Such a great way to end 2014.

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Here’s one I did on self-help.

When did self-help books became bestsellers in the US? Why? What were the first self-help authors who made their way to the top?

The term ‘self-help’ was first used by Samuel Smiles in Scotland in 1859, but it was in the US that the idea of self-help books really took off in the twentieth century. Perhaps the first major self-help authors were Dale Carnegie in the 1940s (How to Make Friends and Influence People), Norman Vincent Peale in the 1950s (The Power of Positive Thinking) and and Thomas A. Harris in the 1960s (I’m OK, You’re OK).

What have been the preferred topics of self-help books?

There have been two major ideas in self-help books. The first idea is that people are in control of their own destinies and can improve themselves and their lives by thinking more positively and changing their attitudes. This is the empowerment message in books like The Power of Positive Thinking, and the 1980s bestseller The Secret.

The second major idea in self-help books, which conflicts with the first idea, is that people cannot help their troubles and that the problems we have are due to bad situations we have been through. For example, I’m OK, You’re OK, and many other books, blame toxic parenting for the difficulties that people have in life. These kinds of books have been called victimisation self-help books.

Do you think that these topics have altered over time? Do you think that there are changes in self-help topics in different decades?

There are definitely shifts in self-help books over time. The empowerment books were popular up until the 1960s, then the victimisation books became much more popular as people began to suspect that there weren’t such easy answers to their problems. However, there was a backlash against that in the 1980s with a return to books which promised people that they could control their own destinies and improve themselves.

In recent years, there has been a move towards positive psychology books which focus on how people can be happy and successful through using various psychological techniques.

However, there have also been a few books (like my book and the books of Oliver Burkeman) that have criticised self-help books for focusing too much on the individual rather than the social situation that they are in. It is damaging to suggest that all people’s problems can be fixed by thinking differently if there are real reasons for their problems (like poverty, unemployment, and discrimination). Also it is often the messages that people receive from the world around them (like the mainstream media) that make people feel worse about themselves. So perhaps we should focus more on changing the world than on changing individual people.

Some people suggest that books of popular science devoted to help people to improve their lives can be considered self-help too. What do you think about this?

I like the idea of broadening out self-help to include popular science books, social science books which address the social reasons for people’s problems, and also more spiritual books about how to live ethically and compassionately. The popularity of mindfulness is something that I have been writing about recently, finding that people are increasingly drawn to meditation practices and compassion-based approaches to self-help, which hopefully also help them to relate better to other people and to the world around them.

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But of course I am in a bit of a strange position in relation to criticising self-help books because haven’t I recently written something which looks very much like a self-help book myself? Here I want to summarise some of the reasons why I agree, with Scott, that it is worth being very cautious about such books, and also to explore some possibilities for engaging with this genre creatively (and, as Scott emphasises, critically) rather than wishing for its total demise.

Anti-self-help

In the introduction to Rewriting the Rules I call my book an ‘anti-self-help’ book. The reason for this is that in the very title ‘self-help’ there is an implication that there is something wrong with you (the self) which requires help.

So most other relationship self-help books locate the problems that people have with relationships (either problems getting together with someone, or difficulties in relationships) in the individual who is reading the book. There is a suggestion that the reason that we have problems with relationships is due to something within us such as being too needy, not understanding the ‘opposite sex’ well enough, failing to be enticing enough, or being poor at the art of seduction. The answer, of course, is to be found within the pages of the book: we need to change ourselves in order to fix our problem.

Similarly self-help books on other topics identify a flaw in the reader which can be addressed through following the advice in the book in order to create a more successful self.

In Rewriting the Rules I take a different perspective and suggest that the reason that we (all) struggle with relationships is mostly to do with something outside our selves: the messages that we receive about the way we should do relationships. And that it is these that could do with changing.

Furthermore I locate a lot of the problems that people have, in relationships with other people and with themselves, in the very way of seeing yourself that self-help books encourage. I argue that self-help books are part of a wider culture (reality TV, celebs, advertisements and so on) which encourages us to constantly monitor ourselves, to compare ourselves to other people, and to judge ourselves, whilst trying to present a perfect image to the world.

Striving to be a perfect self and to have a perfect relationship puts a great deal of pressure on people which paradoxically makes it much harder to be kind to ourselves or to be content in our relationships. Body ideals leave us feeling miserable about our bodies, constant critical comparison to others is linked to depression, and trying to have a Hollywood romance leads to relationship distress.

So Rewriting the Rules is an anti-self-help book in that it doesn’t suggest that our problems can be located in something that is wrong with us, as individuals, and it also tries to work against the mainstream self-help industry which I perceive as generally part of the problem rather than the solution.

So can’t we help ourselves?

In one way Rewriting the Rules is arguing that culture is the thing that needs to change, not us as individuals. For example it would be good if culturally we stopped having such narrow ideals of beauty, or seeing people as to blame for their problems, or telling them that there’s only one way of having sex or doing relationships.

However, it wouldn’t be a terribly helpful book to read if it just said ‘culture is to blame, not you!’ and left it at that. For one thing we all have to operate within culture as it currently is, and for another thing culture is us, and can shift, so it’s worth thinking a bit about how we can be part of that (and who already is doing that). For that reason, in the book, I explore other ways of doing things that are out there (aside from the most prevalent messages about relationships) and ways in which we might navigate the culture we find ourselves in – resisting it, opening it up, creatively engaging with it – to find other ways of relating to ourselves, to each other, and to culture itself.

