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Know Yourself and Renounce Self-Help Therapy
Enlightened humility and the audacity of therapy culture
Most of us want to be told what to do and how to do it.
The answers are all on the internet in byte-sized packets: how to organize your closet, start a business, bake a lasagna, write a novel, paint a picture, tell a joke, go on a diet, survive a zombie apocalypse — it’s all there in black and white, endless step-by-step instructions.
If one recipe fails you, try the next. You need never live with doubt or failure. A world of know-it-alls is out there to pick you up, dust you off, and set you on the right path.
Then we leap to the conclusion that we should be told not just what to do but what to be. We think therapy should be just as straightforward as a how-to guide. If we’re short on the money for a professional therapist, we can resort to the “self-help” industry, since with all the free advice on offer, we assume we might as well help ourselves.
If you don’t like your personality, you can fix yourself just like you can fix a leaky faucet. What’s more, you can do so quickly and easily, with the same convenience as ordering stuff from Amazon, McDonald’s, or Uber Eats.
The Audacity of Therapists
But this insistence on easy answers in life is ludicrous and pernicious.
Looking up advice on how to make better sushi rice is one thing. Presuming you can learn from others how to be a better person, because someone somewhere knows the proper way to live is foolish.
And this therapy culture is dangerous, too, because it feeds our egos. Who says we should be thinking so much about ourselves in the first place?
Who is anyone to tell some law-abiding person what they should be doing with their life? Who has the gall to reduce all the philosophical and religious discourses about what our existential purpose might be, to a handy ten-step program?
Therapists often skirt the audacity of their profession by pretending the main goal in life is settled. They turn the question of what to be into yet another how-to query; specifically, they turn it into the assignment of learning how to be happy.
