Help yourself or remain unhelped
Posted on December 13th, 2006 by Jackie Danicki
My friend Amy Alkon is a pro-rationality, anti-BS, straightforward advice columnist and all around clever stick. If you’re into that kind of thing, you may want to have a look at her list of the nine best self-help books. I’m mildly surprised that she recommends The Road Less Traveled by M Scott Peck - which I think is utterly brilliant - as it’s a bit ’spiritual’, but that’s a pleasant surprise.
I recommend ONLY the FIRST half of the Road Less Traveled. It has some very sensible thoughts on love apparently taken from Erich Fromm, Nena & George O’Neill, and others (although he doesn’t always credit his sources). I can’t find my copy at the moment — just looked — but I believe I recommended only the first half because, sorry, the second half is filled with something less worthwhile.
Ellis and Brandon, yes, definitely (although Brandon’s HARD WORK and VERY SERIOUS and EXTREMELY HIGH MINDED), and it’s a great list. I don’t think I could have named nine. Others I’d include in such a list are:
Lance Dodes - The Heart of Addiction (to my mind the first seriously useful book on addiction, especially alcoholism, and the first to come up with a believable psychological superstructure for that kind of behaviour. Hard to see any purpose in the “disease” model after reading it)
John Diamond - Snake Oil. The late JD’s unfinished but magnificent assault on all things fake about New Ageism. Everything to avoid is in here, as well as why you should avoid it.
Heather van Vorous - IBS: The First Year. Just about the only decisively useful book on the subject. What to do, in which order, and why, and what to expect from it.
Eric Harrison: Teach Yourself to Meditate. An Australian hippy tells the world to chill out - with tips and tricks! Meditation might be too strong a word for what’s in here, but in a way that’s helpful - no need to plough through yards of polysyllabic Buddhism.
(I’ve a soft spot for Tony Robbins’ books, which are essentially excellent guides to CBT but under the deepest possible cover i.e. you couldn’t begin to guess that that is what he’s telling you about. I doubt any of his British critics, at any rate, have actually read him - what Francis Wheen has to say about him appears to come purely from the blurb on the back cover. But I couldn’t possibly admit to having such a soft spot, so I won’t).
I’ll have to re-read it, Amy. I remember being bowled over by Peck’s thoughts on love. It made me realise that, just because somebody may have had a strong feeling they called ‘love’, their actions were what defined whether or not they loved me. This can be especially difficult (devastating, even) if you apply it to a parent who, quite obviously under this definition, was anything but loving towards their children.