; that is, chronic brain disease is caused by the biological effects of psychoactive drugs and results in withdrawal when the drug is taken away. Self-help translated this view to its own criterion for declaring a behavior to be "addictive." It essentially said that anything you do that is difficult to stop doing is an addiction.

Into the 1970s, the disease bias was supported by researchers trying to replicate addiction in the laboratory. They tried inducing the "big four" of the addiction biases: craving, tolerance, dependence, and withrawal. James Olds and Peter Milner, both psychologists, explained "addiction disease" by pointing to the conduct of rats in cages when subjected to the relentless stimulation of their brains' "pleasure centers" (the septal area of the hypothalamus). The caged rats shot electricity to their brains as often as they could. This "reward model" of addiction helped substantiate the view of addiction as biomedical disease called by the stimulation of "pleasure centers."

As a young student learning about Olds and Milner's rat research, I thought that there was little else for the rats to do in those terrible cages than to get high on electrical joy juice. The experiment did not explain human addictions. Drugs such as cocaine and heroin do produce extraordinary highs and they are profoundly addictive for some people; yet tobacco is just as addictive as these drugs, but it doesn't produce the equivalent highs. The reward model also fails to explain why drug abuse continues even when unrewarding side effects such as anxiety, agitiation, convulsions, and vomiting occur.

The biggest problem with the "reward model" of addiction is that it has been accepted by self-helpism as fact. In this uncomplicated view of the theory, something within us is subject to addiction, or is too weak to resist. But studies on torture conducted by Professor Stanley Milgram of Yale University, showed that it wasn't what was inside a person that made him or her willing to torture others, but something in the situation that encouraged bad conduct. The "within" belief bias of the self-help often ignores the "between," or situational, factors involved.

In the early 1980s, creative and careful research by Bruce Alexander and his colleagues Roger Coambs and Patricia Hadaway challenged established thinking about addiction. They suggested that a broader view of the reward model can open new ways of dealing with the misery of real addiction and allow us to banish the myths that surround it.

A LESSON FROM RATS IN PARADISE

When Alexander observed laboratories where so-called "reward model" studies of addiction disease were taking place, he felt as I did. He saw skinny, starving, junkie rats with catheters sticking out of their heads living in feces-littered, cramped cages; every hour of their deprived existence was spent pushing levers that administered stimulation. He commented, "If I lived like that in a cage, I'd get as high as possible too." He wondered whether testing animals in more benevolent settings would lead to the same kind of behavior shown by the addicted caged rats.

To test this hypothesis, Alexander and his research team built what they called a "rat park," or a rat paradise. They constructed a 200-square-foot rat housing colony, about the size of a small bedroom. It had heating, tasty cedar shavings, and the most preferred toys that could have come from "rats-R-us". The housing was co-ed with plenty of space for sex; the walls were hung with beautiful paintings that were the team's best guess as to what would make for rat heaven. A control rat group lived in the typical sums of laboratory cages.

The team then tempted the rat park and rat slum residents with morphine-laced water. The caged slum rats drank it until they fell into a drug-induced daze. The rat-parkers resisted the morphine water no matter how much sweetness was added to entice them. Some of the rat park residents would occasionally take a sip of the morphine water, but then returned to plain water. Living in the rat paradise rendered the tempting joy juice nonaddicting. Even the rat-parkers who did imbibe to excess on the sweet morphine water eventually stopped drinking it. They did not "go into the throws of withdrawal" you might have seen portrayed in the movies; they just "came down," got up, and went back to enjoying life in rat park.

Alexander took a behavioral-cultural view of addiction. His research shows that addiction isn't cased by an abused inner child, and addicted parent, lingering childhood guilt, negative thinking, low self-esteem, an addictive gene, or the power of external temptation. Addiction is environmental more than psychological; it is caused by a situation, not a vulnerable psyche. Repeated exposure to even the most addicting drugs does not usually lead to addiction. It's not the drug we put in ourselves that's the problem but the place in which we find ourselves that leads to addictive behavior. Addiction appears to be related to whether we feel we are living in a terrible cage or in a loving colony.

