Personal Growth Distraction

Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote, “In a sick society, women who have difficulty fitting in are not ill but demonstrating a healthy and positive response.”

I have recently become annoyed with barrage of personality tests that are designed to tell us what’s wrong with ourselves so that we can fix it. I recently was pointed to the Saboteurs test. According to it I am too confident, too challenging, and not obedient enough. I am too driven and too independent. I am too rational and too principled. To me these all seem like strengths, especially when those in power would have us sit back and take it. Two years ago, understanding “middle age” felt good, appropriate. Now it feels like navel gazing in the middle for a forest fire. While bad people do bad things to us, we sit and wonder how some minor personality trait is the cause of all our problems.

It can be hard to tell when something is good and when it is bad. Often the bad are packaged as good (cigarettes), or they start out with good intentions, but then are coopted for evil (glp-1s). We see this all the time in education. School choice—packaged as good for parents to make the best decisions for their kids is legal racial segregation. Charter Schools—intended to allow for experiments in education styles became a way for private schools and corporations to get public funds without calling it vouchers. Was self-help, personal growth a cultural phenomenon intended for good, designed to empower us? Or has it always been bad, designed to keep us thinking about what’s wrong with us so we don’t notice or care that a few people are taking everything? Historically, self-help books seem to rise in popularity as authoritarians, monarchs, or capitalists are telling us life is great while they take everything from us.1 Even thanksgiving started as directives on how to be better women—in reaction to industrialization and liberalization.2

Fundamentally, I am not against self-help. (Though the name itself, a derivative of the American “independent spirit,” encourages isolation rather than community, which is often the root of our problems.) Taking time to process is important. I spent seven years in therapy, and am a much healthier person for it. But I gradated. If we’re going to be empowered, we need to know when we’re ok. When we understand ourselves enough, perhaps not entirely—there will always be another perspective—but enough that we can return to the world. There needs to be a point in which we turn our focus outside ourselves. I often think of Jane Fonda; she has taken time to deal with her stuff when she needed too, but she never let it distract her from the more important external battles.

So many common brain diagnoses are “disorders.” Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. The problem with these titles is that they feel permanent and unmutable. And people have made them identities. I appreciate that they are now discussed publicly, that we can commiserate and understand better, but it has become an excuse rather than something that we find ways to deal with. There are people with schizoid affective disorder that have found successful treatments that allow them to live in society, and others that struggle. There are people like me who just need a bit of therapy to deal with some post traumatic stress, and others who will always struggle. If the majority of us, who are treatable, make diagnosis our identity, it make it harder for people who are worse off to get help. For the majority of us, the point of therapy is not to be in therapy for the rest of our lives, it’s to learn the skills we need to thrive. Once we have those skills, use them, and move on.

Utilitarian philosophy says it is better to maximize the well-being of the many. Self-help is fine if it helps you help others. If it makes you a better mother, boss, community member, activist, etc. But staying internalized doesn’t do others any good—you are never done and you’re not helping others. The deontological take puts the importance on the action. If you’re stuck in self-help mode, you’re not actually taking moral action. Two years ago, this might not have been as obvious, but today it is hard to sit and watch the invasion of our cities, people ripped out of their homes, communities dismantled, the President stealing our taxes and think that my personality saboteurs are the problem.

There are so many ways to look at ourselves and find issues. But who says those traits are bad? When a behavior interferes with our lives it need to be addressed. Panic attacks should be dealt with, they can be crippling. And perhaps some personality traits are harmful to our careers, relationships, etc. But for each of us there is a point where we are good enough, and further exploration comes more from our culture and is therefore a distraction. Whenever society says something is wrong/broken/must be fixed, I wonder what the power I have is that they’re trying to make me forget. Or worse, “fix.”