self-help books ruined my life

what happens when the concept of karmic energetics turns to obsession?

nearly ten years ago now, I was introduced to The Artist Way by my then-fiance-at-the-time’s-father… who had been doing the morning pages for years. Picking up that book changed the course of my life. It’s helped me dive deeper each time I pick it up, even now, 7 years in to my creative practice.

this breakup gave me the gift of time and space with myself… things I have never had anywhere else. I knew that I had healing to do, that I was disconnected from my body. I had spent years disassociating, losing track of time, having little to no memory of my life thus far. my level of self awareness was pretty low, because there was no self left. after a series of toxic relationships, burn out, alcoholism and more- I had always absorbed into whatever relationship I was in at the time. all parts of self had been scattered to the wind. I was desperate to find her again.

once I picked up the self-help books, I couldn’t stop. I was eager for more and more. I began to understand the reason my body was disconnected, the basic understandings of mind-body connection, the nuance of relationships and how they effect our lives. I love studying attachment theories, dissecting the way we do things and why.

it’s rarely mentioned how addicting this process can be. even still, I’ve had to stop myself from binging podcasts on CPTSD or other triggering topics. I’ve gotten used to ruining myself for the sake of trying to understand myself on a “deeper level”— a level I reached a long time ago. sometimes, there have to be boundaries with staring at our wounds. I don’t want to live there, forever. I also don’t want to remain in a place where I am always dissecting someone’s behavior in an attempt to understand them— or even at my worst, control them. Life becomes exhausting at every turn.

I don’t follow any structured religion because I’ve never been a fan of fear-mongering. I do consider myself a spiritual person, on my own terms. Religion always felt too rigid, too constricting. I don’t want to follow rules because I’m fearful. I want to follow them because they are intrinsic and innate in my body and mind.

As a little kid, I vividly remember my sister being hospitalized for her asthma and being terrified she would die. I threw the covers over my head and rattled off a million and one things to God that I would no longer do in order to save her. I promise to never again steal candy from the candy drawer. To not talk back to my Mom. To eat all of my vegetables and go to bed when I’m told. Please, I begged, I offer you this in exchange for my sister’s life.

I believed I was being punished in some way. Once a month during religion classes, the adults ushered us in, one at a time, into the tiny room the size of a closet… where I would sit on my knees, in front of a window I couldn’t see through, and come up with reasons I was a bad kid— because it was required in order to ask for forgiveness. “But what if I don’t have anything to ask forgiveness for?” I asked my teacher, anxiously sitting in the pew before my turn. even as a young kid, the only memories I have are filled mostly with anxious dread of what was to come. “Oh, we all have things to be forgiven for, Sam.”

Before that time, I wasn’t aware that I could have any bad inside of little me. I realized then, that God must be mad at me. Must be showing me his power by making my sister sick, because he knows how much I love her. He would take something away as a bargain chip until I was good again.

That God sounds a lot like the manipulative relationships I’ve been in. They’ve done more harm than good.

Since leaving them behind, i’ve never been a fan of living in fear.

Back to the self-help books.

I’ve noticed a shift happening over the last year in my processing. When things start to go “wrong” or happen throughout life, I notice myself wondering what has fallen out of alignment for me. What is the universe trying to tell me? Is there some energetic block that’s holding me back and keeping me down here with all of this bad?

When my car was hit last summer, when my car was then stolen, when I lost business deals, when I missed a flight or witnessed a loved one die of cancer. These things are happening for a reason, I remember thinking. What am I doing wrong?

When my health was compromised again, I noticed more extremes in my thought patterning. Last September my appendix ruptured, and I found myself listening to people who made comments about my health stemming from unhealed trauma, from bad energetics.

I do believe the body stores things we are unaware of. I believe there are connections to the mind and body so powerful it can cause chronic pain or illness. How could the two not be inherently connected? Of course our ideals within western medicine are missing the mark on so much of this.

But where is the line? How much is free will, how much is genetics, how much is a coin toss into absolute nothing?

These thought patterns create an extremely delicate and insanely complex possibility: the power of knowing you can change your life with your thoughts AND the heavy weight of knowing the bad things in your life happen because of your thoughts.

