Essay: The problem with self-help
why are we told to believe it's empowering to not need the help of others?
Sleep has always been a challenge for me. So the other night, when I woke around 3 am, it wasn’t unusual. I’ve tried to learn, to find ways to relax, to stop the racing thoughts. I tried for a solid three hours to fall back asleep. The thoughts just refused to stop whirling. When I woke up from a half-hour of dozing, one frustration was still spinning in my mind: the exhaustion of being told that everything—ourselves, our relationships, or society, our world—is a problem to fix. This litany: sleepmoredrinklesseatrightleanin. And the following year: don’tsleeptoomuchdon’tleanineattherightfatmoderatelydrinkdothework.
It’s the last one I’ve been thinking a lot about. Do the work. The term is used commonly, and I get the value in trying to heal what might have injured us in our past. But what would it be like to simply (?) be aware of ourselves and not think of ourselves as a mile-long list of problems that need to be managed and fixed? What would it be like to live in a world that wasn’t inundated with media, friends, coworkers—basically everyone—telling us all the things that we need to fix about ourselves?
It’s the law of the instrument—if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Except it feels more like the reverse—that all we have is a hammer and it is raining nails, screws, wood, metal, and we are being told in a crazy squid game that we have one lifetime to fashion an entire house with just a hammer.
It has become so pervasive, so incessant we absorb these commandments into our own personal, inner scape—be more mindful, more efficient; more productive, etc., etc. It’s not a new idea or headline—but I woke up just wondering what it would feel like to not have to fix anything, to live among others, among the earth, without looking at it like it’s something to fix or improve. Would that inherently be stillness? Acceptance? But would that then be denial, an abdication of responsibility—because ‘acceptance’ would mean something an individual has the privilege to choose?
Later that day, I was listening to a podcast where the speaker was lamenting that women’s writing often gets labeled as self-help. And I began thinking again about the origins of self-help, of Emerson’s self-reliance, of the individual white man alone in the wilderness, of individual incomes in a partnership, of the incessant story told that ourselves, alone, are all we can trust, are all that we have. That realizing it’s within us will magically solve the problems we face or feel. That it’s up to us to do the work.
Femininity is particularly problematized in ideas of self-help. Being a woman has been pathologized for centuries. And the audience for self-help is skewed towards white, middle-class women readers.
Women are often targeted as more relationship-oriented, which then strays from the ideal individualist, self-reliant gospel of self-help. As a result, much of self-help literature encourages women to take on characteristics of white male hegemony—to the point where
…ideal femininity is conceptualized as not needing others.…[it is] self-help that celebrates women developing a form of rugged individualism, where ideal femininity is conceptualised as not needing others.
And, needless to say, self-help for working women often problematizes women’s behavior, rather than the organizational cultures that cling to white male hegemonic practices—famously emblematic in Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In:
Other scholars highlight the way that self-help aimed at women in the workplace problematises women's behaviour rather than organisational cultures that support a very limited set of behavioural practices (and the neoliberal economies on which they are predicated) (Rottenberg, 2014).
Similarly, it has been shown that most often, it is women and minorities who are labeled with ‘imposter syndrome’—not the work cultures steeped in decades of structures that marginalize anyone who doesn’t fit the white male model of ‘professional.’
I’ve read my own share of self-help literature at different times—some given to me by a boss who wanted me to fix what she perceived as my imposter syndrome. Some self-help books are those that reach the popular zeitgeist and I become curious. I read many self-help books when I was pregnant—targeted to the middle-class white woman, advising on all the things that she would need to do to keep a healthy baby, raise a healthy child alone at home with a husband at work. Alone at home with the joyous days of a new baby you have no idea what to do with or if you’ll ever know sleep again. In these books I was struck by how much is put on women—it’s up to the mom, alone, according to many pregnancy books, to ensure that the individual soon-to-be-mother is doing everything right by her unborn child. Self-help.
I’m a bit fascinated with the narrative voice of self-help books—it’s the authority of their tone that I’m curious about—of who has the authority to say what is. Where does that voice of authority come from in sharing with others what worked for them, or the truth of their life?
It is so powerful to hear truth spoken out loud—even an individual truth. It cracks open the door—that feeling of “I thought it was just me” dissolving as soon as you recognize yourself in another’s experience of the world. I wonder if that’s why women who write non-fiction often get lumped into the self-help beat—i.e., a woman is obviously writing about how to fix herself…right? Other women could benefit from their help!
But so often the truth-telling of self-help can step over the cliff and begin preaching an individual experience as a presumed universal truth—and that’s when I wince. The preaching starts to smack of the hustle—like the self-help gurus selling their many books. Newer and newer versions of the same focus on the work you, as an individual, must follow to win at life. It turns hollow very, very quickly.
Can self-help actually be something that is truly helpful for many? Or is it only helpful to the individual making a living from selling their truth? I am America and so can you, etc.
The crux of it all for me resides in the sense of that ever-present problem that needs fixing. And that when it comes down to it, self-help is speaking—with an ever more certain and yet questionable authority—to people who are problematized by society and deemed to need fixing. It’s the trope of self-reliance inflicted with a kind of shadowed violence on those who are not privileged in society.
For example: if you’re living in poverty it’s up to you to change your life and get rich quick, it’s your power you’re not exerting—not centuries of disproportionate wealth and institutional oppression. If your self-esteem is low, it’s up to you to find the confidence within—it’s not because you live in a world that was made by and for white cis men and you are not one. If you feel like an imposter at work, it’s your issue to overcome—not an indication of a toxic workplace that supports professional ideals that have been shaped by and for white male hegemony. If you feel you live in a cage because that is the role that white supremacy and patriarchy has made for women and BIPOC, LGBTQ+ and trans people, it’s up to you, alone, to do the work to break free of that oppression.
Self-help quickly becomes a blame the victim mentality masquerading as ‘self’ empowerment. It silences the need to challenge the institutions and structures we are living within, which create the problem in the first place.
An article on these issues gives more precise language to the barrage of problems that self-help books seek to fix:
… In this way, self-help works to construct thoughts and feelings as modifiable, but the wider world as fixed and unchangeable (Anderson, 2017). … sociologist Nikolas Rose (1996, 1999) argues that such psychological discourse is a key site of the reproduction of power rather than of freedom through self-actualization.
The reproduction of power. Self-help is giving answers that intrinsically perpetuate and support the powers that be, inflicting a constant gaze towards the individual, rather than at society.
This is particularly true for women and minorities. It’s what we tell women and people of color when they get too angry: be civil. Be civil means act like a white cis-gender male—i.e., those in power. When it’s a matter of life and death, the need for incivility is exactly what should be brought to the table. But those with the grievances of injustice are told they need to ‘control’ their behavior, so that they might act more ‘correctly,’ more palatably to get their word across.
Self-help—learn how to achieve—by yourself—an anodyne civility of polite speech that supports existing power frameworks.
True to our inheritance of western manifest destiny frontier myth-making in this country, the psychology of self-help focuses on problems and solutions residing solely within an idealized white male individualism, rather than on the social and institutional structures causing individual harm, distracting from the need for collective, institutional change.
The toxic institution isn't the problem, you are. Fix yourself. You do the work.