Video: Socrates and Self-Help

Watch my conversation with William Mulligan of the Everyday Stoic

William asked me “Do you have a problem with self-help?” That’s a great question! Answer: Yes and no. I love self-help books but I also think there’s obviously something fundamentally wrong with the whole self-help industry. Check out the video below to watch our recent conversation.

• Therapists today often see clients who have read many self-improvement books — they often describe themselves as “self-help junkies”. Even though they feel as if the self-help books they’re consuming do them good, they still arrive in therapy presenting ongoing problems. (Socrates describes a very similar situation!)

• Assessment of therapy clients often reveals that they are using self-help strategies in ways that are backfiring and maintaining their problem, e.g., many self-help techniques can become subtle forms of avoidance — as Albert Ellis used to say: feeling better is not necessarily the same thing as actually getting better.

• There are probably no self-help strategies or rules for life that are helpful in every circumstance you will face in life. Modern behavioral psychology has revealed a problem with rule-governed behavior (such as self-help advice) being overly-rigid and insensitive to change in our environment. What works in one situation may backfire in another but some people will continue repeating the same mistakes, expecting their strategies to continue working.

• Research also tends to show that coping flexibility is associated with emotional resilience, i.e., the ability to select wisely between a broad repertoire of different coping strategies. Self-help literature seldom teaches coping flexibility, though, but tends to encourage over-dependence on general rules or strategies. We are better to learn to think for ourselves rather than depend too much on other people’s advice, as Socrates clearly realized long ago!

Although, in some ways, Socrates can be viewed as the great grandaddy — or the godfather — of the self-help tradition, he also poses radical questions that strike at the very core of what it has become. In particular, Socrates seemed to think that wisdom should be viewed as a cognitive skill rather than merely a set of rules or maxims. The Socratic Method teaches us to question our assumptions about what is good or bad, healthy or unhealthy, and to become more aware of exceptions to our definitions of virtues, and other general rules of life.