SELF-HELP HERESY

The victim mentality and "within" rather than "between" orientation permeates self-helpism. The religious approach of confessing your addiction and deferring to a higher power (God, a therapist, the group, the program) for helping you climb through steps to a life in perpetual recovery is the way of self-help. Although only about 5 percent of people in twelve-step programs succeed in staying sober, advocates still consider it heresy to challenge this approach.

The "cage vs colony" idea is attacked by those who point out that wealthy people usually fill the luxurious beds at high-end addiction treatment centers. In both my clinical and personal experience, I have found that some of the richest people feel the most "caged in" and trapped in relationships, occupations, and lives characterized by great spiritual suffering. We've all heard stories about mega-millionaire rock stars and athletes who become addicted to drugs. On the other hand, many people struggling to make ends meet avoid drug use and addiction. Good relationships and membership in caring colony make the difference.

I've also heard the arguement that the brains of opioid, cocaine, and other drug abusers show signs of changes that weaken their ability to exercise free will. But as all scientists know, correlation is not causation. As with all the issues with which self-help deals, I suspect that there's a little truth in all the views of addiction. Creative self-help requires first being aware of these views and then carefully sorting through them to arrive at a dynamic view of the issue as it applies to one's own life.

MAYBE, MAYBE NOT

As we consider the mythology of self-helpism, it is helpful to consider a warning from President John F. Kennedy. He wrote, "The greatest enemy of truth is not the lie--deliberate, contrived, and dishonest, but the myth--persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic."

The alternative ideas that follow are suggestions, not instructions. By that, I mean the ideas are food for thought, not steps to take or concepts from which to begin a personal reconstruction program. I don't offer programs, steps, or answers; I do offer ideas that I hope you will find worth of consideration for your own creative self-help program.

Self-helpism can't flourish unless we think something is wrong with us; the old psychology examined only those who were suffering and sick, leaving self-help free to encourage those who aren't "really sick" to become "all they can be".

Much of the new research that has relevance to what I'm calling creative self-help derives from the new field of positive psychology. This is the science of what is right about us, and it goes beyond psychology's historical focus on what is broken and how to fix it to look instead at what is right and how to recognize it. The new positive psychology focuses on the ordinary magic of people who are thriving despite, and often because of, adversity. Joined by findings from the new fields of affective neuroscience, psychoneuroimmunology, energy cardiology, and other sciences generally unknown to the lay public, positive psychology offers a base for creative self-help.

SOME ALTERNATIVE "FACTS OF LIFE"

Here are some alternatives to self-helpism's "facts of life." They are meant to serve as catalysts for the more creative and contrarian consciousness and to provide direction for a more creative self-helping. I hope they will cause you to adopt a mindful approach to what is too often taken on faith.

LOSE HOPE. Striving to keep your hopes up at the worst times in your life can be exhausting. Studies such as those recently conducted at the Harvard and UCLA Medical Schools show that hope does not promote healing, nor does it render cancer treatment more effective. Trying to "be hopeful" can prevent honest expression of feelings that could be helpful in maintaining and improving quality of life even a the most frightening times.

My own struggle with cancer taught me that pessismism, fear, anger, and panic are every bit as legitimate as constant hopefulness, and that such emotions are even essential. When others tell us not to lose hope, sometimes we hear, "Your present situation is terrible and all that's worth thinking about is a better future." Accepting that assessment is dangerously limiting because it tells us that the present is not all that worth living and that joy is to be found only in the future.

GIVE UP. Persevering is not the only way to demonstrate strength. Nor is being strong always about working had for victory over an outside obstacle. Strength can also mean knowing when to engage in enlightened surrender, willingness to give in and move on. Though giving up has a bad reputation in the self-help movement, winners do sometimes intentionally quit, and quitters often end up winning.

Sometimes, persevering turns out to be glorious stupidity, and not giving up can lead to the loss of a golden opportunity. As the song says, the challenge is to "know when to hold them and know when to fold them." Too often we foreclose on today by constantly feeling pressured to struggle for a better tomorrow. So long as we give up both the striving and the goal, we are free to think creatively about our problems. If, however, we just stop trying and still cling to our goal, we end up feeling despair and helplessness.

