How My Rant Against "How To Know a Person" Led Me to Better Know Myself

Self-help books: Love them or hate them?

Photo by Shiromani Kant on Unsplash

You’re on Substack browsing lists of “all the books I read in 2024” and spot a title that stirs something inside you. For me, it was David Brooks’ How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.” I thought, I’d like to learn that art and skimmed the first couple chapters online in bed that morning. Satisfied the book would guide me toward more productive, meaningful conversations, I promptly ordered a copy, hoping it would soon arrive.

The book seemed to hold so much promise. I want to have deep, meaningful conversations! I want to understand people and have people understand me! Most urgently, I want to be “seen” by my parents and appreciate them for who they are in all their complexities. I imagined reading Brooks’ advice and applying it in my relationship with them. I imagined gifting them the book saying, “read this, then let’s talk.” I imagined the book providing us necessary tools to better understand one another. I imagined wrong.

I’ve been writing this post off and on for months, not satisfied with the content or tone. It was to be an accessible critical discourse analysis of the book from a critical disability studies perspective. I wanted to bring critical interpretative analysis into my creative writing to introduce readers (and writers) to the widespread use of disability metaphors in writing and how they perpetuate the oppression, discrimination and exclusion of disabled people. I didn’t stop there. I found much to critique about the book, from Brooks’ over-reliance on metaphor, to ignoring his own advice and/or not understanding how to apply all the theories he explains. He comes across to me as an unreliable, hypocritical and somewhat unaware source.

Taking other people’s perspectives is a key point of the book, yet his examples and writing do not exemplify what it means to truly appreciate and consider how another person views the world differently from you. The book is framed by his own privileged perspective, which he only partially acknowledges, making his writing at odds with many of the ideas he presents. In short, How To Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen, should include the caveat, “if you are a male, white, neurotypical, non-disabled person interested in deeply knowing other male, white, neurotypical, non-disabled people with the author’s worldview.”

I wrote a 6000-plus word post filled with quotations from the book and discussion of my findings. It read like a mashup of a personal essay and a messy academic paper — a rant with no clear main point. Something was missing.

One of my criticisms of How to Know a Person, is that Brooks turns conversational partners into psychological subjects —individual case studies to be categorized according to various psychological theories. He says that once categorized — once we know a person’s personality or conversation style — we can adapt how we converse with that person. The reliance on such categorization is hypocritical because he doesn’t address how this fits with another of his main points, which is to not categorize people, but appreciate and understand them as individuals.

Based on my own personal experience and research in critical reflection and dialogue, a meaningful conversation is not based on psychological manipulation, but one during which people connect openly and honestly, when differing perspectives can be shared and each person comes away knowing more about the other and perhaps more importantly, more about themselves. Missing completely from Brooks’ book is the idea that getting to know other perspectives allows you to better understand how your own perspectives have been shaped. Also missing, is how power dynamics between people, and the navigation of those dynamics, influence how open and honest each person can be with one another. He just assumes anyone can start prying into another person’s life through psychologically-informed questioning, without asking himself how he came to make this assumption — he is a journalist after all.

Self-help books: Love them or hate them?

Thanks to a brief discussion of self-help books with a small group of women participating in a trauma-informed rendition of The Artist’s Way, facilitated by Clare Egan recently, I uncovered the missing link in my messy post. I had thought I was being open and honest by beginning with some family history to explain where my negative ideas about self-help books originated. However, I did not go any deeper to explore how those experiences shaped my own assumptions about self-help books and people who read them. I had not considered the various ways people might approach these books of self-betterment. I was not being as open and honest about myself as I wanted Brooks to be about himself in his book; I was not critically reflecting on my own perspectives enough.

I’ve therefore ditched the long critical interpretive analysis to offer something more of myself instead (still long though!). It’s a frightening thing to do, turning a critical lens on myself and writing about it. I begin by introducing the childhood context that shaped Self-Help Skeptic, while Critical Disability Studies Scholar and Interpretive Sociologist help me explore both problematic aspects of How to Know a Person, and my own reactions to it.

Introducing my self-help skeptic

I’m Ok, You’re Ok (1969), How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), Jonathon Livingston Seagull (1970), everything by Wayne Dyer. These are a few of my parents’ self-help books I recall packing and unpacking over our many moves in the 70s and 80s. After I’d left home, new ones like The Wealthy Barber (1989), The Chicken Soup series (1993), Rich Dad, Poor Dad (1997) and many others were added to my parents’ shelves. These books supplemented, at least in our house and my mind, my parents’ involvement in multi-level marketing ventures. I associated both with wanting more and not getting it.