So I do offer lots of suggestions in the book which might sound a lot like conventional self-help. For example, in the chapter on relationship conflict I offer some guidelines that we might follow when we are fighting. In the chapter on attraction I suggest some ways in which we might learn to treat our bodies, and the bodies of others, more kindly. And in the chapter on sex I draw on sex therapy and sexual community ideas about how to tune into, and communicate, our desires.

Critical thinking is the key

Scott Cherry’s book is subtitled some simple steps and a dash of critical thinking. This is really the key for me. Most self-help books do not include much in the way of ‘critical thinking’ whereas that is what Rewriting the Rules is all about. I’m inviting the reader to think about what those messages are (about how to have relationships, and how to treat ourselves) and then think critically about those, and to consider what we often take-for-granted and bring that out into the open to think critically about as well.

Thinking critically might involve looking at the research evidence, or asking questions such as ‘is this useful for me?’, ‘what about the people around me?’, ‘who is excluded from this?’, ‘how might it be for them?’ and ‘what alternatives might there be and what would they be like?’

Of course once we’ve had a good critical think we might decide actually this is just fine for us and to keep on subscribing to those messages or ideas. The thing is to have them available for thinking about, rather than just believing that we have to go along with them, and to open them up to critical reflection.

Self-help books of the future?

Scott’s analysis of self-help books is very useful because it helps us to see what self-help books have tended to look like until now. Unfortunately the publishing world is quite resistant to anything that looks different to those existing books, as I found during my long search for a publisher. They know that those books sell and it is daunting to take a risk on anything different (and for this reason I will always be grateful to Routledge for taking a risk on my book).

The majority of self-help books propose individual internal causes for problems and offer the words of wisdom of the author as the solution for everyone. What if we challenged both of those ideas in books of the future?

First, we could move away from internal causes. Instead we could embrace what most academics now accept as a better way of understanding difficulties (from depression to relationship troubles to pain) which is a biopsychosocial model. We need all of those levels of understanding when making sense of our experiences, and they are inextricably interwoven in complex ways. Most self-help books neglect the latter part (the social) so we need to bring it back in.

Second, we could recognise that different things work for different people at different times. My book would have been very poor indeed if it said ‘here is the one true way of doing relationships and everyone should follow it’. Clearly people think about, and manage, their relationships in all kinds of ways. People like to live alone or with others, to combine finances or to keep them separate, to have one main person in their life or many, and all sorts of other differences.

So I would like self-help books to recognise this and to be more of a jumping off point for people’s own explorations rather than providing them with a single, universal, destination. It would be particularly useful to give examples of lots of the diverse things that people find helpful (as I’m hoping to do in a book I have in mind on all of the different things that help with depression). Also I would think that a good self-help book would be about asking questions more than it was about providing answers.

There are examples of self-help books that I would advocate, so I can’t criticise the whole lot of them. Dorothy Rowe‘s books (on depression, friendship and the like) are a great example of books which include the social aspect and question taken-for-granteds. Whilst I don’t subscribe to all the theories that Paul Gilbert draws on in The Compassionate Mind, this book is both biopsychosocial and encouraging of a more compassionate (rather than critical) way of treating ourselves. Books like Esther Perel‘s Mating in Captivity and Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy’s The Ethical Slut challenge conventional rules of relating and explore how we can manage our relationships in different ways. Both books embrace diversity rather than offering one universal way of doing things.

Every book is imperfect and limited, but it seems to me that it is possible to write a self-help book that opens things up more than it closes them down and which, rather than offering some final point of ‘self-fulfilment’ (which, as Scott points out, should mean that we no longer need any self-help books), more humbly offer itself as an invitation into critical thinking on an area: a starting point for the reader’s own continued explorations, and an encouragement to change the world rather than fixing our selves.

Find out more

Scott’s book is available here, and soon on Amazon.

There’s a helpful history of self-help books, with consideration of the ways in which they are valuable and potentially damaging by Laura Vanderkam here.

Petra Boynton asks ‘self help or self harm?’ on her blog about relationship books.

Micki McGee has a Self Help, Inc. blog on the topic.

There’s an interesting post about the possibility of scientific self-help here.

There’s a more positive take on the subject by Alain de Botton here.

Other books which critique the self help industry, listed in Scott’s book, include:

• Kaminer, W. (1992). I’m dysfunctional, you’re dysfunctional: the recovery movement and other self-help fashions. New York: Addison-Wesley.
• McGee, M. (2005). Self-help, Inc. Makeover culture in American life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Pearsall, P. (2005). The last self-help book you’ll ever need: repress the anger, think negatively, be a good blamer & throttle your inner child. New York: Basic Books.
• Peele, N. V. (1995). [1989] Diseasing of America: how we allowed recovery zealots and the treatment industry to convince us we are out of control. San Franscisco: Jossey-Bass.
• Salerno, S. (2005). SHAM: Self-help and actualization movement. London: Nicholas Brealey.
• Simmonds, W. (1992). Women and self-help culture: reading between the lines. New Jersey: Rutgers.
• Tiede, T. (2001). Self-help nation: the long overdue, entirely justified, delightfully hostile guide to the snake oil peddlers who are sapping our nation’s souls. New York: Atlantic.

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