Self-help or Self-doubt?

Today it is almost impossible to escape walking through the self-help isles in our bookstores. The seemingly never ending lanes now dominate the stores floor and one can find anything, on any topic, from Its Not You, Its Me and Why Men Love Bitches to Shrink Yourself: the Ultimate Program to End Emotional Eating and The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands. These so called “self-help” books are merely wolves draped in sheep’s clothing. They preach to help when nine times out of ten they tend to insight problems rather then cure them. Todays self-help books should be renamed self-doubt books. To illustrate this image yourself walking down one the like fourteen self help isles, just browsing, not really looking for anything in particular, and then you see it. A self-help book titled How to Have a Good Relationship with Your Parents. You pause, tilt your head a bit, and slowly pull the book from its shelf. Prior to seeing this book you never considered yourself to have a bad relationship with your parents but upon seeing this book it strikes. Doubt! Your start thinking that maybe your missing something, maybe your relationship isn’t as good as you think it is. You then read the back cover and discover that you and your folks show none of the “15 signs of a good relationship”. Oh no! Your relationship doesn’t embody one of the 15 signs (and of course there is only 15 possible signs because that’s how many the author says there are) and so that is telling you that you and your parents relationship is a poor one. Self-help books are doubt igniters, creating problems in our minds and lives that we would have never even thought of if we hadn’t of seen the book.

I think Edwin has got the right idea. Most self-help books are crappy, repeats of every other self-help book, whose purpose is more to entertain than to solve. Every person knows how to fix their problems and they don’t need a books help. We have become a nation of dependents. We depend on simple media to help us solve and construe our personal issues. I wait for the day when we will be able to look at ourselves through our own point of view and rely on our own intuition to solve our problems.