Like many people, Mom and Dad were susceptible to get rich quick schemes, spending money on lottery tickets and signing up for the latest pyramid scheme. For a few years they were convinced they’d make boatloads of money as Amway distributors. As a kid, I was convinced too, or at least hopeful. If they just sold more stuff, and persuaded other people to get on board to sell more stuff, we’d be rich! I recall a couple plaques on the wall, small rewards for targets met thanks to their steady customers – mostly themselves and their parents.

We never got the big awards and we never got rich. Some months we could splurge on a trip to the ice cream parlour or Canada’s Wonderland. Other months, we could barely afford rent, shoes that fit, and well-balanced meals. Extra cash earned went back into buying more products and attending conferences. We were brainwashed into a capitalist cult built to feed those at the top of the pyramid.

After Amway, there were other sketchy business ventures. Dad even convinced me and my new husband, Ian, to invest in one. We’d get our $1000 back tenfold! This was the best venture ever! After listening to him and his business partner take us through the shpiel, I was skeptical but felt pressured to support him and contribute, even though I could have used that money to help pay off my student loans. It’s no surprise our thousand dollars (Ian’s money really, since he worked and saved while I was in grad school) was never returned. And then there was Matol, a black, thick, foul tasting liquid that was supposed to cure all ills and lead to a long life.

No matter how many self-help books my parents read, how much time and money they put into their ventures, or how optimistic they remained, we stayed poor. Money we didn’t have was squandered away, filling the pockets of those at the top while we ate bologna or kraft singles with mustard on white bread and bruised Macintosh apples every day for lunch.

It wasn’t all pyramid schemes. My parents also sunk money into Mom’s revolving interests, sometimes beauty-focused (e.g., Colour Me Beautiful, mobile pedicures), but more often related to New Age health and spirituality (e.g., reflexology, ear candling, spirituality workshops) to name a few. She once convinced me to join a meditation workshop she was leading when I lived with them during first year university. I remember sitting in a large circle in the basement with half a dozen women, fidgeting in my seat, wanting to believe in this practice but feeling very out of place. This was long before I realized my brain wasn’t wired to slow down.

I thought there was something morally wrong with me, unable to reach a higher level of consciousness like everyone else. Mom claimed to float out of her body and look down on everyone and I couldn’t even empty my mind for 10 seconds. I was a failure. I remember spending hours that year trying to see auras, becoming bored and frustrated when I couldn’t see anything except the blur that comes with staring too hard.

The promise of a better, healthier life that never came (until I left my parents’ home), and my difficulty connecting to Mom’s spiritual practices, made me a cynic of anything “New Age” or anyone who claims to have answers to any particular problem. With any self-help type book, as soon as I get a whiff of the sentiment, “this will solve all your problems,” I slam that book shut as if a monster were trying to break out. I knew it was all bullshit and you couldn’t convince me otherwise. It was either that, or allow feelings of failure to take over since it was impossible and impractical to incorporate all the advice into one’s daily life — it was too much information and too many rules to follow and my brain was already busy and full.

And yet…I fell for the promise of Brooks’ book

With How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen, I couldn’t perceive how it fit into this self-help category until I was a few chapters in. Since I was so caught up in thinking the book would help me solve my parental relationship problems, I eagerly read and read and read, thinking only on a surface level, until repeated inconsistencies and ableist wording had me slow down to think more deeply about what I was reading. I bounced quickly from one extreme (this is so great!) to the other (this is so wrong!). I became disappointed both in the book — it would not be the solution to my communication problems with my parents, and in myself — for being so gullible as to think it could help me solve those problems.

I don’t doubt David Brooks’ good intentions. I believe he wants to do good in the world and is committed to becoming a better person, an “Illuminator.” However, I’m not surprised that a book written by a white, non-disabled man about getting to know other people’s perspectives, fell short for me as a woman. He tries to take other viewpoints, but in doing so, often continues to centre his own. Critical Disability Studies Scholar tends to favour writing by people on the margins themselves, not those in societal positions of power. I wish I had thought of this before purchasing the book.

