by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
Self-Help Often Encourages You to Be Unreal Instead of Real…Here’s Why
Self-help is supposed to make life better – well, at least that’s the promise it makes:
More confidence, more money, more success, more clarity, more peace…. if you just read the right book, adopt the right mindset, wake up at 5am, visualise harder, optimise your habits, heal your inner child, rewire your beliefs, and finally become the version of yourself you were always “meant” to be… then everything will just click into place.
Sounds great to me – except for that fact that for a for a lot of people following the ‘self-help’ philosophy the opposite happens:
They become more anxious, more self-critical, more obsessed with themselves, and more miserable than they were before they ever picked up a self-help book, went on a retreat, or did a(nother) course.
They know all the spiritual lingo, have done the work on their chakras, and can explain their problems in exquisite psychological detail but their lives don’t feel any more REAL.
This article is about why this happens:
It’s not because growth is bad, not because reflection is useless, and definitely not because people shouldn’t want to improve their lives but it’s because much of what passes for “self-help” today doesn’t actually help people grow real.
Instead, it reinforces shame-driven patterns of ego instead of dissolving them and promises wholeness through control, completion, and self-obsession, which are precisely the things that keep us fragmented and stuck.
This is why the more seriously people chase the self-help dream, the more miserable they often become.
Let’s dig a little deeper:
“Self-Help” Is Making You Miserable: What We Cover in This Article
- Self-Help Often Encourages You to Be Unreal Instead of Real…Here’s Why
- Why People Get Pulled Into Self-Help in the First Place
- The Core Flaw at the Heart of Self-Help Philosophy
- Ego vs Realness
- How Self-Help Makes People Miserable (In Practice)
- What Growing Real Actually Looks Like
- Practical Ways to Step Out of the Self-Help Trap
- “Self-Help” Is Making You Miserable: The Final Word
Why People Get Pulled Into Self-Help in the First Place
Most people don’t get into self-help because life is going brilliantly but because something hurts:
They want more money because they feel unsafe or inadequate; they want success because they want proof that they matter; they want status because they hope it will silence the quiet shame that tells them they’re not ‘enough’.
On the surface, all of these desires look pretty practical – sensible, even because who doesn’t want financial freedom, recognition, or a sense of achievement in the modern world?
The problem is that underneath all of these desires what’s usually driving them isn’t growth but resistance.
Resistance of the shame, uncertainty, and the uncomfortable truth of being human in a world we can’t fully control.
Ironically, chasing these things for their own sake instead of within the context of a wider and more real purpose often only amplifies the emotional and mental problems people are trying to escape:
This is why “self-help” often leads people down the garden path to a world where the ego strengthens its grip over people, comparison intensifies, and the nervous system ends up being locked in fight-or-flight mode as life starts to feel like a performance that can never quite be perfected.
This is where most self-help starts to take a dark turn:
Instead of helping people move towards wholeness, it encourages them to double down on all of the things inside themselves that make them fragmented – endlessly ‘fixing’, optimising, and improving a self that was never actually broken in the first place (because what’s real is always real).
The Core Flaw at the Heart of Self-Help Philosophy
At its core, mainstream self-help is built on a set of assumptions that sound empowering but are fundamentally unreal and just lead to people taking themselves out of reality instead of being able to work with it (which is the only thing that ‘works’ when it comes to improving our lives).
The first is the idea that we can be in total control of our lives:
This is the flawed belief that if you press the right buttons, apply the right techniques, and maintain the right mindset, then life will finally line up completely and you won’t have any more problems ever again:
You’ll feel complete, settled, and finished – like you’ve finally reached the end of a very long to-do list with a one-word title: “Me”.
The second flawed self-help assumption is that we can know everything and control everything:
This leads to you believing that if something doesn’t work out, it must mean you missed something, believed the ‘wrong’ thing, or failed to optimise properly.
It also means that if you feel ‘bad’ at any time, then it’s just another sign you’ve messed up somewhere along the line.
These ideas are all based on the shame-driven assumption that we can somehow reach a state of being omniscient, omnipotent beings – tiny gods that can force reality to conform to our (ego’s) preferences.
When reality doesn’t cooperate (which it inevitably won’t at some stage because we can’t know and control everything), the conclusion is almost always the same: something must be wrong with me.
This conclusion isn’t actual truth, though – it’s just an extension of our underlying SHAME.
This is unfortunate because shame is the engine that keeps the entire self-help machine running.
Ego vs Realness
The ego thrives on control, comparison, and self-reference projected out into the world:
It wants certainty in an uncertain world, guarantees in a reality that offers none, and wants to believe that if it just tries hard enough, it can finally outrun its own vulnerability.
(Spoiler: it can’t).
Realness, on the other hand, begins with humility:
It recognises that we don’t always get what we want, that we can’t control everything, and that life is something that we can participate in even if we can’t program it completely.
It also recognises that growth doesn’t come from forcing reality to bend to our will but from learning how to grow with reality as it is.
Self-help largely appeals to the ego because it promises mastery without surrender and wholeness without acceptance:
It says, “Become better and then you’ll finally be acceptable” rather than, “Grow real and see what unfolds”.
This difference matters way more than most people realise if you want to stand any chance of living your actual, real life.
How Self-Help Makes People Miserable (In Practice)
1. It Reinforces Shame Instead of Dissolving It
A huge amount of self-help externalises responsibility in a way that sounds empowering but actually isn’t at all:
If you don’t have the life you want, you must have the ‘wrong’ mindset.
If you’re struggling emotionally, you must not be thinking ‘positively’ enough.
