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Mike
Carruthers:
The self-help industry it's a multi-billion dollar business,
but not everybody thinks it's a great thing. Dr.
Paul Pearsall:
The idea of self-help has always really been that you've
got to be better than you are, that you're not happy enough, you ought to be happier.
Those are the kinds of ideas that have very little scientific merit. Dr.
Paul Pearsall, author of The
Last Self-Help Book You'll Ever Need, says this whole idea of being better
and loving yourself is baloney. Look,
loving you is someone else's job. You've got to be working on being love worthy.
Good relationships don't depend upon finding the right partner they depend upon
being the right partner. Yet we have these; how to find a date, how to find the
right partner. Usually written by people who've failed two or three times in their
own life to find the right partner. Why are we deferring our life to this advice
without asking, "How do you know?" The
whole self-help movement is about fixing your life so it's better tomorrow. But
Dr. Pearsall says… Psychologists
who are good researchers talk about the idea of being mindful. Being attentive
to your life now, not making your life a constant self-improvement project. For
example self-help groups have had very little evidence that they're helpful. Many
are detrimental - it leads to self-help guilt, that you have to go to your support
group. Some people benefit from them, these are people we know in the research
that are expressers, they've got to get it all out. But some people are repressors
they keep it in. Tomorrow,
Dr. Pearsall's take on diet books. I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You
Should Know.
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