Why Self-Help Strategies may not be Helping much at all

We have seen a dramatic shift in the desire of individuals to work on their issues in recent decades, as we have also seen a broad collective shift toward mental health awareness. This change is hugely important but is not without its problems. In some reaches, there is an almost counter-phobic obsession with thoughts, ideas, and practices, ranging across the full spectrum of psychology — both East and West — as it relates to personal development. While this is undeniably valuable, it must also be questioned. And here is why:

1. Real Change is about the Story, not the Headlines

One can be forgiven for thinking that the key to psychological change and development is to get hold of as much advice as one can from experts and sages — for presumably, they know what they are talking about, given that they have an abundance of expertise and experience. But this presumes that what changes us is the insight into change. While insight is an important, and some might even say crucial, aspect of the process of change staying changed, it is not itself a primary agent of change itself. Rather, something much more radical is, something out of which our minds are born and depend on for their being — that which insight has sight into.

So, what is this radical thing at the root of change?

Well, names fall short here. But let’s think about a child developing, especially a very young child when most development happens. For example, parents by and large do not instruct their children to watch their anxious thoughts and let them drift away, advising them with surety that the thoughts do not reflect “reality,” nor do they advise them to think about all the good parts of themselves when they are feeling down because they are, “in reality,” the good things that they have forgotten. These insights that the parent might have discovered are not going to be particularly helpful for the child, at least not in the absence of something else (see below).

Rather, children develop by living into and through the highs and lows — the doubt, the pain, the fear — pre-verbally and without thought, discovering for themselves through the very qualitative dimensions of those experiences and their real-world outcomes, that anxious thoughts will pass and the good parts of themselves will survive and reemerge after bad experiences have passed.

It is about journey and process, something that actually has very little to do with insight. It is about the movements of one’s being and not mental phenomena, and it is about that which is experienced but not necessarily known.

If what has been unearthed in this journey can then be translated into a verbal, personal insight, then all the better. The quality will have a quantity to it, so to speak, which can then be called upon and mixed with darker moods in times of duress. But the efficacy of the insight in these cases really depends on it being a translation of the fruits of one’s own journey. Using a translation of somebody else’s will not have nearly the same potency because their insight is the fruit of their journey — something which cannot replace the journey that produced the insight. Doing so may even interfere with or stifle your own attempts at change, diluting or muddying them, as it confuses the process.

Insight, in other words, is the icing on the cake and not the cake itself.

You might say, “But what you have said above relates to children, not adults.” This is true, and there are, of course, differences — our minds, and thus our powers of insight, are much more developed, and we have learned how to navigate our worlds as adults. To this I would say, as many a psychotherapist has said before me, that those psychological aspects of ourselves that are in need of transforming are precisely those that disembarked from the developmental train at a particular juncture and therefore remain immature, waiting. As a result, they need to be called upon to embark on a new journey in the present. I might also add that no matter how developed a mind and its insight, the power it has to change things at the pre-verbal level is naturally limited (indeed, some people would say that the more developed the mind, the less power it has to do so). We are essentially talking about two different orders of reality.

2. Psychological Development is not Something you Achieve Alone

While what I have said above is important in its own right, it is missing a very crucial component to this kind of journey. The journey that the child is on requires parents or other care figures to be intimately bound up in the process. If the child is to discover through their own experience their nature as a continuous self, persevering and even thriving through the adversity of the world, an other is needed as an integral part of that journey.

The role of the other is to contain, regulate and render the child’s internal state digestible for them — at least, that is, ideally. It is within this matrix of ‘self and other’ that real change happens, because, despite what we have been taught we are and often experience ourselves as, we are not, in essence, isolated minds. On the contrary, we are inter-dependent and inter-constituted experiences that cannot be meaningfully separated from each other without emptying ourselves of the experience of being alive.

This is explicit in the case of the infant and its development. As Donald Winnicott famously said, “There is no such thing as a baby,” referring to the role of the parent as the sine qua non of the being of the baby. But the truth of this interconnectedness with the other remains a constant throughout life. It is only that it increasingly recedes from our awareness and becomes more obscure as time goes on, progressively retreating into the implicit, unacknowledged ground of our lives.

