We've become addicted to self-help books even though many of them give conflicting advice, but there's hope for us yet, writes Grace Wynne-Jones
Us self-help-advice addicts know summer is the perfect time for the book that will transform our lives. While others devour blockbusters on the beach or in a shady Spanish hammock, those who are fascinated by self-improvement may be found Healing The Shame That Binds You or trying to Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway while attempting to get a tan. After all, spring cleaning is long past - or may never have been even attempted, because we didn't get around to reading The Life Laundry: How To De-Junk Your Life. But we know that, if we really put our minds and hearts to it, summer can be the time we get to the parts of us no mop or duster can ever reach.
If we are alone and female we can turn to the advice of Chronically Single Women. And if we are married we may desperately need the edicts of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus just to preserve peace on the trip to the airport at the start of our holiday. Sometimes even the titles can be used as gentle intimidation. Casually tossing The Dance Of Intimacy: A Woman's Guide To Courageous Acts Of Change In Key Relationships in the suitcase, for example, tends to make most Martians sit up and take notice.
Like Strangers In The Night, I thought the perfect self-help book would find me across a crowded room, probably somewhere in Waterstone's, Eason or some other self-help pick-up point. The cover would wink at me, lure me towards it with its seductive promises and confidence ("Over 50 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list!").
Being a huge romantic, I naturally thought love was wonderful. Then I bought Women Who Love Too Much and discovered I had been loving too much all my life and clearly needed to do something about it. Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway, by Susan Jeffers, made me realise that I simply must extend my "comfort zone", so I went windsurfing and splashed into the arms of erogenous Eric in Greece. Romance blossomed for two and a half weeks, then led straight back to Hughes & Hughes and Smart Women, Foolish Choices. It was clearly time to go to the park and quack at the river . . . I had also been reading Talking To Ducks: Rediscovering The Joy And Meaning In Your Life, by James A. Kitchens.
To tell the truth, ducks aren't great conversationalists. But they do seem pretty bright-eyed and perky, and they made me wonder if it was time to try to End The Struggle And Dance With Life. I knew I wouldn't be content with a slow waltz. It would have to be a tango straight out of Simply Ballroom, because back then I was a perfectionist with a rampant "inner critic". In fact I regularly criticised myself for criticising myself too much. Somehow the forests of advice about loving and accepting myself more took a while to reach me.
The wonderful and awful thing about self-help books is that they are stuffed with information about relationships. They tell you about boundaries, "disowned selves" and projection and about how you really, really must love yourself more, even though the sex isn't great.
Is it possible to love self-help books too much? "I have to say that I am addicted to both reading and writing spiritual and inspirational books," says Nick Williams, author of The Work We Were Born To Do. "But it's a positive addiction. With so much negativity in the world I need to do everything I can to keep my soul aloft." Williams believes that to get the best out of self-help books we need to start from a place of self-acceptance rather than self-improvement. "We can turn them into weapons of self-destruction if we use them to judge ourselves negatively. Or we can start from a place of self-love and self-acceptance and build from there. We are already an amazing, whole, spiritual being, peeling off the layers of conditioning so that we can remember who we really are."
Oliver James, the psychologist, says: "Anything people find helpful is a good thing". But he adds that people can take self-help books too seriously and that they could sometimes get as much information from a novel. At their best they can be tools for transformation, but it's up to the reader to put the good advice into practice.
And the advice tends to vary. For example, three self-help gurus seem to disagree on the source of happiness. Jeffers apparently thinks we are "searching for a divine essence within ourselves"; Anthony Robbins, author of Awaken The Giant Within, believes we need to figure out what we really value; but Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, believes that happiness and success require integrity, humility, fidelity, courage, industry and temperance.
"Life is difficult," wrote M. Scott Peck in The Road Less Travelled. "This is a great truth, one of the greatest." It's a pretty sobering announcement, but it apparently contains the seeds of liberation, because "once we truly know that life is difficult - once we truly understand and accept it - then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters".
That's why we buy self-help books, of course: because life is sometimes difficult and it's a great comfort to see the fact in print. Now that my addiction has eased I realise that the advice can take a while to process, so it's best not to devour them like Liquorice Allsorts. Sometimes just managing to sit still for half an hour can be enormously instructive. Maybe the main pay-off in searching for answers is that your questions get more interesting. But also it's the advice you give yourself that really makes the difference.
Grace Wynne-Jones's latest novel, Ready Or Not?, is published by Tivoli, €9.99