A main issue with this and other self-help books, is advice presented as closed directives. Instead of including caveats like, if this suits your personality and situation, or if you feel safe to do so, or if the person you’re talking to seems open to questioning, or here are some ideas that may or may not be appropriate in every situation for every person, Brooks presents his advice as directives: understand this, and do and say this and this and this if you want to deepen your relationships. I find the assumption that his advice should apply to everyone as unquestionably the “right” way to interact to be problematic. Some of the questions he suggests seem paternalistic and judgmental, although he’d attribute my feelings to how closed off we’ve become as a society, without fully examining the societal structures that might have made it so.

I think there’s a time and place to probe someone for personal information that may involve delving into past trauma, and that’s not over dinner with colleagues. As soon as I read advice that feels ethically wrong to me, especially if presented with an absolutist framing, my bullshit radar goes off and I start to question and critically interpret everything. I think I also just don’t like to be told what to do!

Ironically, I’m in the middle of The Artist’s Way: A Course in Discovering and Recovering Your Creative Self, Julie Cameron’s self-help book for artists. Facilitated through a lens of trauma by the wonderful Clare Egan, who encourages participants to critically reflect on the contents, I thought I’d give it a shot. Without this permission to take what is meaningful, leave what is not, and call out what is harmful, I don’t think I would have made it all the way to Week 8. Cameron presents a course in creativity, yet like Brooks (even more than Brooks) her advice is prescriptive and rooted in her own privileged perspective. She tells people what they need to do, also relying on many problematic disability metaphors, without any consideration that not everyone will experience the creative world as she does. Truth be told, I’m not really following the program. I do morning pages most days, but not much else besides reading each chapter, searching for some useful nuggets amidst much cringing, but that is another story.

The further along How to Know a Person I read, the more problems I encountered. However, instead of letting Critical Disability Studies Scholar and Interpretive Sociologist take over, I’m going to spend some time here with Self-Help Skeptic. I want to better understand how she might be preventing me from understanding different perspectives and what she might teach me about myself, because I believe the more open and honest you are with yourself, the more open and honest you can be in conversation with others.

From, ‘Don’t tell me what to do,’ to ‘I’ll do what feels right to me’

I know where my dislike of self-help books comes from, but I hadn’t thought about how my reaction is rooted in difficult childhood experiences that continue to influence me now. I hadn’t thought about how my visceral reactions of anger, annoyance, rebellion, and being quick to judge and discount anything the author writes, closes me off to other perspectives, including those of my parents.

Don’t tell me what To do

I was a tightly wound child who grew into a tightly wound adult. I never forged my parents’ signatures, lied or spoke back to adults, and rarely stated my displeasure with anything. I did all my homework, handed assignments in on time, and was secretly envious of the teacher’s pet but was too quiet to become one myself. I was the kid who would be home by curfew, loathed pranks, kept elbows off the table. The party pooper, the goody two shoes, little Miss (trying to be) Perfect.

I followed rules because that was the safest thing to do to gain and maintain adult approval. I followed rules out of fear of being abandoned, unloved, or mocked if I wasn’t good enough. And I followed rules so as not to cause harm to other people. But my rule following and fear of doing wrong caused me harm in childhood.

I know now rules are social constructs created to keep us in our places as responsible, productive citizens according to where we fit within our society’s power hierarchy. Rules apply unevenly across this hierarchy, created by those in power to maintain their power. Some people can afford to break the rules, whereas others cannot. For example, Trump is a known tax-avoider and rapist, yet is president of the United States. George Floyd was killed by law-enforcers over a counterfeit $20 bill. Rules are often not equitable and many rules should be questioned. This is the mindset I bring to reading self-help books, especially those written by people who assume they’re writing for everyone. This critical questioning mindset is a direct reaction to following rules too closely when younger, rules that didn’t allow me to discover how I thought and felt because I was so busy doing what I thought was right to be accepted and loved.

I no longer follow rules and advice that contradict what my own body and mind tell me is right, but it’s not always easy.

Learning to trust myself

When I tried to read my parents books as a child or young adult, I’d become overwhelmed by information and my brain would shut down. The books contained too many suggestions that I couldn’t remember to follow. When I inevitably stopped part way through, giving up on strategies that were supposed to make me a better person, I’d feel like a failure, like when I couldn’t meditate or visualize auras. I’d wonder why I couldn’t take in the advice or had no willpower to implement it.