It’s very empowering when you find yourself in the position of everything going exactly right. I control my destiny because I control my mind. But when life starts to roll back in with the ebbs and flows, as it always does, do you now hold all of the responsibility for every single thing that’s ever happened to you?

A book was recommended to me recently is Louise Hay, You Can Heal Your Life. There are similar notions I’ve read in countless other books, books like The Body Keeps Score and Eastern Body Western Mind, depicting the body-mind connection and it’s relevance. I can’t disagree with it. I’ve felt those connections in my body between trauma and illness.

But Hay goes often defines things within simplistic extremes….arguing that the cause of any illness—or even any accident or injury—is all created within the mind.

“Accidents are no accident. Like everything else in our lives, we create them.”

As someone whose lived in the intense shadow of their trauma for over half of her life, working through the shame of things happening to me outside of my control was when I was able to take my power back. But in this case, where does it leave me?

Are we saying here that those born in war-torn countries, or genocide, have attracted those things with their mind? We can’t possibly be.

Time and time again in many of these books, we’re shown the belief that we attract the things that happen to us. As many of the self-help books I’ve read before hers, it builds on the importance of energetic attraction and the subconscious mind— two things I’ve always been fascinated by. If I continue having health issues, if I get into an accident tomorrow, how do I figure out what am I doing wrong? How do I prevent doings this wrong as quickly as possible, before something else happens?

For every self help book with the words similar to, “Your thoughts create your reality”, there is someone out there with anxiety or OCD, terrified that their thoughts really are shaping their reality. What happens when this concept becomes more of a constant negative rumination than it does a helpful suggestion?

I feel as though I’ve been walking through my life on eggshells, peeling back every page and looking around every corner— hands up in the air, covering and protecting my head. What am I missing? Why am I being punished?

….how am I back to being punished?

Suddenly I am seven years old again, kneeling in that too-tight confessional, wondering how many Hail Mary’s I will have to say in order to be forgiven…In order to go back and join my peers like a good girl. Begging to the God they say is in the sky to please let me keep my sister because I promise I won’t sneak that extra piece of candy.

Whether our energetics cause our health crisis’ or not, I can promise you that telling a person in a health crisis that their thoughts are causing their emergency surgery is never really as helpful as you think. I believe positive thought patterns can heal us more quickly than negative. I also believe that advanced support, resources and medical care and genetics also impacts that.

“Resentment, criticism, and guilt are the most damaging patterns.”

That’s a fair bet, Louise Hay. Holding onto resentment and negative patterns keeps us in places we don’t belong. They prevent expansion and love and joy. But do I believe that every person whose been hit by a drunk driver, died of cancer, or lost a child tragically…created those things in their life with their thoughts? Yuck. It’s overly-simplified and gives too much power to the little humans that are us.

Is that what we’re after here, with all of these grand ideas of energetics, universal karmic energy, and mind-body connection? Are we once again, similar to organized religion, attempting to reason with our critically-rationalized minds— the reasons things are the way that they are? Are we once again, working our absolute hardest, to remain in some method of control?

If you are in a valley of your life right now, I do not believe the universe is punishing you. If you are working to heal something unimaginable, you are not defined by the things that have happened to you. You didn’t attract them, you didn’t cause them, and I hope you’re able to heal the shame you feel for your mistakes. (you’re only human, after all) But in doing so, please be careful where you turn to while looking for those answers.

It’s our human nature to want to flip over every rock and turn every page, desperate to find the answer, to believe it’s hidden somewhere if we just search hard enough— in a book of a guru or the window of a confessional.

We need reasons why things unfold the way they do. We need validation that our pain and brutality and complexities of life are all amounting to something greater than we can see. And I do believe the greatness in that is in knowing it could probably never be defined in a way we’re able to process with our simplistic human mind.

But the only foundation of Truth we hold, is knowing we might know nothing at all.

xxx

Self-help books have changed the course of my life, for mostly — the better. But similar to anything else in life, we approach with discretion and moderation. You and your life are not one giant test of who can heal the most and intellectualize the fastest.

Life is meant to be lived x