Developmental psychology has taught us that it is the journey within this matrix that is the primary agent of psychological and emotional development, a discovery that changed the way we think of psychotherapy. Despite Freud’s initial notion that change happens through revealing the unconscious 'truth' behind the patient’s problems (i.e. insight), irrespective of what was happening between therapist and patient, his attitude changed to working with “transference” — the patient experience of the therapist as a composite of past relationship figures enacted live within the therapeutic dynamic.

Fast forward to the present day, and most therapists, especially in light of Attachment research, understand that psychological and emotional transformation for the adult is primarily considered to be something that happens in the transformative dynamics of the relationship with the therapist. This assumes, of course, that the therapist can do a good enough job of containing, regulating and rendering the person's internal state digestible for them — just like the parent. It has little to do with revealing 'the truth' of the past (or the present, for that matter) as insight for the individual, an endeavour that has largely been given up.

This, then, is not a DIY kind of situation.

It is not about knowledge of one’s psyche acquired from the outside world, but about self-evident revelatory experiences that spontaneously emerge from the self in the right environment.

One can say that many people embark on solo journeys and have transformed considerably, something which is clearly true. I would argue, however, that those people either already have had a fruitful original journey (of the sort above) that implicitly functions as a resource, or they currently exist in a wider journey inside of themselves, even though they may not be actively participating in it on the outside. Of course, we all, to differing degrees, have both. Sadly for a lot of us, however, some stops along the way may have been problematically negotiated or traversed in a superficial way, such that a return to them is really the only viable way forward.

But this is not, of course, to say that you cannot do anything transformative by yourself — mindfulness practices, Yoga exercises and certain self-help strategies clearly can be helpful. It is to say, however, that those kinds of things should not be considered as replacements for the kind of process described above. They should not themselves, in other words, be thought of as capable of generating sustained, stable psychological and emotional change (although they may indeed be capable of immeasurably advancing what has already been developed, which is another topic). Insofar as they are, it could spell further trouble.

Psychological development is something that happens between people, and this is especially important when we are thinking about psyches for which a diagnosis of a mental disorder, from a psychiatric standpoint, would be appropriate. In the case of more distressed or volatile psyches, self-help strategies may not help at all, or worse, might exacerbate the problem. This is something that Carl Jung (1970) pointed out, in relation to the Western mind, in his writings in “Psychology and Religion.” Indeed, he explicitly warned us against engaging in these activities without an awareness of the function that the East’s cultural container provides.

“The split in the Western mind”, writes Jung, “therefore makes it impossible at the outset for the intentions of yoga to be realized in any adequate way… not a trace is to be found of the unity and wholeness of nature which is characteristic of yoga” (1970; p. 533). I would argue that a basis in “unity and wholeness” is in fact a pretty accurate description of the main aim, in the first instance, of (Western) psychotherapy. One could perhaps even say that psychotherapy as a discipline emerged in the West, in part at least, to compensate for the lack of this in the Western cultural container.

3. Happiness is not about the Absence of bad Feelings

If only it was as simple as ridding ourselves of bad feelings! If it was indeed as simple as that, all therapy would be some variation of telling the client good things about themselves. Empathy and understanding are only one side of the coin. The other side is limits, the fundamental and perennial need for which is something that naturally and necessarily binds us to the experience of bad feelings.

It is not too far-fetched to say that a child who is solely the subject of empathy and understanding would have psychotic tendencies. They would have no way of differentiating where they end and the world begins. Rather, we come to gain a sense of self in the first instance by “bumping up against” what we are not — something which can be a painful realization. A firm “no” from a parent when a child only sees what they want in front of them, while often deeply upsetting for that child, serves as a critical part of their self-development. It is through these experiences that the child learns the hard way that the world is not just an extension of their own wishes and desires, and it is these experiences that manifest an interior place — a sense of self — for those wishes and desires to exist as personal and therefore subject to one’s agency. Indeed, it is the creation of this place that is responsible for strength, resilience and genuine empathy for others.

If this process is devoid of empathy and understanding from a significant other, that bump might break something, and the process of developing selfhood fail. But without that limit, the soil in which the self grows would be baron, and empathy and understanding would largely be futile as transformative tools.