THINK SAD THOUGHTS. Trying to think only happy thoughts limits our ability to think creatively and critically. Our general level of happiness has almost nothing to do with external factors or how we "try to think"; it's largely due to our preset "happiness range"--from the annoyingly upbeat Winnie the Pooh to Eeyore the chronically down donkey. We are what we are and no amount of positive affirmation will change that. There's misery in the world and plenty to think sad thoughts about. Just as there is no day without night, we need sadness and sad thinkers as much as we need the gleefully upbeat. We all have our "happiness set point," one that is not changed by trying to think happier thoughts or by winning the lottery or "getting all the breaks."

SETTLE FOR SECOND (OR THIRD OR SIXTH). In any life endeavor, there can only be one number one. Relax and enjoy being one of the thousands who fall short. My own research on successful people published in my book Toxic Success shows that misery is the ultimate result when we link our sense of achievement to other people's failures.

DON'T WORK THROUGH YOUR GRIEF. The pathogenic or "dysfunctional" starting point of most self-help approaches assumes that we need help with grieving and many other natural life transitions, that they are somehow "treatable." New research shows that there are many types of grieving and that the rush to grief counseling can do more harm than good by imposing assumptions that are not relevant to one's own grieving style.

Grieving is not a symptom. It is a natural, necessary life process. Because we live, we die. Because we die, we were made to grieve. We are not emotional hydraulic machines in which our feelings build up a kind of spiritual steam that has to be vented. Unless we have other psychological problems, most of us grieve well without help, and do it relatively quickly without having to "work" at it or seek the help of a grief counselor.

BE A PESSIMIST. A little defensive pessimism goes a long way to building a good life. You'll seldom be disappointed, and sometimes pleasantly surprised. Unless you're a natural at trying to always think positively, the effort is stressful, exhausting, and limiting. A scientific Journal of Negative Results would likely contain many important lessons and new questions. Thinking negatively is easier and it comes natural. If it didn't, our ancestors would not have survived. Our natural propensity for pessimism is a built-in evolutionary trait that helps keep us vigilant for threats to our well-being. Research indicates that the longest-living people in the world were distinguishable by their pessimistic outlooks.

DON'T TRY TO DISCOVER YOUR "PERSONAL POWER". You don't have nearly as much of it as you think, and you'll end up happier and healthier by focusing on your "interpersonal weaknessess."

DON'T BELIEVE IN YOURSELF. No matter how much self-confidence you muster, you can't do everything you put your mind to. Part of the strength of giving up derives from avoiding the fatal mistake the legendary John Henry made: He tried to do the impossible. Beware of the "Little Engine That Could" approach to health. ("I feel OK, I look OK, I am OK!)

DON'T TRY TO HAVE IT ALL, DO IT ALL, AND "JUST SAY YES". It's exhausting and doesn't lead to nearly as much health and happiness as being willing to have less, do less, and just say no.

STOP EXPRESSING, REPRESENTING, AND ASSERTING YOURSELF. Shut up and listen. Research shows that people who interrupt are three times more likely to die of heart attack than those who don't and that marital relationships usually fail because of too much communication, not too little. Couples who spend a lot of time being quiet together stay together.

MEN AREN'T FROM MARS AND WOMEN AREN'T FROM VENUS. One of my gay patients showed me relationsip guru John Gray's book about the different planets from which men and women are supposed to come. He tossed it onto the table and said, "OK, if this guy's right, on what planet do the gays, lesbians, and transsexuals live?" The problem isn't that men and women think as if they were from different planets; it's that they are following the wrong advice about how to live together on this one. Men and women are not nearly as different as we've been led to believe. (I have found that almost every major relationship book was written by a divorced author who had experienced many failed relationships.)

The oft-cited gender differences in these books are usually the reverse of what sound science says. It's men, not women, who tend to become emotional quickly, who tend to be clingy and needy, and who use an excess of words to express themselves. (One of my female patints said, "I know my husband uses a lot more words than I do. He just uses them all up before he gets home from work.")