Reading self-help books pulled me in all different directions as I grappled with my own ideas versus those presented to me. I think I put down the books as a strategy to protect myself from the uncomfortableness of being presented with rules I couldn’t follow. I didn’t yet know that if something I read didn’t feel right, I could spend time exploring what didn’t feel right and how I might learn something of the world and myself from those feelings. I didn’t yet know I need not follow advice that went against my values, because I didn’t yet know my own values or how to trust my instincts. When you experience childhood trauma and grow up unsure about yourself, thinking your ideas are worthless and others know more than you, you don’t trust the worth of your feelings when something doesn’t seem right. And when you don’t know and trust yourself, you end up feeling like a failure when you can’t take someone else’s questionable advice.

I now follow my own instincts, knowing that only I can decide what feels safe and moral to me.

From living to please to living to learn

I recognize now that when I bristle at advice contrary to my own values, it’s because Insecure Child has been poked and Protective Parent tries to calms her. Insecure Child still feels unworthy and wants to make everyone happy, but she’s also upset at my parents for spending so much time and money on multi-level marketing and unnecessary items instead of making better financial choices. Protective Parent thinks she needs to shield me from dangerous thoughts that threaten my “good girl” persona by shutting the book and forgetting about it, because if I stop reading, my identity will stay safe and I won’t be swayed or feel awful about not agreeing with someone telling me how to feel, behave, or converse.

Except now I have tools that allow me to question, to apply discourse analysis, to interpret the text within its particular context. These tools allow me to pinpoint what it is I disagree with and why. When I can separate Insecure Child’s feelings from the text itself, I become more open to learn from the text – perhaps a different way of thinking I may or may not agree with but can learn something from either way. I want to always be curious, to continue becoming in all the different ways I don’t yet know.

I’m learning that I can form my own opinions without fear of being “wrong,” because when everyone has different opinions, there is no wrong, just different ways of understanding. I know now that my way of understanding matters just as much as anyone else’s.

What about injustice?

Sometimes the need to shut the book isn’t about feeling overwhelmed with too much to take in and remember. Sometimes the content itself provokes reactions of anger, annoyance, and disappointment. With How to Know a Person, it bothered me that Brooks could write a best-selling book because he has a platform that makes people think he's an expert on the topic when he’s not. You could argue that no one is an expert on conversation because no two conversations are the same, and since every conversation is different, you can’t dictate (to the specificity he does) how two people should converse to know each other better.

I’d like to learn to do critical analysis without getting all riled up. Some emotion is good, it’s what stirs motivation to write about injustice. But I’d like to learn to accept that injustice is part of the world. I can’t change that a white, non-disabled man who is a well-known journalist has an easier time obtaining a perceived ‘expert’ status and sell more books than, say, a relatively unknown black women or gay man, or autistic queer woman who everyone loves conversing with and who has gained much relationship wisdom over the years, but who has no publication background and doesn’t fit societal ideals as ‘expert’.

What I can do, is question content that excludes groups of people, such as disabled people, neurodivergent people, 2SLGBTQI+ people, Indigenous peoples, and persons of colour to name a few. I can and do buy books written by people of all different backgrounds and experiences and I support authors from socially marginalized groups, not just to support them, but to learn about perspectives which may differ from mine. I can also learn perspectives different from mine by reading books written by white men of course, but many of those perspectives already circulate easily within society — we’re already governed by them. We can learn much about society by which books, written by which authors, become best sellers.

The aggravation and anger that surfaced when reading How to Know a Person, came from knowing this man wants to do better, wrote a book about doing better, yet the book is still exclusionary, ableist, and paternalistic. But maybe he’s open to more communication and dialogue, maybe he hasn’t been challenged enough, maybe the right questions haven’t yet been asked of him to understand that meaningful and equitable conversation doesn’t happen from psychoanalyzing one another as much as it does from turning the questions onto yourself.

Questioning my ideas about self-help books

So, I’ve turned the questions onto myself: What happened in my life to make me shut a self-help book as soon as I don’t like the advice? Self-help books make me feel inadequate, like something is wrong with me. It’s easier to shut the book and blame my reaction on something wrong within the book than to stop and think about why I react that way and others don’t. It’s not really about the books, but about what they represent for me. Before I even start reading, I feel like a child who didn’t feel worth being listened to, always striving to do good, to be better, to get better grades, to choose a career that would support myself, to be overall successful in life as defined by societal expectations. And self-help books remind me of all that is wrong with my relationship with my parents.

