Why Self-Help Materials Often Fail To Help
By; Eric Erickson, PhD
Marriages and relationships are difficult for many of us. Their prospect is so full of the expectation and promise of fulfillment, love and happiness. Often their beginnings appear to be living up to these dreams, at least for a while. But once these relationships begin to fail, to show signs of disappointment, there is quite often very little that many couples can do to reverse the decline. Some couples, finding their marriage in decline, promptly decide to end their relationship and to seek the promise of happiness elsewhere. Others attempt to resolve their problems with the help of friends, a therapist or clergy. Still others attempt to straighten out their differences alone or with the assistance of self-help books, videos and seminars. Those who choose to consult popular self-help materials often come away disappointed as their relationship continues to fail. Today, we will be exploring several of the reasons why traditional self-help materials are often ineffective in improving or repairing a failing marriage.
Our discussion will be focusing on three problem areas common to most, if not all, popular self-help materials and will proceed from the least to the most restrictive reasons for their failure.
To begin I would like to mention that my partner, Jeane Cordingley, PsyD and I love to read self-help books. She got me started on them shortly after we met thirty some years ago. From this beginning one of the features to be found in many of them immediately drew my attention. This feature was the inevitable chapters that titled their contents in list form, such as: “10 Sure Fire Methods of Reigniting the Passion in Your Marriage” or “Five Steps to Better Communication” and another good one, “Three Things That Every Woman Should Know About Men”. Now while it is true that there are methods that will increase or return passion to some couples. Just as there are things that partners can do to gain a better understanding of their mate thereby improving their ability to communicate with each other and certainly there are things that every woman should know about men. However, such generalities are often of little value when trying to fix a failing relationship.
Your relationship is the combination of two unique and special individuals, each equally deserving to give and receive love. There is no one else in this entire universe quite like either one of you and when you met and formed your relationship it, too, became instantly one of a kind. Therefore its improvement or repair requires, in addition to an equal effort on both of your parts, methods, steps and answers that are tailored to fit your unique situation. Such insights can only come from you and, sadly, popular self-help materials fall woefully short of inspiring them in their readers when all they have to offer are generalities.
Also, the healing arts are not exact sciences in any way as are physics, chemistry and mechanics, for instance, regardless of how much their practitioners would like them to be and psychology is among the “fuzziest” of the healing arts. This is not to say that psychological insights and the various “talking therapies” are ineffective. In a great many cases they are very effective, providing needed help to over 80% of those who pursue this course of treatment genuinely. The point I am trying to make here is that there are no hard fast rules when it comes to applying help to something as unique and complex as your marriage. So when a self-help author offers you; “3 Sure Fire Ways To…..” these ways are unlikely to provide you with any tools that will actually help you improve your relationship in any lasting, meaningful way.
In our discussion so far we have learned that generalities form the first reason why self-help materials often fail to aid those who wish to improve or repair their troubled relationship. Now let’s move on to examine the second aspect of this failure which involves the nature of knowledge itself.
All self-help materials, books, videos, seminars etc. strive to give you knowledge. This knowledge may be presented in many forms, ranging from folksy popularizations to serious academic presentations, and covers a wide range of topics which reflect the diverse nature of psychology. The way that knowledge is offered only presents a problem when the author’s presentation is beyond the comprehension of the material’s intended audience. So the source of the problem we are about to explore lies elsewhere.
Knowledge consists of information; it is the accumulation of information that itself is based on the past experiences of others. Therefore, knowledge is always in the past and deals with the previous experiences of strangers in their own unique circumstances. This is why knowledge alone is quiet “dead”, by which I mean that it has no power or ability to bring you the transformative insights you require to improve or repair your relationship.
Love is not knowledge. True, real love is not simply the remembrance of past events, past experiences and past pleasures. This is why knowledge alone, which is constantly based in this past framework, will not solve your relationship problems. If it did then everyone who held an advanced degree in psychology would be blissfully happy and we all know that there are many, many miserable shrinks.
