Confessions of a self-helpaholic

While I celebrate the idea of improvement, there are dark and painful elements to the self-help industry that we can easily internalize and use to punish ourselves.

Like everything else in our capitalist world, our desire for growth has been packaged as a commodity, and our longing for health, healing, and wholeness can be exploited.

The painful assumption that can underpin our attempts at improving ourselves is that we are lacking as we are now.

We are not good enough. We are not…enough.

This is the language of shame. Most of us speak it fluently. Shame and shaming as a tool to motivate and control behavior is woven into our culture. This is a huge topic, so I will just leave that here. But suffice to say, I think we all experience shame and we can be incredibly driven to not feel the pain of shame.

This understandable avoidance can present as destructive behaviors. It can also present as the countermeasures we bring in. For example, drinking or drugging might be a way to escape from the unbearable shame of not feeling good enough. A determination to be sober could also be driven by the shame of feeling broken for drinking too much.

When we are in a shame loop, we need incredible amounts of willpower, grit, and determination to dominate the unwanted part of the loop. While willpower is sometimes absolutely necessary to get us out of dangerous patterns, long term it is unsustainable and exhausting.

For years, I did all the self-help a woman can do. I needed help. I committed to therapy knowing that getting well was a life or death issue for me. I made a profession out of helping people develop themselves as an Alexander Technique teacher. It was rewarding, I learned and I grew.

Looking back, I wish there had been more focus on accepting myself as I am. I was so driven by my feelings of shame that self-development became a never-ending grind.

I had a turning point some years ago. I was doing a journaling process designed to heal chronic pain. Like a wave, I was hit with the realization that all my efforts to heal, all my efforts to grow, and all my efforts to improve myself were rigidly driven by the belief that I was a problem. Not only did I have problems to fix, but I was treating myself, my very existence as a problem to be fixed. Once I was able to drop that assumption, the miracle of healing over 30 years of crippling migraines began to occur.

There was nothing wrong with me. I was not a problem to fix. I am a human being navigating an uncertain and sometimes painful experience in a world that does not always seem to support my needs. I experience pain. I suffer. This is part of what it means to be human. There is nothing wrong with me. There never was.

Being human also means I have an innate curiosity and drive to grow, mature, develop and expand my experience. I am privileged enough to be living a life where that is accessible to me.

Our desire to improve, do better, and be better is innately human and positive.

I invite you to consider that growth and self-development can be a path of creativity and joy. Our pain may be pointing us in some miraculous directions and learning opportunities. But at no point are you a problem to be solved. At no point is there anything lacking in you.

This process of growth is open-ended. It is non-linear. If we engage in it from a place of lack it can easily veer into a never-ending treadmill. There is always more to do! There is always the next thing we need. The capitalist system is more than happy to exploit your vulnerabilities to keep you on the treadmill.

I show up to my personal work because I love myself. I love having more understanding, healing, and peace in my life. I love sharing that with other people. I recently heard the author Glennon Doyle say in the face of a devastating mental health diagnosis that she was going to do the hard work necessary to heal because she loves her future self so much and she wants her future self to be more liberated and happier. Our desire to learn, create and grow is as human as our suffering.

We all have everything we need to chart our way through life. My advice is to lean into processes of self-development that assume you are whole and capable. Processes and people that support you with the circumstances that promote your innate knowing and wisdom. Human knowledge is always expanding, there is nothing to keep up with.

Instead of motivating ourselves with the lie of not being good enough, we can inspire ourselves by how much we care for ourselves and how much we care about our experience here on earth. Let’s love ourselves now so we can love our future selves into a happier and healthier tomorrow.