Take This Advice and Shelve It

Moreover, the experts aren't created equal. One marital expert I consulted has a degree in physiology; many others (let's be charitable now!) are self-taught. The worst of them offer a bath where you can stew in your flaws. Sure, it feels nice at first, but there comes a point when that bath becomes dangerous, a swamp of self-loathing. There's a point at which focusing on your flaws becomes unhealthy. The few good experts I encountered on my quest stood out because they balanced the focus on the self with a focus on how that self fits into the larger world.

But even the best experts, in many ways, troubled me. To deal with stressful situations -- my personal bugaboo was my husband's job security -- I was advised variously to smile, to show myself that this had nothing to do with me, to take deep calming breaths and to let my consciousness take a break. We all have stressors, the experts say. The only thing I could do was Claim Personal Responsibility for my reaction to them. It's meant to be empowering.

This might sound familiar to those of you with school-age children. It's something you tell a person who is more or less powerless.

What self-help really does is provide a step-by-step distraction, a nice set of blinders to help readers maintain the illusion that they're masters of their own destinies. Really, that's all self-help can do. But when your eyes are focused on you, your flaws and the path toward some measure of perfection, it's easy to avoid looking at those quality-of-life issues that an individual can't change alone.

A person can't just say that she wants job security and work it out by herself. A stable, satisfying romantic relationship depends on both parties. Every day, millions of people with dependents -- both young ones and old ones -- struggle to reinvent the wheel of caregiving. For those without health insurance, all it takes is one piece of bad luck to deep-six quality of life. It's a slippery slope from Claiming Personal Responsibility to Every Man for Himself.

A few months after I finally closed the last self-help book, my husband was at last able to trade his layoff-happy employer for a less well-paid, but more stable, job. It was the single event that most improved our quality of life, and it had very little to do with claiming personal responsibility.

But very much to do with . . . you guessed it. Luck.

jennifer.niesslein@brainchildmag.com

Jennifer Niesslein is the author of "Practically Perfect in Every Way: My Misadventures Through the World of Self-Help -- and Back."