The key part of of self-help is "self." I've always screwed up my brow at the huge self-help sections in bookstores. The books forever end up in Goodwill, next to old Mantovani LPs. You want to lose weight, improve a relationship, get more education, advance at work? GO AHEAD, THEN. It's all based on common sense. Execution is the hard part.

One especially insidious thing about the burgeoning American self-help industry is its co-dependent relationship with Clientized Consumerism. Whether you've got a problem with your career, marriage, dog's behavior, weight, self-esteem, or minority identity - there's either a moping "support group" to help you feel better about yourself (the low budget option), or (for the well-heeled mark) a trained professional to coach you through it. Odds are the latter has plenty of reading material, tapes and maybe even "seminars" available, for an extra charge.

Author and critic Steve Salerno in this L.A. Times op-ed explores the often-delusional aspects of self-help.

...the pop-psychology menu increasingly has been flavored by an antithetical concept — empowerment — that can be summarized as: Believe it, achieve it....In U.S. schools, the crusade to imbue kids with that most slippery of notions — self-esteem — has been unambiguously disastrous (and has recently been disavowed by a number of its loudest early voices)....Over time, it became clear that what such policies promote is not academic greatness but a bizarre disconnect between perceived self-worth and provable skill. Over a 20-year span beginning in the early 1970s, the average SAT score fell by 35 points. But in that same period, the contingent of college-bound seniors who boasted an A or B average jumped from 28% to an astonishing 83%, as teachers felt increasing pressure to adopt more "supportive" grading policies.

...Still, the U.S. keeps dressing its young in their emperors' new egos, passing them on to the next set of empowering curricula. If you teach at the college level, as I do, at some point you will be confronted with a student seeking redress over the grade you gave him because "I'm pre-med!" Not until such students reach med school do they encounter truly inelastic standards: a comeuppance for them but a reprieve for those who otherwise might find ourselves anesthetized beneath their second-rate scalpel.

...one never really fails in this brave new (euphemistic) world. "There is no such thing as failure," posits a core maxim of neuro-linguistic programming, the regimen from which (motiivational guru Tony) Robbins drew much of his patter....As top management consultant Jay Kurtz argues: "The most dangerous person in corporate America is the highly enthusiastic incompetent. He's running faster in the wrong direction, doing horribly counterproductive things with winning enthusiasm."

Thanks to self-help, people who have made intractable choices are peer-counseled that everything is workable. Take the Gay Married Men's Association of Washington, D.C . (GAMMA). Please. It's for gay or bi-sexual men who are married or contemplating an intimate relationship with a woman. I've stated here before I have no axe to grind with gays and lesbians so long as: they're good citizens; don't overplay the victim card; and don't speciously equate opposition to same-sex marriage with "homophobia." Yet I do believe that a man who's married to a woman, or considering partnering with one - but has sex with other men or wants to.......well, he'd better choose one life or the other. GAMMA sees it differently:

Some members are in satisfying, conventional marriages, some in less happy ones. Some are separated or divorced, some have lovers....Some have had free and open discussions with their spouses and children. Others have never spoken to anyone about their feelings. All are welcome and should find among us others who share their experience. GAMMA has no official party line. It neither encourages nor discourages its members from relationships with their wives or other women. Rather, it seeks to assist each man to find his own best road to travel in life. Much of this is accomplished through open, candid, and sympathetic sharing of thoughts, experiences and feelings.

Of course, there's a GAMMA referral to a regional "Wives Group," too, via The Straight Spouse Network. And doubtless plenty of psychotherapists willing to take money to help codify such arrangements.

Psychotherapists, and marriage counselors. Feh. Don't EVEN get me started on them.

TECHNORATI TAGS: SELF-HELP, STEVE SALERNO, EDUCATION, SOCIAL PROMOTION, GAMMA, STRAIGHT SPOUSES

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at January 3, 2006 05:34 PM