In a way, I’ve been judging my parents based on Insecure Child’s thoughts. I’ve been judging them for wanting to better themselves, for searching for meaning in life (and aren’t we all doing this, constantly?), because I couldn’t remove Insecure Child from my thoughts. My parents collected books to make them better sales people, to be self-accepting and happy, to foster relationships, to be better people in various aspects of life. They sought out MLM schemes to try and make more money for their family.

I’ve written before about wanting to be understood by my parents and wishing we could communicate openly with one another. I realize though they likely weren’t taught how to communicate openly or given the safe space to do so as children themselves, so they couldn’t teach their children how to communicate openly either. Reading and learning about how to communicate might not turn into action if you’re carrying around unresolved trauma that has not been fully addressed. Brooks does not address the effect past and present trauma has on communication, nor does he address how nurturing and developing relationships with family members amidst complicated past histories differs from meaningful conversations with someone you are just meeting.

My parents’ intentions were good even if the outcomes didn’t meet my childhood (childish?) desires or idea of “success.” I recognize how I’ve had unrealistic expectations, and how old feelings of resentment over money and time spent on books and workshops and conferences and new business ventures cloud my judgment of them now. Just because I was unhappy doesn’t mean they were unhappy.

It’s time for my adult self to guide and nurture Insecure Child so I can appreciate my parents humanness. They are like every other person (myself included), trying to make their way in the world, trying to make sense of where they are in life and how to make the best of it. And who am I to judge, when I’m 53 years old and only now starting to pay attention and figure out who I’m becoming?

I don’t know how fulfilled my parents are with their lives now, or how fulfilled they were when younger. What I do know is they always presented themselves as an affectionate couple who loved and respected one another deeply. They didn’t fight or argue, at least not in front of us kids, and they provide a role model of a loving relationship (although this also added to us kids never witnessing how people who love each other can have an argument and work through it). I know they tried their best and made decisions they thought were right as parents, just as I did with my own children. How can I fault them for that?

Maybe my parents are like me and don’t even make it past the first chapters. Or maybe they read because they like to learn new things about human nature from various perspectives — maybe they’re not trying to change anything at all, maybe they’re just curious. That should be enough. If I really want to understand what my parents get out of self-help books, I should ask them. And I should really pay attention to what they say so I can get to know them better.

What next?

I’m not sure if I can go back to Brooks’ book, mining for helpful information while ignoring all that I find wrong, but I will try to finish The Artist’s Way, at least my half-hearted first attempt at it, focusing more on what is helpful to me and less on what is problematic. I’d like this attitude to spill over into life, to see the good first, or at least along with the bad, not to ignore injustice, but to not let it take up so much space in my brain. I’d like to leave more space for creativity and delight and more energy to tackle injustice without it sapping me of hope, love, and joy. I’m privileged in being able to not live with injustice affecting my personal life everyday — not everyone can just set thoughts of injustice aside.

I will continue to seek out books that make me think — and all genres of books can make us think — so I can question myself and my experiences in the world. I love a good sentence, paragraph, or essay that sparks the “aha” moment: I’ve never thought about it that way before. I don’t need an author to impose on me a certain way of doing things to improve a specific aspect of my life; I learn the most from authors who present life experiences and understandings in beautiful ways, leaving me to interpret what is meaningful. I’d like to move forward in life knowing that I am enough, that I have within me what I need to live a meaningful life amongst others, that I can decide how other people’s ideas are meaningful to me.

Join the Discussion!

I would love if you would share your experience with self-help books. Your perspective might help me understand the value of them in a new way and I sincerely appreciate your comments. Feel free to consider the below questions, or share whatever you'd like!

Do you search out self-help books to improve aspects of your life? Do you usually finish them, do you get what you want from them? Do they make you feel better or worse about yourself?

What do you do when a book has useful advice interspersed with questionable or possibly harmful advice? If you don’t agree with advice you read, how do you know/decide if you don’t like advice because it goes against your values (i.e., you think it’s morally wrong), or because it presents uncomfortable ideas that challenge your own beliefs, but could possibly be for the better? In other words, how do you stay open to alternate ideas that could help you grow as a person, while staying true to yourself and your core beliefs?

If you think others might like to engage in questioning their relationship with self-help books, please feel free to share this post.

Thank you for taking the time to read my ideas. It means more than you know!

Tracey