A good friend of mine just recently enquired whether I would be interested in doing a six week course titled – A Life of Happiness and Fulfilment. I didn’t, and I explained why, to which she conveyed her relief and agreement about why I felt this way after over a decade involved in therapy, coaching and personal development,  – but perhaps without the reference to to the rabbit!

My reply was as follows,

‘As your good friend, strange though this may sound considering I am involved in the personal development field, if its possible, and if its not to late, do not venture into this pit of self help.

At the end of a course on happiness I would hedge my bets you’ll be none the wiser where to find it and left only with more self analysing questions that keep you going round and round and round whilst the rest of the world get on with their day, being happier than you, in their own, sad little way, than those, who are looking for the key to Elysium on the ever growing self help book shelves at Waterstones,

all promising they have the answer, but clearly they don’t, or the writing would stop, which unfortunately it doesn’t-  with another new book, which is really the same book but just with the same regurgitated guff being repackaged by people who, as I heard the other day usually ‘don’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of!!

And if they do, its not because they have the answer, it’s because they sold some plagiarised books or they earned their money initially doing a normal or even boring corporate job!

It’s a bit like booze or drugs (which really self help becomes, as does religion at times) They can, in the moment, be a massive liberator and comfort, but usually they leave you feeling shit afterwards or eventually dependent – and then it’s Priory time!

There’s two types of people. Those looking to fix a particular problem. They go to see someone, get it fixed – or not – and then fuck off about their day., never thinking about it again or where their life went wrong and who’s to blame. (Bit of ‘thug kitchen’ talk- maybe ‘thug therapy?!’)

Then there’s fuck ups like me and so many other people in the psych-type industries, who initially got involved in psychology, self help/PB or any of the other alphabet therapies out there, in the hope of sorting themselves out, only to be dragged down the rabbit hole by a butt fucking psychological self help bunny rabbit who proceeds to feed you psychedelic dream chasers whilst raping both your mind and wallet in the process.

And when this carrot eating mind bender has left you in the gutter with your pants round your ankles and a needle in your arm from the last hit of bullshit you’ve just had to ‘suck cock for rock’ to get, you wake up from your crack induced coma, feeling…well far from happy shall we say.

You then think the way to get away from the self loathing of last night debauchery is to go and visit that very Buck toothed deviant that abducted you initially and ask him for another crack pipe dream. And how do we pay for it? Often by selling the dream ourselves.

The problem is we don’t know we are happy, or having the best days of our lives sadly, until it to late and we are looking back reminiscing, maybe because we are lonely or someone has died, or maybe because we are medicated up to the gunnel’s to stop the pain whilst we sit there with the drip that’s pumping chemo into us, and as we do, we long to be back to how life used to be, which is, in effect now, today, on the day you are currently looking into how you can find happiness!  Sad really.

Sometimes it’s about consciously stopping and saying ‘fuck me, today I’m ok. So far today I’ve not been told I’m about to die. I’ve got my health and my family, who have also got the all clear today.

If any of that changes tomorrow, today will, in comparison be the happiest day of my life! Let’s get out and celebrate, see some friends, do something fun, something, anything! But all inside of this fact that things for most of us could be massively worse, rather than routinely doing these things to distract ourselves from thinking ‘I should be more than this!’.

JUST BE as I wrote about before.
https://younglobal.wordpress.com/2015/10/20/just-be/

I think a lot of what I’ve learnt helps me understand stuff or break things down but essentially I don’t think it makes any difference to the outcome of my life.

In fact it has in many ways probably held me back.

Most of the time we don’t need self help, we just need to help ourselves to recognise what we have got and use everything that we currently are, our strengths and characteristics that make us unique, to better ourselves and those around us.’

Or is that just more meth crystal for the mind? Who knows.

And finally I wanted to add a nice analogy my friend responded with which I think sums it up nicely –

‘Funny enough, parenting is very like what you described, you can read all the books, pigeon yourself as this type or that type, elect that they won’t have any sugar before they’re two and in turn constantly worry your arse off that you’re getting wrong… or you can just get on with it old school style and berate them when they run out in front of a car and not feed them any more chocolate when they’re climbing up the side of the house… you get the idea!’