When self-help materials offer their readers or viewers knowledge solely as their “active ingredient” for dealing with their intended problem they are destined to fail. This is especially true in the area of relationship improvement and repair where any problems that exist between a couple are compounded by the fact that there are two people involved rather than the single individual that therapists are accustomed to dealing with. This is not to say that information which leads to knowledge is useless, I merely mean to point out one of the reasons self-help materials offer little help to those who seek to save their marriages. When considering the role information and knowledge might play in your attempt to help your marriage it may be useful to remember that information and knowledge form a part of a larger whole that is commonly known as wisdom. Wisdom is a hierarchy:
Information → Knowledge → Understanding → Awareness.
From this progression you can see that information leads to knowledge which in some people inspires understanding which, in turn, can sometimes lead to awareness. Awareness differs from mere information and knowledge and even understanding as we are about to find out.
We’ve arrived at the third, last and possibly most limiting major failing of self-help materials. It concerns the fact that most, if not all, popular self-help materials fail to provide you with some form of empowering practices, exercises or disciplines that will enable you to apply the knowledge you have gained through reading or viewing them in a way that will fix your relationship. To better understand this concept let’s return to our hierarchy of wisdom. In traditional western education you learn that the goal of acquiring knowledge is to lead to understanding, as our graphic shows. This understanding is then demonstrated in grad school when you write your dissertation and defend it. It is your understanding that empowers you to defend your work. But this purely academic demonstration is the limit of the empowerment that understanding alone usually conveys. This is why I said earlier that simply possessing an advanced degree in psychology will not give you the tools necessary to improve or repair your own relationship. This is why there are so many unhappy couples who also happen to be psychologists and psychiatrists.
Returning to our hierarchy you will see that awareness follows information, knowledge and understanding. This is not an automatic progression and often does not take place. However, when it does awareness grants active mastery over one’s inner life and its problems. This is because awareness is a living, dynamic, expansive form of consciousness. When one wields it they are easily able to correctly assess their personal situation and those of the people closest to them and to formulate answers that are specifically tailored to fit their individual and unique needs. It is this active nature of awareness that will provide you with the solutions to your relationship problems. When two people acquire awareness and apply it to their marriage it is soon on the way to becoming a Perfect Relationship, sadly, however, the majority of today’s self-help materials fail to provide this vital ingredient.
Without providing you with a way to gain awareness, something that is also lacking in our system of higher education, popular self-help materials widely available both at cost and for free have little chance of providing you with any assistance with your relationship concerns whether they originate during dating, in the early stages of courtship or once the relationship / marriage is formed. Realizing these failings some time ago my partner and I formed www.perfectcoupleproductions.com as a source of self-help materials specifically dealing with relationship issues that do not have the failings we’ve spoken of here today. Such self-help materials provide awareness building techniques in addition to supplying necessary information. It is this combination alone that completes the hierarchy and grants wisdom and active mastery not only over your relationship concerns but all of your other concerns as well.
When members of a troubled relationship apply such wisdom to their problems they soon solve them. With their problems out of the way and a new awareness of their relationship along with the connection to real love that this provides the couple is well on their way to building a Perfect Relationship out of their previous mess. This Cooperative / Mutually Supportive Perfect Relationship can become every bit as happy as the Natural Perfect Relationship two people who are originally totally right for each other have. In either form of Perfect Relationship each partner sees their mate with the exact same excitement that they had when they first met regardless of how long they remain together. Their passion is actually maintained on a level which is higher than that even those couples experience that have recently become intimate. This level of passion never diminishes. The amount of love, companionship, trust and togetherness present in a Perfect Couple are beyond all the experiences of lesser couples who have an Average / Working Relationship (the level of relationship experienced by most couples in America). Material success flows naturally from the positive synergy that exists between members of a Perfect Couple, as does health, longevity and popularity. If you are seriously interested in finding or building this level of happiness for yourself then I suggest that you visit www.perfectcoupleproductions.com where you will find all that you need to do so.
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