As I said in my first post, I bought my first self-help book when I was ten. It was called How to Be Popular. My Montessori school had some sort of book-ordering scheme. You checked off the books you wanted on an order form, and a week or so later, the teacher handed out everyone's books in class. In front of the whole class. I remember being embarrassed at my choice of books. Even then, I suspected that to seek help in books was something to be ashamed of. And especially the topic. How to be popular! How sad that I'd have to find that out from a book! When I got the book home, I even hid it from my mother, behind other books in my bookcase.
I was always a troubled, quiet child who never had many friends. For one thing, I was pathologically shy. It was months before I would speak to my first grade teachers, and even now I have a vivid memory of the moment I opened up to them. I wouldn't talk to any strangers, and was terrified of the ringing of the phone, worried that I'd be expected to pick it up and answer it. Add to that that I started having acne breakouts at around ten and, as a younger child, had had to wear a purple nylon headpiece to keep the retainer in place to fix my overbite, and you don't exactly have the picture of a confident, happy child. Buying this book is the first conscious memory I have of taking action to better myself.
The two main things I remember from the book were: "When you first see someone, smile and say hello" and "Be a good listener." These seem obvious now, but not to a ten-year-old who was anxious and timid around others. And to be honest, I think the advice worked. I made more of an effort to engage with the people around me, and though I certainly didn't become the life of the party, I did manage to gather a friend or two.
Since then, I've gravitated towards self-help or self-helpish books and never been ashamed to seek help from counselors or therapists when I needed it. I guess you could say I grew out of the embarrassment. But here's the kicker: I'm still shy and quiet!
And this, I think, is my point: that self-help can really only do so much. These books and program are great and we can get a lot out of them, as much as we put into them. But in the end, we are who we are. Our personalities will not change appreciably. As a ten-year-old, I knew that my way of engaging with people (that is to say, not engaging with them) wasn't going to work. I knew this because I felt lonely and disconnected most of the time, and knew that I didn't like that feeling. I knew that someone else out there knew how to engage in a more healthy way with people, and I bought that person's book. I smiled more, I listened better. I learned to get along better with people. But now, at 40, I still have few good friends (although the ones I have are very good) and I will never be the life of the party. And this is okay.
Most of the work I've done on myself as an adult has, in fact, been about learning to accept and appreciate myself, and not about how to be different and "better."
I think the important thing to remember about self-help or therapy in general is that they are not miracle cures. If anything, they are tools to bring us back to who we are, not tools to make us someone different than we are, in our core. Used well, self-help helps us know ourselves, accept ourselves, and even love ourselves.
On the other hand, self-help can be very useful in teaching us new tools to use when life throws us curve balls. In my next post, I'll talk about how the acceptance and willingness I learned from reading my company's books on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy enabled me to reach a milestone at 37 that most people reach at 16.