YOU'RE NOT A VICTIM. Except for people who have suffered accidents and been victims of violent crime, most people are not victims of anything except thinking they're victims. Listen to any group of people talking about daily problems and you will hear the victim mentality, even if they are victims of something as inchoate as "the world today."

While we're examining self-help's victimology orientation, it's worth noting that most children aren't physically or emotionally abused. Those who were abused are not automatically doomed to lives of failure, to further victimization, or to victimizing others. Self-help psychology puts way too much emphasis on psycho-history, ignores the data showing that childhood experience doesn't have much to do with how people feel or act as adults, and neglects the strong infuence of temperament.

BE A GOOD BLAMER. To err is human, but to forgive is not always divine. There is a forgotten first step in the "forgive and move on" self-help advice--good, intense, mindful blaming. Finding the right person to blame is essential for good mental health.

DON'T READ WEIGHT-LOSS BOOKS: EAT THEM. They're a better source of fiber than information on permanent wight loss. If you eat them, they'll stay with you longer and generally better for your bowels than the plans they offer.

DITCH YOUR DIET. Research shows that no diet works for long, and constantly trying and failing at dieting is depressing, unhealthy, and ends up making you even fatter. Use the SWELMM system of "Stop Worrying, Eat Less, Move More."

INDULGE YOURSELF. Research on aging shows that the stamina and general good health shown by living long entitles older people to at least one pure indulgence a day for every ten years they have already lived. Whatever you've been doing is working, so reward yourself, and--despite Wayne Dyer's dire warnings about guilt--go ahead, feel guilty, and wallow in self-recrimination!

BOTTLE UP YOUR ANGER. Contrary to the idea that "letting it all out" is healthy, research by the physician Redford Williams and others shows that venting is bad for you and those around you. Do you remember your last intense angry rant? Did you feel better while you were doing it and after? Did your tantrum target change? Research show that although mindfully understanding your anger can be helpful, hostile expression of it weakens your immune system and literally hardens your heart and the hearts of those around you.

SHOW YOUR AGE. Gravity will trump nips, tucks, and Botox. No matter what you do, you will eventually grow old and wrinkled. Enjoy the fact that being old means you don't have to worry about dying young.

DON'T NURTURE YOUR INNER CHILD--KICK IT'S ASS. Our well-being depends more on finding our "inner elder" than on yielding to a mythical, whining, narcissistic inner infant. Look for your problems within your adult interactions, not within your own infantilized consciousness.

AVOID MOST SUPPORT GROUPS. Talking with others about a real problem you share with them can be helpful, but many support groups often found that meeting at churches often became pseudo group therapy that, intentionally or not, ended up explaining and supporting destructive behavior rather than helping participants take individual responsibility for making the difficult long-term changes required. Gathering a bunch of self-proclaimed bulimics, shoplifters, and sexaholics together to discuss their afflictions can lead to group support "for" the problem rather than a careful examination of its roots.

STOP MISTAKING PSYCHOLOGY FOR RELIGION. Satan is not a personality disorder. It may be wise to learn from ancient spiritual systems and their forms of psychology and science, but modern psychology itself is--or should be--primarily a science, not a spiritual system. If you're looking for religion, get out of the self-help section of the bookstore and go to church or temple.

FACE IT, YOUR FAMILY'S NUTS. The only cure for dysfunctional families is to do away with all families. We all have at least one weird family member and usually more. In fact, most of us are that member! A family is nothing more than a group of people irrationally committed to one another's welfare. Being a good family member means being able to enjoy living everyday with a group of flakes and failures. A good family is a group willing to stick with you when most sane and discerning poeple would vote you out.

DENY YOUR ADDICTION. Except for what seems to be a kind of "craze addiction" of "psychoholism" shown by dependence on the latest movement or program, most of us aren't and never will be addicted to anything. You're not a "chocoholic," you're just intentionally pigging out on chocolate because it tastes good. You're not a "sexaholic," you're just having too much reckless sex because it feels good. Even if one of our parents was a medically diagnosable alcoholic, long-term research shows that we are not doomed to suffer the same fate.

