In this new zine I discuss both why we get so shut off from our feelings in a wider culture which values some emotions far more highly than others, and how we can go about shifting our patterns of avoiding and fighting some feelings, and craving and grasping for others. It covers both therapeutic and spiritual practices for staying with our emotions.

You can download or read the zine here.

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You might also be interested in the other interview she’s conducted so far with Prof. Emmy Van Deurzen, foremost existential psychotherapist in Europe.

Briefly tell me your story (who are you? Where do you come from? Where are you going?)

I’m Meg-John Barker (MJ for short). I grew up in Bradford in the 1970s and 80s. I studied psychology at university, did a PhD in that area, and stumbled into working as a lecturer. But my passion for exploring and writing about people’s relationships with themselves and others didn’t really develop until I was around 30. It’s been a gradual process of allowing myself – more and more – to study what really fascinates me, drawing on the ideas and approaches that make most sense to me, and writing in the ways that I feel I’m best at and find most fulfilling.

In the last few years I’ve been writing more about more self-help style books – and other materials – for general audiences rather than for academics. I see myself going increasingly in that direction, weaving together my therapeutic work with my writing, and producing the kind of creative and critical self-help that I think would be useful for people. I’m particularly excited about projects involving comics and animations, for example, or mashing up self-help with other genres such as ghost stories, or memoir.

What do you see as your true purpose in life?

I see my purpose as being somebody who brings together and synthesises a lot of information and ideas about the topics that I’m passionate about, and then finds ways of putting that across which will be accessible and engaging for folks. It’s all about connection for me: connecting with the people who I learn from through reading, conversations with colleagues, and my therapy work; and connecting with the people I’m talking to through my writing, workshops, mentoring and counselling.

Another important element for me is that my work locates individual experiences in wider culture, and encourages people to engage critically with the messages around them, rather than getting caught in a spiral of blaming themselves – as individuals – for their struggles.

How did you discover this purpose?

I’m sure that a major element has been my ongoing reflection on my own life, and what has been helpful to me: wanting to put stuff out there into the world that might be useful to others who are struggling in ways that I’ve struggled.

Also there’s been a process of gradually allowing myself to pursue what I see myself as being best at. We receive so many messages about what we should do in life, or what a ‘proper’ person in our line of work should be doing. I try to hold those messages lightly and focus more on the question of what seems most useful and valuable. I know that it’s when I pursue those projects that I feel most alive, and that what I produce is of the highest quality.

What are the key qualities in yourself or others that you value and why?

The key qualities for me would be walking the walk, balancing criticality and kindness, and engaging with others in accessible and inclusive ways.

I value people who put their ideas into practice in their own lives as much as possible and who reflect on their own experiences to inform their work so that it’s grounded in what actually works in practice. I think that kindness is probably the most vital human quality: it counters the self-criticism that lies at the heart of most mental health problems and emotional suffering; and it counters the judgement of others that is the root of so much human conflict. So I value people who treat themselves and others with kindness, and manage to balance that with a critical approach towards the wider structures, systems, and dynamics that often exacerbate suffering. Finally, I value highly people who are able to put forward their ideas in ways that are engaging to others, and include everybody, so that people can take away practical and helpful suggestions, and feel embraced rather than alienated by what is being said.

Did you always have such a clear and honest voice? If not, what changed? How did you develop your voice?

I think as a kid I did have a tendency to point out things that I found baffling in the world in something of an ‘emperor’s new clothes’ manner! However, the strong messages I received at school about how you had to be in order to fit in managed to stifle that for a long while. At the same time the experience of being bullied also gave me a much better insight into how other people might be struggling and how to engage with people more compassionately.

I think my voice is still developing, and it comes best when I manage to get out of my own way. By that I mean dropping all of the ideas I have about who I should be and what I should be doing, and allowing myself to go with my gut and write and talk about what feels most important to me, in the way that feels right, and drawing on the ideas that I find most useful.

Are there times, places or people where you find it harder to maintain the integrity of your voice?

