"Elsa" (names and identifying details have been changed) was born in Scotland in 1973. A few months after starting her first professional employment in 1997, she was having difficulty getting out of bed and going to work. Diagnosed with clinical depression, she was ultimately hospitalized. The years following were a bleak treadmill of conventional psychiatric treatments, including frequent hospitalizations; none of it really helped against her incapacitating "black moods of hopelessness," or not for long. In 1999, Elsa moved back to her mother's basement, an invalid and pensioner, seemingly with few prospects.
Something happened in 2003, Elsa now says, that changed her life forever. While browsing the internet, she happened to read about a form of specialized journal-writing. Practiced consistently, it was supposed to "cure" depression over time. Elsa was wary, but also intrigued. The psychotherapist who had devised this method believed that psychiatric symptoms were manifestations of unresolved trauma from an individual's past. The journal-writing was intended to connect the writer's present-day emotional reactions to long-ago events, often in childhood, to systematically re-live and finally to resolve them.
"Really, what did I have to lose at that point?" Elsa remarked, smiling.
Finding an empty notebook and pencil, Elsa sat in a cozy chair, writing, far into the night. She wrote about her present-day, "black" moods, about her pervasive, crippling anxiety, and about her dimly remembered—and heretofore largely discounted—childhood history of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse by relatives.
In the morning, Elsa ventured down the street to a café. She remembers chatter, bright paintings in the sunlit room, and the sounds of the coffee-making equipment. Over her steaming coffee, Elsa felt glimmerings of new happiness and relief and connection to her surroundings.
Over the next years, Elsa faithfully continued her journal-work, at first, for several hours each day. In 2005, Elsa took a part-time job. Since 2008, she has worked full-time, for the same graphic and commercial-arts firm that had first employed her. There have been promotions and raises. She has many friends and a full social roster. She has tapered off all her medication.
Today, Elsa is married and a stepmother to grown children. She and her husband are "proud parents" of two Norwegian Elkhounds. She reports that she has not missed a single day of her specialized journal-writing since that first evening in 2003. These days, she writes for at least twenty minutes, up to one hour, each morning before starting her day. She is, as she puts it, "seeing to the endless clean-up" of her difficult past, so her personal emotional "baggage" doesn't interfere with her present life.
We Americans always have admired, or at least given lip-service to, "amateur" ingenuity and can-do in removing obstacles to individual and collective happiness. The notion that we, rather than the "experts," hold the keys to our own betterment, always did appeal to us. Paradoxically, it's taken a long time for that notion to start to lose its radicalism. In many ways, it never really has.
In the wake of the World Wars, self-help has, at least partly, reached the mainstream in the form of a "personal self-help" industry. Chalk it up to the rise of a leisured class, chalk it up to the waning of organized religion, the limitations of modern medicine, or anything else you want, there were vast "self-help" sections in any decent-sized bookstore I ever visited. "Take charge," the floor-to-ceiling titles exhorted browsers, "Ditch the paid chatterers. You already have everything you personally need to get yourself together, except wisdom from those who have succeeded at what you most want to do." From a book, apparently, you can learn everything you ever need to know about how to be happily married, how to be optimally creative, how to handle difficult relatives, how to attain physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. Many "self-help" books—disproportionately the more credible and serious ones, perhaps--have you "do" something, consistently, maybe with regular "checks" to see if whatever it is the book has asked you to do, is "working." You are looking for evidence of some-or-other desired sea-change in personal outlook or fortunes. Probably, some of the wisdom in some of those books, some of the time, works for some people, decisively and enduringly. It would depend partly on how well readers "stick to the plan" laid out in the chapters, how persistent and disciplined they are, over months and years.
For the ideal of self-reliance the term invokes, personal "self-help" gets a bad name. A psychology professor of mine in the 1980s declared, "On every neurotic's bedroom nightstand is a stack of self-help books." The pitiful Saturday Night Live character Stuart Smalley and the equally ptiful "diarist" Bridget Jones, of the eponymous novel and movie, both "fail" at self-help. Stuart Smalley parrots "self-help" clichés he learns at Twelve-Step meetings and on television as gravely as if they were oracular wisdom. Bridget Jones regularly encounters new self-help schemes she discards apace. Neither Smalley nor Jones is up to the grueling, exacting work actually needed to bring about personal transformation. They remain dilettantes. People who get rich or who get thin earn cultural approval. Why do we so seldom hear of people who refuse (or exhaust) the wisdom of "experts," and who nevertheless surmount personal challenges besides these? Why is "self-help" roundly disparaged as "futile”?
