Why I Hate Self-Help Books

by Mary T. Kelly

What I’m about to say may be considered shocking, blasphemous and puzzling given what I do for a living. But I’m going to say it anyway. Granted, it may be a temporary phase, but I pretty much hate most self-help books. Yeah, despise them.

But I also want to make it clear that I don’t hate ALL self-help books. I’ve been helped by many a self-help book and there’s plenty of times I recommend them to my clients. Many years ago, my journey to waking up and becoming a conscious human being was through the narrow pathway of a self-help book.

My first “self-help” book was, “The Road Less Traveled” by M. Scott Peck. The first line in the book was, “Life is difficult.” It may seem simplistic, but the flood of relief I felt when reading that very first line helped crack open a heart that had long been held captive by dogmatic religious beliefs and the constant self-pressure to be the best Christian/wife/friend/mother I could humanly be. I was in a world where if you didn’t have a continual broad smile on your face, you would be questioned and “admonished”. “Trust in the Lord, Mary” was the simplistic answer as I grappled with my well-loved father’s recent diagnosis of a malignant brain tumor, a mother showing early signs of Alzheimer’s, witnessing the painful agonizing screams of an AIDS patient who had been abandoned by his family in his final days, and the constant activity of four small children who were like eager young puppies making messes and trails of destruction wherever they went.

Reading that “self-help” book nudged me into a much-needed journey of self-excavation. I immersed myself into professional therapy and as a supplement, read many self-help books to serve as guides on an emotional road that took me up, through and over steep and treacherous internal passes. These books were powerful and bold sources of influence and motivation that encouraged me to change, break out of my repression-shrouded cocoon and begin to cure the deadly disease of the highly contagious and deeply ingrained “Good Girl Syndrome”.

Oh how I soaked up those books, the books that contained the Permissions to leave the church, the unhealthy relationships and the expected roles. They were influential in teaching me to do the hardest of all tasks...learning to love myself.

So how I can I say that I hate self-help books? The first reason is that I’m over them. They had a time and a place in my life and I will be forever grateful for much of the wisdom I garnered from them. But I’m tired of self-improvement, the miniscule constant psychoanalysis and inventories of my various faults, patterns, wounds, and ego variations, ad nausea. This “new” me just wants to scream, “WHATEVER! I’m a human being. This automatically means I am not perfect, will never be perfect, and in fact, the thought of perfection makes me feel bored and depressed."

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