If you’re anxious, stuck, or exhausted, you probably need to optimise harder.
On the surface, this looks like accountability but – beneath the surface – it quietly deepens and reinforces the shame that keeps people lost to the ego in the first place.
The end result of all this is that instead of meeting themselves with honesty and compassion, people learn to monitor and judge themselves constantly so that every ‘bad’ feeling becomes a personal failure and every setback becomes evidence that they’re not doing growth ‘properly’.
Real growth doesn’t happen through self-surveillance but through awareness and acceptance that leads to real action – seeing what’s actually there without immediately trying to ‘fix’, suppress, or transcend it so that you can take real action that leads you into deeper wholeness.
The bottom line is that shame dissolves when it’s met with truth – not when it’s dressed up as motivation and the same old patterns repeated over and over again.
2. It Treats Success, Money, and Status as Ultimates
There’s nothing wrong with money, success, or recognition – they’re useful, can be meaningful if seen with perspective, and can even be a source of joy if handled in a real way.
Unfortunately, problems start to arise when they’re treated as ends in themselves rather than the by-products of becoming more real.
When people believe these things will finally make them whole, they load them with unrealistic expectations because the truth is that no amount of money, success, recognition or anything else can resolve a fragmented relationship with oneself.
When these things are pursued without a deeper orientation towards wholeness, they tend to magnify inner conflict rather than resolve it which just means that external gains increase while the internal ground remains unstable because it’s always unreal.
When it comes to your own realness, success is something you use to become even more real, not something you worship for the sake of itself.
3. It Encourages Obsession With the Self
As the name suggests, a lot of “self-help” encourages people to focus almost exclusively on themselves – their goals, their trauma, their mindset, their productivity, and their healing journey.
This may feel introspective but over time – especially without taking real action – it becomes isolating because life isn’t a solo project and we’re not just little self-contained units floating around reality.
What we actually are is interdependent, relational beings whose sense of meaning emerges through participation and contribution.
The truth is uncomfortable for the ego but liberating for who we are when we’re being realest with ourselves and life:
The most effective way out of self-obsession and back into realness is service.
Growing real means integrating the Shadow, reclaiming disowned parts of ourselves, and then giving what we find in the Shadow Territory – creativity, insight, presence, care – back to life.
Focusing on what we can give rather than what we can get like this is not moralistic – it’s practical and how human beings actually thrive.
A self that only consumes will always feel empty because it will always be ‘stuck’ in the Void.
4. It Pushes Action Without Awareness and Acceptance
Self-help is obsessed with action for the sake of taking action (usually as a distraction because self-help acolytes have become Human Doings instead of Human Beings).
The truth, though, is that action that isn’t grounded in awareness and acceptance doesn’t liberate or align us with reality but just reinforces the same ego-driven patterns that created the problem in the first place.
Without awareness, people don’t see why they’re doing what they’re doing; without acceptance, they’re still fighting themselves at every step.
(This is why my coaching containers are always built around Awareness, Acceptance, and Action).
When we don’t do the ‘inner work’ first then the action we take just becomes another attempt to escape shame rather than a natural expression of wholeness. It looks productive but feels hollow because even though we’re so ‘busy’ we’re still disconnected from our real core.
Real action emerges after awareness and acceptance, not before – otherwise, it’s just ego in motion.
What Growing Real Actually Looks Like
Growing real is not about ‘fixing’ yourself into worthiness but about recognising that worthiness was never the issue in the first place:
It begins with awareness: seeing your patterns, defences, and motivations clearly, without trying to spin them into something more palatable.
Then it deepens through acceptance: allowing what is there to be there, including the parts you were taught to exile like your anger, fear, grief, desire, and vulnerability as well as all of the ‘good’ things about yourself the world taught you deny like your passion, creativity, capacity to trust, and the qualities and skills that make you really ‘You’.
Only then does it move into real action that’s aligned, grounded, and responsive to life rather than reactive to shame.
This process doesn’t promise certainty or completion but it always offers something better:
Participation, meaning, and a sense of being at home in yourself and the world instead of being lost within yourself.
If you’re ready to start growing real and moving towards wholeness then read my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace.
Practical Ways to Step Out of the Self-Help Trap
- Question your motives: Ask yourself honestly: “Am I trying to grow or am I trying to escape feeling not being enough?”
- Shift from control to cooperation: Life isn’t something to dominate but something to relate to. Pay attention to where you’re forcing instead of listening.
- Reframe success as service: How does what you’re building benefit the world beyond your ego? If it doesn’t, the emptiness will eventually catch up with you and you’ll end up being miserable.
- Prioritise awareness over optimisation: Seeing clearly is way more transformative than doing more.
- Let go of the fantasy of completion: You don’t arrive at life in a state of disconnection from it – you get to participate in it until the day you die.
“Self-Help” Is Making You Miserable: The Final Word
Self-help often leads to misery because it keeps people trapped in an illusory state of separation where they end up being endlessly focused on themselves, endlessly trying to perfect an image, and endlessly fighting reality.
Growing real moves in the opposite direction:
It dissolves shame instead of exploiting it.
It values wholeness over performance.
It replaces self-obsession with service.
It recognises that the deepest fulfilment doesn’t come from getting more but from becoming more real and giving what we find back to life.
When we stop trying to ‘fix’ ourselves into worthiness and start growing into wholeness, life stops feeling like a problem to solve and starts feeling like something we can actually belong to and that’s where real freedom begins.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If you’re ready to start growing real instead of staying stuck on the hamster wheel of ‘self-help’ then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you start moving in a real way.
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