Psychobabble: Exploding the Myths of the Self-Help Generation

257 Pages·2012·3.2 MB·English

by  Stephen Briers

Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: what’s so wrong with popular psychology anyway?
MYTH 1: The root of all your problems is low self-esteem
MYTH 2: Let your feelings out!
MYTH 3: Emotional intelligence is what really counts
MYTH 4: Let your goals power you towards success!
MYTH 5: No one can make you feel anything
MYTH 6: Think positive and be a winner!
MYTH 7: We need to talk ...
MYTH 8: Whatever your problem, CBT is the answer
MYTH 9: You can never be too assertive
MYTH 10: Men and women live on different planets
MYTH 11: Your inner child needs a hug
MYTH 12: You can learn to do anything you want
MYTH 13: You’d better get yourself sorted
MYTH 14: You are stronger than you know
MYTH 15: You are a master of the universe!
MYTH 16: There is no failure, only feedback
MYTH 17: It’s all your parents’ fault
MYTH 18: You can heal your body
MYTH 19: You are in control of your life
MYTH 20: Married bliss: a matter of give and take
MYTH 21: Discover the real you!
MYTH 22: Make every second count
MYTH 23: We must all strive to be happy
Epilogue
References
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
To my very dear wife and long-suffering sons: thank you for all your patience
and support. I promise I won’t write anything else for a while. Many thanks also
to the team at Pearson, especially Paul East and Elie Williams for all their hard
work behind the scenes. This book also owes much to the academics, bloggers
and journalists who kindly furnished me with so much stimulating material, and
also to Drew and Natalie Dee, creators of Married To The Sea. Their genius
cartoons made me laugh out loud during a particularly gruelling phase of the
writing. Most of all, thank you to my magnificent editor, Rachael Stock, who
went way beyond the call of duty and generously offered to edit this book whilst
technically on leave. I’m not sure about the wisdom of sawing through the
branch you’re sitting on (or even helping someone else do so) but you have
selflessly steadied my hand and I’m truly grateful. Finally, I want to
acknowledge the contribution of my faithful hound, Lola, who has stayed glued
to my side throughout the whole process, even though I suspect her devotion
may have had something to do with her ability to persuade me to keep on putting
my hand in the biscuit tin and turn a blind eye whenever she snuck up on the
sofa in my office. I have only two words to say to her: GET DOWN!
PUBLISHER’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Cartoons from the strip, Married To The Sea (marriedtothesea.com).
‘Men willingly believe what they wish.’
JULIUS CAESAR
‘I believe in an open mind,but not so open that your brains fall out.’
ARTHUR HAYS SULZBERGER
‘Man is what he believes.’
ANTON CHEKHOV
Introduction
WHAT’S SO WRONG WITH POPULAR
PSYCHOLOGY ANYWAY?
We live in the age of self-improvement. As we go about our daily lives we are
subjected to a million messages – some subtle, and some less so – intimating that
a happier, richer, more successful life is just around the corner. With the
immediate survival needs of food and shelter taken care of for the majority,
western civilisation has now turned its attention to how much better it could all
be. And this in turn has spawned a prolific, multi-million dollar industry of
stadium-filling gurus, bestselling books, magazines and websites telling us how
to be happier, thinner, richer, and all round better people. But is our culture of
self-help really helping? Or is it just creating expectations that none of us can
live up to? Has the casual psychologising of everyday life enlightened us, or are
we just making a rod for own backs?
These are questions we all need to be grappling with. This book is an invitation
to pause, take stock, and maybe start weeding out some of the more insidious
modern myths that have taken root in our collective psyche. I’m not simply
trying to be a killjoy or score cheap points at other people’s expense. I fully
appreciate that many contributors to the burgeoning self-help industry are
sincere, well-intentioned individuals who genuinely want others to benefit from
their wisdom and experience. The majority are not charlatans out to make a
quick buck from our credulity. Some are well-informed and well-qualified to
offer advice, and such people absolutely deserve to be listened to. However,
insofar as this does feel like a grumpy tirade, it’s because I am increasingly
concerned that something significant is happening within our society to which
we continue to turn a naively blind eye.
It’s too easy to dismiss the world of self-help as an amusing diversion, a quick
read on the plane or a pleasant escapist fantasy of a life reinvented and
transformed. Maybe we might even pick up a few handy tips or a couple of
insights along the way. What’s the harm? After all, nobody takes these things
that seriously, do they? But the truth is that secretly many of us do. Increasing
that seriously, do they? But the truth is that secretly many of us do. Increasing
numbers of us are turning to the pages of self-help books in search of answers to
lives that feel in need of fixing. The phenomenal growth of the self-help sector
in the last century is a testament not only to our rising levels of insecurity and
self-doubt, but to the stealthy psychologising of our culture as a whole.
The ideas and values associated with popular psychology have infiltrated our
culture so deeply that we now take them largely for granted. Even for those of us
who regard ourselves as fairly knowing, they form part of that framework of
assumptions that constitutes the invisible scaffolding for the way we approach
our lives. They shape our evaluations of other people and ourselves. They subtly
colour the tone of everyday experience, bringing with them an agenda that
radically affects the kinds of decisions and choices we make both as individuals
and as a society. Rather alarmingly, much of this has taken place without us ever
having paused to examine these precepts, or to question whether we can afford
to follow where they lead. Whilst we may like to think that popular psychology
holds up a mirror that allows us to understand ourselves, it is also a distorting
mirror that remakes us in its own image. In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins
introduced us to the meme, defined as ‘an idea, behaviour or style that spreads
from person to person within a culture’. Thanks to the powerful engine of the
self-help industry, the memes of popular psychology are busy replicating
themselves so effectively that they have become an integral part of the fabric of
our lives and thought processes.
