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I'll never forget the day I sat in Ruby Tuesday's alone, eating lunch as I opened my freshly purchased copy of Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled. His first chapter begins with these words: "Life is difficult."
Scott Peck had me at difficult. This I knew. All my life, I'd struggled with poor self-esteem and crippling, uncontrollable fears. Yet in my family's conservative Christian circles, a good Christian never needed therapy—ever. Self was to be denied, not embraced.
Peck goes on to say life isn't supposed to be easy; difficult is OK. Reading hungrily as I ate my meal, I suddenly felt less lonely than I had in a long time.
In my late teens, when I headed to Bible college to discover "God's will for my life," I gravitated toward bookstore self-help shelves, seeking answers in secular titles that promised healing for my wounds—Codependent No More and Taking Responsibility. My justification for this interest?
I was fixing myself for God.
I continued to read self-help throughout my 20s. But after years of chasing the self-help dream, I faced a serious marital crisis. At the prospect of becoming a single parent, I found myself turning to God—not my books—for the answers I desperately needed.
Don't get me wrong; secular self-help isn't without some sound psychological insights. But too often these insights come wrapped in falsehoods. Here are four that popular self-help gurus promote—and that Christians should avoid.
1. You should put you first.In Take Time for Your Life, author Cheryl Richardson writes, "When you practice extreme self-care and put yourself first, you are then fully available to others without resentment or anger."
At first glance, Richardson's words are a simple call to establish healthy boundaries, permission to get off the merry-go-round of people pleasing. When I was younger, I ate up such advice. Self-help told me I'm special—and I should treat myself as such. But then I encountered people who didn't understand, care about, or even like me. Without an inflated sense of self-worth, my attempts to put myself first seemed obnoxious and ridiculous.
God established the truth about my personhood in Genesis 1:26, when he says, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness." I, along with the rest of humankind, am an eternal spirit of immense potential created in God's image. Ironically, self-help gurus have it backwards: I don't learn to value myself by selfishly ignoring the value of others; it's in identifying their value that I begin to learn how tall I truly stand. So when I meet people mastered in the art of self-love and self-promotion, I confirm their hunches: "Yes, you're full of remarkable possibility, but then so is everyone else. Including me."
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