Unfortunately, as a result of this, suffering really is an inevitable and necessary part of life, and one cannot escape this basic fact — it is even there as an axiom of physics, entropy. Despite what we fantasize about, there is no such thing as a linear movement towards 'goodness'. Life is a dialectic between good and bad, expansion and contraction, creation and destruction, which so many of the world’s traditions and discoveries have shown us. What goes up must come down, as they say — and for good reason. Without this contrarian force, in fact, there would be no such thing as existence, which is as true for the development of the self, as it is for the development of an atom.

While thinking good thoughts in the face of bad feelings might help in the short term, over time they do not. Those feelings avoided through focusing only on the positives become repressed or dissociated, depending on one’s level of psychic organization, and appear in another form elsewhere or at another time, often radicalized and with a vengeance — the contrarian force manifesting an unconscious entity instead. From the perspective of the individual, psychological and emotional development only truly happens when we enter into a new communion with those parts of ourselves that feel pain, shame or anger when we reach a limit in the world.

People often think therapy is chiefly about removing something 'bad' from, or gaining something 'good' for, one’s self. But this is not the case. It is much more to do with generating a certain quality of internal space in which what is already good and bad come together in a kind of family-of-the-self. In Gestalt psychotherapy, they call it “The paradox of change.” This is the idea that change only truly happens when we genuinely accept what is. It is this acceptance that introduces those parts into the domain of the self, thereby freeing up our consciousness to look over and after them instead of being embroiled in their on-going relationship issues. The truth of this applies outside of therapy too, of course, and I take it as a general principle that transformative spiritual practice and deep creative endeavours work by similar means.

In fact, when we think about it in this way, the notion of happiness really loses its meaning altogether. One is not looking for some state in which things are always, in some important sense, better. This is actually a feature and means of dissociation. Rather, the fruit of a better communing self — developed out of a journey inextricably tied to another — is a sense of relief, stability, continuity and faith in oneself and the world in the face of the flux of good and bad, happy and unhappy experiences.

4. To truly Learn something we must Commit to a Process

Finally, I wanted to say something about the nature of self-discovery in general. While it is true to say that learning as much as one can about the mind, and one’s mind in particular, can be useful, it is also true to say that those things which quickly enter our psyches and lives also have a tendency to fly out just as quickly.

Learning about oneself is not an easy thing to do. It is not simply about adding information and experiences together and hoping that they form some sort of coherent whole by themselves. Much like the problem with the development of the psyche in general, nothing truly transformative comes without struggle and without entertaining the bad feelings associated with that struggle. It is only within this context that we can meaningfully talk about coherence. To really learn something about oneself involves going through doubt, confusion and loss; for if you have something to learn, then at the same time you must have something to unlearn (not a nice experience when we are talking about who you thought you were!). If this were not the case, then how you already saw the world would have been unproblematic and a need for some sort of answer would not have emerged.

Thus, a cursory investigation of some aspect of one’s psyche or life, or only briefly pondering a problem or its solution (both of which I admit being guilty of myself) are unlikely to effect radical change. To really discover something new that has an actual impact on one’s life, one also needs to commit to a journey and process, with all the complications that come with it.

This is particularly hard, and becoming increasingly harder, in the modern Western world in which we are becoming more and more seduced by a kind of manic, scattered and impulsive cultural mood, one that encourages rapid and superficial complexity at the expense of depth. The odds are against us in this respect.

This is not, though, to say that briefer readings or musings on these topics are not helpful (otherwise me writing this would be pointless), but they must be seen much like the activities mentioned above — as compliments to, and not causes of, change.

There is no substitute for an other.

References

Jung, C.G. (1970). Psychology and Religion: West and East. Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 11. Princeton: N.J.

Winnicott, D.W. (1960). The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 41:585–595.

James is an experienced psychodynamic mental health counsellor with a specific emphasis on severe mental health issues and psychological assessment. James also writes on topics related to psychology, philosophy, and religion. His central passion is to help reimagine and re-conceptualize the nature of mental disorder from a 'non-Cartisean' perspective in order to advocate for non-reductive strategies of healing and recovery.