On Being Too Smart for Your Own Good (II)

I was in therapy for a few months several years ago. It didn't go especially well. The therapist I saw was very nice, but her style wasn't compatible with my needs. Mixed into a collection of printouts she gave me to read over were some quotes from Deepak Chopra. And she kept pressuring me to listen to these self-hypnosis tapes, one of which encouraged me to picture myself floating away from my cares in a big blue balloon. The metaphor was a little threadbare, which prevented me from approaching the thing in the correct spirit. In this specific case you might not blame me, but I think it points to a larger problem: self-help materials aren't typically aimed at an audience that regards itself as intellectually sophisticated, and therefore people who regard themselves as intellectually sophisticated have little patience for self-help.

There's something in me that brims over with contempt at the very word: "self-help." That part of me isn't big on "self-esteem" either. Which is why it took me a damn long time to admit that I have self-esteem problems. (You'd think I might have guessed when, asked by the intake person at the clinic where I saw that therapist, what my good qualities were, it took about a minute of stumbling and stuttering to admit that I was probably smart. That is pathology, not modesty.) There are good reasons to be wary of mass market self-help. It can promote bright simplifications and easy fixes, some of its practitioners are out for a buck, and some of its adherents are looking for excuses rather than solutions. But bad doctors and bad patients aren't proof illness doesn't exist.

That pamphlet my therapist gave me was a mishmash of pop neuroscience, New Age stuff, mindfulness, and conventional therapeutic material. Because things like these do exist along a continuum, it's easy to dismiss all of it as fringe nonsense, quackery, unworthy of consideration by serious people. It's easy to say, "I have a vigorous mind, I have a lot of responsibilities, of course I've going to feel stressed, anxious, depressed, etc. That's just a part of life." But it's not. Or it doesn't have to be.

I'm not suggesting that everyone with a post-graduate degree ought to rush out and buy a copy of I'm OK, You're OK. It just helps to be open to things. Mental health is about more than medication. It takes practical work. The best comparison, I think, is to physical therapy. The mind is like the body: it needs exercise to get back to working the way it's supposed to work. Making that effort is usually the last thing in the world you want to do: the illness by its very nature encourages you not to test and strengthen the part of the body that it has weakened. And let's face it: you probably feel pretty silly flailing around like that. But if you don't do the exercises, you're not going to get better.