Are You Tired of Mainstream Self-Help That Doesn’t Help?

By Laura K. Connell.

Are you tired of mainstream self-help that doesn’t help? Maybe you’ve read books and watched videos that everyone raved about, but they didn’t resonate with you.

There’s a good reason for that.

Today we’ll delve into why motivational tools designed for the masses miss the mark. If you’re surviving childhood trauma, they could even do more harm than good.

What is self-help?

Self-help is a blanket term to describe any of the tools we use to try and better ourselves and overcome our problems so we can have a better life.

These include books, courses, seminars, videos and other trainings we consume without the direct support of a therapist, coach or mentor.

Before I made the connection between my childhood trauma and adult outcomes, I spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours on self-help.

I read books with titles like “Leap and the Net Will Appear”, traveled to Tony Robbins conferences, and watched trainings that taught me how to “just do it”.

While these may have given me a temporary boost, they never created any meaningful transformation. Sometimes they left me feeling ashamed and isolated in ways I couldn’t explain.

Mainstream vs. trauma-informed

There’s nothing wrong with self-help. But if it’s designed for someone who grew up in a somewhat healthy home and you experienced childhood trauma, it will not help you heal.

Trauma-informed self-help, on the other hand, considers the impact of past trauma on your nervous system. It understands that you have spent most of your life in a state of fight or flight.

For that reason, a directive like “burn the boats” may be too much too soon. You need to create a sense of safety before diving into the deep end.

Otherwise, you will do more harm than good. Quitting your job to go all in on a venture could prove disastrous if you haven’t dealt with the underlying reasons for your self-sabotaging behaviors.

Mainstream self-help ignores or fails to understand the unique challenges of the childhood trauma survivor. Take Brené Brown, for example.

She says that guilt is good because it’s a sign you’ve done something wrong that goes against your values. However, if you were raised by a narcissistic parent, you have been conditioned to feel guilty, and guilt was used to control you.

Brown also claims that boredom is desirable because it inevitably leads to ideas and creativity. This fails to take into account the complex trauma survivor who will spiral and become overwhelmed with negative emotions when faced with a stint of boredom.

For him or her, boredom does not lead to anything but a possible panic attack!

Remember when you were a child?

Have you heard mainstream self-help experts invite you to harken back to childhood when you knew how to have fun and didn’t have a care in the world?

Wait, that doesn’t sound like your experience growing up? You mean you spent your days in a state of hypervigilance, desperately trying to keep yourself safe in a world that felt terrifying?

That’s why mainstream self-help doesn’t help. It leaves you feeling misunderstood, alone, and unfixable because you can’t relate to what they’re talking about.

And if you were to bring up this fact, they would say that’s all in the past. You must let go of that and live in the present!

They don’t know that it’s impossible to release past trauma until you’ve learned how to process it. The only way out is through.

Your parents did the best they could

Mainstream self-help experts love this line. They encourage you to remember the good things your parents did instead of dwelling on the bad.

In fact, not all parents did the best they could. Some were intentionally cruel or wildly neglectful.

And whether or why your parents did what they did is not the point when you’re healing from a traumatic childhood, anyway.

We want to stop thinking about our parents, making excuses for them, and minimizing what they did or didn’t do for us. We need to turn the focus on ourselves.

That includes creating a cohesive narrative around your past. One that centers your own experience and deals with the impact of poor parenting on your adult outcomes.

That means telling the truth about their behavior toward you instead of pretending it was normal. It has nothing to do with blame and everything to do with authenticity.

You do not have to cover for your parents at the expense of yourself anymore. That doesn’t mean it’s payback time; it simply means we’re not going to lie for their benefit.

How to find self-help that helps

Avoiding mainstream self-help that doesn’t help means finding tools that do. These include resources that acknowledge the impact of trauma on our brains and nervous systems. 

Outcomes such as procrastination, perfectionism, and people pleasing are dealt with at the root-cause level. That means we go beyond “just do it” to see how failing to show up is our way of avoiding danger.

If visibility got you in trouble, wouldn’t it make sense that you’d stay small as an adult? If boundaries resulted in loss of love, isn’t it obvious you’d shy away from setting them?

But these issues aren’t dealt with in mainstream self-help. They are viewed as mindset issues to be jumped over, rather than deep conditioning that makes you feel as though you will die if you do things differently.

Next Steps

Look for experts who have recovered from the issues they teach you to heal from. And strategies that help you feel less alone by acknowledging the impact of your past.

Instead of big scary jumps, they offer gentle baby steps. Rather than telling you to “forget about it”, they acknowledge your past as an integral part of your current experience, while offering solutions from a place of deep understanding, not dismissal.

Laura K. Connell is an author, coach, and course creator who helps you overcome the family dynamics at the root of your adult self-sabotage. Watch her free masterclass “The 4-Step Process for Healing Your Childhood Trauma” here: https://www.laurakconnell.com/masterclass-registration