Definitely. It is when I find myself caring a lot what other people think of me so I start trying to speak in a way that I think they will approve of, or saying what I think they want me to say: trying to be ‘cool’ or ‘nice’ for example, so that other people will think well of me. That’s a real ongoing struggle for me, and for many of us I think. I try to remind myself of the following things:

• That doing that generally makes what I’m saying or writing lower quality
• That even if I get the approval I’m looking for it will be precarious because it’s not based on who I really am, and the other person or people may feel let down when they get to know me better!
• That I can’t be all things to all people and it is totally fine if some people really connect with what I produce, and other people don’t like it – how could it be otherwise?
• That everyone makes mistakes and has limitations – and if somebody does criticise what I’ve done in ways that are spot on it is fine – and important – to own up to that.

What advice would you give to someone seeking a more authentic life?

I think the most important thing is developing kindness for yourself, and that is incredibly hard and a lifelong journey. When we can treat ourselves kindly we can manage to get out of our own way more and speak more authentically. We’re also less concerned with putting on a front for other people, or justifying ourselves, so we’re more able to hear what other people are saying, to connect with their experience, and to act in the most compassionate manner in any given situation. Practically I find Buddhist mindfulness and journalling to be helpful daily/weekly things to do in order to develop more kindness towards myself and openness to others.

The post Purpose and integrity appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

As you can see, the session gave me an excuse to delve a little deeper into the history of self-help books, to understand more why they came to be the way they are and what is so problematic about that. I also managed to chart one potential future trajectory of self-help, building on this criticism. For this I particularly considered the writing of Oliver Burkeman: one of my favourite discoveries over the last couple of months thanks to his entertaining and radically different approach. I’ll outline some of his ideas here so that you can see what an alternative to conventional self-help might look like.

A bit of history

Examining the history of self-help we can see that books in this genre have tended to be of two types. The first type – empowerment self-help – emerged in America after the great depression and drew on the New Thought movement which believed in the power of positive thinking. Such books held out the promise that by imagining good things and striking the right attitude people could bring what they wanted to themselves: wealth, friends, success, etc. The second type of self-help became popular in the late sixties and seventies. Know as victimisation self-help, books in this category tend to blame the wider world for any problems that individuals have. Akin to the twelve step programmes for addiction, these books are concerned with reassuring readers that their difficulties are not their fault but down to something beyond their control like having toxic parents or a disorder or disease of some kind. Power is located outside the individual.

In the 1980s and 1990s there was a backlash against victimisation self-help and a return to an extreme form of empowerment self-help which argued that any problems were down to the individual and could be fixed by positive thinking. For example, a quote in the bestseller The Secret by the author’s fellow self-help writer, Bob Proctor, says “Why do you think that 1 percent of the population earns around 96 percent of all the money that’s being earned? Do you think that’s an accident? It’s designed that way. They understand something. They understand The Secret, and now you are being introduced to The Secret.” The Secret in question is the New Thought law of attraction, that successful people bring positive things to themselves merely by thinking about them.

Clearly both these forms of self-help are problematic, and together they set up a false binary around human struggles which is similar to the either/or view of mental health which I’ve discussed elsewhere. It seems that we have to believe either that we are personally responsible for all our problems but that we can fix them by changing ourselves, or that the world is responsible for all our problems but that we are powerless then to do anything about them. If we buy into the empowerment way of seeing things then it easily slips into victim blame, whereby we regard everyone, including ourselves, as to blame for any problems in life. If we buy into the victimisation way of seeing things then we have to believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with us and give up any sense that we could do anything about our difficulties.