Self-improvement takes a plan, and commitment to that plan. It seems numbers of people—Smalley’s and Jones’s hilarious failures notwithstanding—left to their own devices, might acquire both.
Regarding the "self-improvement plan," Elsa found hers while browsing online, as anyone might do. The brand of self-therapy she adopted appealed to her intuition the moment she first read about it. Another "self-improvement plan," one studied scientifically and touted widely in spiritual teaching, is that of sitting or lying quietly and following one's breath with one's awareness—meditation. There are many "self-improvement regimens;" it's one I use daily, and which I first adopted in a manner I describe here.
Regarding one's commitment to one's chosen regimen, different circumstances facilitate the necessary self-discipline. Elsa's commitment to her journal-writing was borne of necessity. Every other treatment she had tried for her incapacitating clinical depression had failed. As she put it, she had "nothing to lose" by trying this brand of "journal therapy," and trying it whole-heartedly. When I took up meditation, I hadn't had a personal nadir as dramatic as Elsa's to force me to "stay the path." Someday, I'll write a diary about why I've meditated every day since July, 2014. But here let me say I did and do recognize that it's only my relatively comfortable personal circumstances—I'm not scrambling for food or shelter or physical safety—that make my regimen possible. I'm grateful for that every day, and I believe I am putting that advantage to the best uses possible.
"Self-help" is for silly people, mostly deluded housewives, though its vacuous promises ensnare any lonely, longing, and unfulfilled people who don't look sharp. Yet, if followed conscientiously, where would many self-help schemes, in fact, lead? Just who wouldn't want the masses going there?
To start, a crowning benefit of my meditation practice is greater ability to live in the present, with less time spent fantasizing about the future or ruminating about the past. Yet, "living in the present," rather than being encumbered by thoughts about the past or future is an objective of many kinds of self-help, not just meditation. The marriage-and-relationship books, for instance, urge you to examine ways your past experiences affect your present relationship; to use the strategies in those books, you work to understand what your irrational biases are, and where they come from. Also, Elsa credits her writing-based self-therapy with giving her the ability to "live in the present," without so much distraction from old, unresolved emotion. The books on creativity and artistic expression, too, want to free you from "mental ruts" that limit your perception of the "scene in front of you," and your ability to evoke it.
To examine another widely recurring ideal of different self-help schemes, recall Elsa stepping out of her basement room the morning following her first stint of journal-writing in 2003. For the first time in years, Elsa recounts that she felt "connection to her surroundings." In the café, she glimpsed a colorful reality of which she was fully a part. Following a self-improvement regimen very different from Elsa's, at points, I’ve experienced other peoples' mental states, "read their minds." I've done this without visual cues or other "hard data." The laws of the known universe tell us this is impossible. My "drop-ins" on others' psyches are only possible if you accept Elsa's epiphany of individual "connection" to the rest, or the mystics' proposition that "separateness is an illusion." The cosmos links all living beings, so that anyone's joy or pain is everyone's. We often hear that fundamental insight sentimentalized as "realizing you're not alone," a "stage in recovery," from addiction, and whatever else we learn about on daytime TV. That vision can, on the other hand, heighten empathy. It can inform social activism. If numbers of people glimpse a widening sense of personal "self," then, in their pursuit of self-improvement, they can directly undercut the status quo.
"Reality," according to the honchos widely believed to run it, isn't for the open-minded. Instead, “reality” is made up of knee-jerk popular biases; the honchos secretly manipulate those biases for their own ends, and they need them unquestioned. “Reality”—also according to the honchos—is "dog-eat-dog." You really are "in this alone." If numbers of people started to challenge the overlords' wisdom here, grasping the universality of human needs through their private work, their plan for us implodes. It's no wonder, then, the culture proffers only Stuart Smalley and Bridget Jones as role-models for a stunted, limited "self-help," from all resources available, while not even registering the instances where the impulse to self-improvement, in fact, leads to liberation.
