Self help. Interesting notion

by Jon Gardner on 19.07.09

The idea that a stranger who doesn’t and could never know your specific, individual circumstance could offer long standing, life changing help to those in real need, is a joke. I make no apologies and I offer no exceptions. If a person is so lost, so buried under their own neuroses, addictions, afflictions, foibles that they cannot see a way out without therapeutic congress, so lost are they that they would turn to a paperback book to try to heal themselves, then they are too far gone for the author to reach them. It’s a neat, simple fact. If you feel the need to try the assistance the books offer, then you’re beyond that kind of help and should sit down with a professional or better yet, a group with which you can properly relate and share.

Relationships for example. You are not from Venus, and your partner is not from Mars. Men and woman are no different from each other than one man is different from another man, which is to say, they are enormously different. Everyone is different from everyone else on a fundamental, often impenetrable level. Your are from Earth and hey! Everyone else is too. It often sucks that we don’t get every little thing in just the same way as each other, but tough. Thanks to those chasms of variety there is a huge spectrum of art and excitement to be wrung from the tiny conflict that is our daily lives within and without each other. On close examination, any honest person would admit they wouldn’t have it any other way. If your relationship has hit such a wall that you believe in the skin-of-your-teeth notions peddled in the pages of the “Practical Guide to Improving Communication and Relationship Skills” then please, save your money and take a tip. Ready? Here it is:

YOU’RE IN THE WRONG RELATIONSHIP! Get rid! Then take a couple of months to get over it, get dolled up, go out somewhere cool, and TRY AGAIN! Because guess what? It ain’t that big a deal. There are too many of us out there for anyone to battle to “understand” or “manage” or God forbid change any other person to make something work, when it just doesn’t work.

The Little Book of Confidence. Learn to Relax and Love Your Life. Five Simple Steps to Emotional Healing. Finding Your Self Worth. I’m not making any of these up. The five strangers who wrote these books can help you, that’s YOU, reading this NOW, whatever your stage name is, find out who you really are, can help you be happier with that self, build your confidence and heal all your past emotional woes. Yet more such heroes can Make You Thin, Affirm Your Self Esteem or can give even you the Secret Habits of Successful People (hint: Write a tosh book about secret paths to success and sell it to the gullible. Instant proof of the system working!). So many of us would slap down a stranger for giving their opinion on our personal delicacies without knowing a thing about us or our circumstances, and rightly so. Why is it that so many of these very people have invested in Self Help books to such a degree that necessitates a whole section of Waterstone’s? How rubbish are we that we need so much material to save us from ourselves?

Here’s a hint: We are very, very rubbish indeed. All of us. We don’t know where we are, we don’t know what we want, and we don’t know what the hell is going on. Embrace that fact and your confidence will grow in the knowledge that we are all as dimwitted and lost as each other. We can bumble through it together without lining the pockets of such manipulative and predatory opportunists.

Trust me, I’m a doctor.

Jon Gardner is not a doctor.