There are more stages to life than living in denial or recovery. Living in a state of assumed lifelong recovery wastes an enormous amount of creative energy. As I pointed out earlier, the famous twelve-step program is ineffective for 95 percent of those who attend it. The best way to deal with something you're doing that you shouldn't be doing is the one-step program: Stop it! A dose of good guilt and deserved shame might help.

STOP LOOKING FOR MR & MRS RIGHT. Loving for life is not a matter of finding the right "someone". It's a matter of being the right person. No one is ever loved the way he or she wants to be love. Stop looking for love and start showing it. Be more concerned with being love-worthy than being loved. Realize that it is at least as important to be in love with marriage as it is to try to find someone you would love to marry.

IF YOU THINK YOU'VE FALLEN IN LOVE, GET UP. Psychologist Robert Sternberg shows that romantic love is a temporary mental "illness" or condition caused primarily by a state of neurohormonal imbalance. It is evolution's way of seeing that we propagate, but it doesn't cause us to cohabitate for long. If we calm down and wait, romantic love always passes and true love can grow.

Real love is not a feeling; it's a decision. If you think you're seeing love by gazing deeply into your partner's eyes, you aren't. You're seeing eyeballs. Lasting love is more a matter of learning to look outward at the world together than looking longingly eye-to-eye.

LOVE CONDITIONALLY. Healthy, lasting love is conditional, not unconditional. No one, including you, is love-worthy if she or he doesn't behave lovingly. Love is something you earn, not something you deserve. Worry more about being love-worthy than about your own self-worth.

DELUDE YOURSELF. Because we're all flawed and not easy to live with, every married person is married to a fool. Research shows that deluding oneself about one's partner--believing that he or she is kinder and more caring and helpful than he or she really is--is essential for a lasting relationship. The greater the discrepancy between close friends' more objective view of your marital partner and your own more subjective one, the happier and longer lasting the marriage.

DON'T EXPECT WHAT GOES AROUND TO COME AROUND. Total jerks and evil people often get all the good breaks. Being nice guarantees nothing. Good things happen to bad people. Sometimes, things just don't "balance out" or "work out for the best".

STOP TRYING TO LIVE UP TO YOUR "FULL POTENTIAL". You probably don't have much more potential than you're showing right now, and striving for more will only cause disappointment. Stop focusing on your potential and start thinking about doing the best with the talents you already have.

STOP TRYING TO CORRECT YOUR FAULTS. Instead, find your strengths and enhance those. Your biologically determined temperament accounts for a large percentage of your feelings and behavior. Striving to be someone you aren't leads to disappointment and, again, maybe even a heart attack. Despite all the self-help books, people don't ever really change all that much. The best we can do is to fine-tune our inherited temperaments.

DON'T STRIVE TO BE ALL YOU CAN BE. Despite the exhortations of the recruitment ads for the United States military, that's a recipe for burnout. Keep a little in reserve. If you're all you can be, that's all you'll ever be. Trying to "be all we can be" assumes that we aren't all we can be right now, but we usually are.

STOP TRYING TO RETRIEVE YOUR "REPRESSED MEMORIES". Like many aspects of Sigmund Freud's theories that still permeate self-help (denial, defensiveness, passive-agressiveness, etc.) research shows that the idea of repression, a mainstay of self-helpism, is out-of-date. As the psychologist Drew Westen pointed out: "Many aspects of Freudian theory are indeed out-of-date, and they should be. Freud died in 1939 and he has been slow to undertake further revisions."

By considering these alternative facts of life and reflecting about them as they apply to your own life, you can begin the process of creative self-helping. By taking a "yes, but" mental attitude and reflecting on the opposite of the accepted tenets of the self-potential movement, you can discover new ways to find the meaning, comprehensibility, and manageablility that truly allow you to help yourself. Through this more enlightened and inclusive self-helping, we help those who love us--and the world--and this is the path to fulfilling our true human potential.

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