A third way? Oliver Burkeman

In recent years it seems that a few authors have been looking for a kind of third way of doing self-help: a way that involves breaking out of this problematic binary. What I have called anti-self-help self-help starts from a criticism of the assumptions of the self-help movement in general. It asks questions about whether it is actually good to strive for the things that self-help suggests that we strive for: happiness, wealth, success, a romantic relationship, etc. Are these good things to have and, even if they are, is striving for them the best way of going about it? Anti-self-help self-help locates any problems that we have in the wider society that surrounds us, the messages we receive from it, and how we relate to these, rather than seeing us as isolated individuals responsible for everything that happens to us. But, at the same time, it sees us as actively engaged with this wider world and able to engage with it in different ways, rather than as powerless.

A great example of such anti-self-help self-help is the writing of Oliver Burkeman. Like his Guardian newspaper column, This Column Will Change Your Life, his first book, Help!, presented an analysis of existing self-help books, attempting to pull out actually useful suggestions from the overwhelming mass of contradictory messages that he found. His second book, The Antidote, builds of the criticisms of self-help that he came to when writing Help! and suggests a radically different approach. Positive thinking, argues Burkeman, actually makes us suffer. The empowerment self-help movement has got it completely wrong. What he offers in its place refuses the disempowering position of victimisation self-help, but instead embraces the potentials of what he calls a ‘negative path’. This draws on a cluster of approaches taken from philosophies from Buddhism to Eckhart Tolle, the Stoics of Ancient Greece to the Mexican Day of the Dead. What these have in common is that they all do the opposite of ‘positive thinking’, instead turning to face the difficult stuff of life.

Thus Burkeman argues for the benefits of meditating on the inevitable fact of our own mortality. He critically evaluates the way in which we tend to react to ‘bad things’ in our day-to-day life, and considers alternatives where we recognise our own role in categorising what is good and bad and trying to get all of the former and none of the latter. He explores meditation and building the capacity to be with difficult feelings, turning towards the things that scare us rather than away from them. He considers the power of just getting on with tasks we are avoiding, rather than assuming that we have to ‘find our passion’ or ‘get motivated’ before we can do anything. He explores the value in considering the worst that could happen (and whether what is happing is ‘just bad’ or ‘absolutely terrible’) as well as asking yourself whether you have a problem right now, in the present moment. He questions who this self is that we are trying to improve through self-help, and wonders whether it might be more useful to reflect on whether such a thing really exists in any meaningful sense, rather than assuming that it does and engaging in a futile quest to make it better.

I loved The Antidote because it resonates so well with the answers (and – perhaps more usefully – questions) that I have come to through my own journey through the ways in which psychology, psychotherapy, philosophy, and sociology have understood human suffering and what can be done about it. Like my work, the book is particularly rooted in Buddhist philosophy and it is very nice to see that engaged with so thoughtfully, rather than just being offered as another set of techniques to make people happier.

The anti-self-help self-help manifesto

Where to from here? I would like to see many more anti-self-help self-help books which start from a critical stance towards the self-help industry and offer something more valuable to people who want to think about how they are living and how they might do it differently. Such work would, I think, share some of the following things in common:

• A critical stance towards conventional self-help
• A critical stance towards normative taken-for-granted ideas about what makes a good person and a successful life, and whether happiness and wealth are the best things to be striving for
• An informed understanding of the problems with telling people that they are flawed in some way and need to change by striving after something different
• Drawing on research evidence from psychology and sociology, as well as philosophical understandings from across the globe (not just the ‘west’), in order to suggest what might be helpful to people
• Locating people’s problems in the inter-relation between them and the world around them rather than entirely internally or entirely external – regarding people as biopsychosocial beings rather than focusing on one of those aspects (bio, psycho, social) to the exclusion of the others
• Suggesting ways forward which involve engaging with the world differently, and recognising how difficult this can be and arguing for wider social change, rather than putting all responsibility on the individual
• An ethical commitment to putting something different ‘out there’ even though the publishing industry conservatively continues to try to publish the same kinds of messages as before

I’d be very interested to hear from others who are trying to write blogs, books, articles, etc. in this vein, and to continue to discuss whether a ‘negative path’ or ‘anti-self-help’ does present a valuable third way.

Find out more

There is more about self-help with useful links to other work here.

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