Consider, by way of illustration, the popularity of talent shows like The X
Factor. The format dictates that every contestant must undergo a journey of
personal transformation. Their motivations are accounted for in terms of an
emotive back story that usually implies some cod-psychological rationale for
their decision to audition while the audience is invited to nod (and vote)
approvingly as contestants ‘grow’ as artists and people over the ensuing weeks.
Shania is a natural talent but ‘just needs to believe in herself more’. Ricky could
be world-class but needs to get in touch with who he really is inside if he is ever
to give a truly ‘authentic’ winning performance. And Cassie could be great if she
ever manages to let go of those emotional demons from her past.
Under the guidance of mentors whose assertive sound bites would make many
motivational speakers blush, the contestants are prompted to change their lives
and take charge of their fates. If they can just believe hard enough, give it 110
per cent, focus on their goals and ‘stay in the zone’, then maybe that elusive
recording contract will be theirs. However, all the while the pseudo-
psychological lore of such shows whispers in our ear that the true prize on offer
psychological lore of such shows whispers in our ear that the true prize on offer
is not the record contract but the personal fulfilment awaiting anyone brave
enough to try and ‘live their dream’.
You can dismiss this all as good storytelling by the production company but
these format points are also an indication of the extent to which popular
psychology and popular culture have become intimately fused. Psychobabble is
a language that, like it or not, we are all learning to speak fluently, and elements
of those Saturday night prime-time shows could have been lifted straight from
the pages of the countless self-help books that line the shelves of your local
bookstore, not to mention the CDs purchased and training courses attended by
millions of us every year.
The most successful self-help books have a long reach: classics like How to Win
Friends and Influence People and I’m OK, You’re OK are said to have sold 15
million copies worldwide. You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay has sold over
35 million, while Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus and the Chicken
Soup for the Soul series claim over 50 million and 100 million sales respectively.
These are big numbers in the publishing world. If you are reading this you will
almost certainly have heard of these books and probably have a fair idea of what
is in them. But even if you haven’t, you will still have been affected by them.
The congregational minister Edwin Paxton Hood once admonished: ‘Be as
careful of the books you read, as of the company you keep; for your habits and
character will be influenced as much by the latter as by the former.’ Perhaps we
should be taking his advice to heart. The values and preoccupations of popular
psychology are already profoundly influencing the nature of the stories we tell
ourselves about who we are and who we can become. The question we need to
ask is, when we take a cold hard look at the outcome, do we really like what we
see?
KEEPING IT SIMPLE
One of the major selling points of any good self-help book is actually one of the
most misleading, namely the promise that it will distil a potentially complex
situation or life challenge into a manageable and readily digestible form. This
would be great if it were remotely possible. As you may have noticed as you
have fumbled along through the years, human beings are complex, their lives are
complex, and the social environment they are trying to navigate is complex.
There are innumerable variables involved in even the most simple of human
activities. As the new branch of science known as ‘chaos theory’ has been amply
demonstrating over recent years, even small local variations can produce a truly
demonstrating over recent years, even small local variations can produce a truly
bewildering variety of outcomes – so great in fact as to render prediction
virtually impossible, even in a closed, deterministic system.
The virtue of parsimony enshrined in Occam’s razor – the principle that a simple
explanation or theory is usually preferable to a complex one – is all very well,
but as our understanding of the world grows more sophisticated we are being
forced to acknowledge that even the most economical explanations at our
disposal are not necessarily straightforward. It turns out Oscar Wilde was right
when he wrote: ‘The truth is rarely pure and never simple.’ For example, in the
mysterious world of particle physics, Superstring Theory remains the most
promising candidate to provide us with a workable ‘Theory of Everything’. This
is the Grail of modern physics, the theoretical framework that will finally allow
physicists to reconcile the uneasy bedfellows of quantum physics and general
relativity. However, as Brian Greene points out in The Elegant Universe,
although the theory looks sound, the maths involved is proving so complex that
even the best mathematical brains in the world are currently struggling to make
the highly convoluted sums add up.
Understanding the way inert matter behaves is hard enough, but when we start
trying to understand ourselves we have a truly momentous task on our hands. As
David Rogers explains: ‘The most extensive computation known has been
conducted over the last billion years on a planet-wide scale: it is the evolution of
life. The power of this computation is illustrated by the complexity and beauty of
its crowning achievement, the human brain.’ If, as Rogers claims, we are sitting
at the apex of some notional pyramid of complexity, the chances that we will
ever understand ourselves in any depth are pretty remote. After all, it is not even
as if every human brain is identical or even running the same software. I would
furthermore suggest that the chances that any significant aspect of our
multifaceted, multidimensional and highly idiosyncratic lives (especially those
murky unresolved zones we tend to demarcate as ‘problems’) can ever be
covered adequately by a brace of simple rules, five key principles or seven
effective habits, are practically next to zero.
Yet this is precisely what the bulk of self-help books offer. Many popular-
psychology authors and publishers even exalt in the fact. Take Norman Vincent
Peale for example, the father of positive thinking, who berates us for ‘struggling
with the complexities and avoiding the simplicities’. This would be all very well
if life were simple, but if the maps we are using to guide us aren’t sufficiently
detailed to do justice to the terrain we are traversing we shouldn’t be surprised if