“Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future /And time future contained in time past.” T.S. Elliot
Today’s post is about a book and a podcast.
Book
In her book, Fotini – Everything is Memory [ed. Kastaniotis], Marietta Pepelasi weaves elements of fiction and her interpretive texts to portray her heroine’s journey of self-knowledge and empowerment. The author tells us that with Fotini in mind, and some of her own memories from her adult life, she wrote this text as a tribute to a woman who dared “to open the flower of herself to the light of the sun, the light of truth”. The therapist’s interpretive texts are brief, with the aim of facilitating the readers’ understanding of the possible causes of events and contexts. They essentially complement the heroine’s narrative. Perhaps, for those with knowledge of psychology the analysis may seem incomplete, but I think it is the author’s choice to keep it brief, to simply touch on deeper causes and theoritical explanations, leaving room for readers to make their own elaborations, interpretations and correlations between events. Besides, the book consists of only 190 small pages with 32 short chapters with indicative titles such as: The Father, Internal Migration, The Slap, The Bicycle, The Sea, The Wedding, The Tax Office, The Fish, A Student Again, The Short Letter (from Mother)…
The heroine’s story unfolds mainly through her basic relationships with her cold and oppressive mother, her idealized father, her manipulative and competitive husband, and her beloved children. The two, in some ways parallel, narratives take us back in time, tracing the landscape of previous generations, when the seeds that gave birth to or at least contributed to some extent, to today’s events, problems, or impasses were planted. With compassion and understanding for the human condition, the narrative touches on a variet of themes: childhood traumas, love deficits, losses, deprivations, orphanhood and poverty, unfulfilled dreams, gender inequalities, lives built on fears, insecurities and manipulative communication, the reactivation of old traumas from new losses or triggers, the desire for death that hides the intense desire for life, the inevitable mental defenses and attitudes to life, and the tendency to repeat dynamics and choices in an attempt to resolve early traumas, conflicting emotions and internal contradictions.
The narrative highlights issues, such as, how crucial the beginnings of things are and how they can contain the end. There are references to the poet T.S. Eliot who says “In my beginning is my end.” The author refers to the difficulty of giving and receiving love, the obstacles we ourselves put up, the difficult process of psychological maturation, and how without the opportunity for exploration, understanding and acceptance, old burdens, expectations and losses can sometimes lead us down wrong paths. The narrative also focuses on the importance of the ethics and quality of the psychotherapeutic relationship and journey that changes both parties involved, and on the last stage of the therapeutic process.
Pepelasi honors those who find the courage to visit esoteric places or explore memories that most prefer to leave untouched. She writes: “This journey is arduous, and not everyone has the same ability to express in words the inner dramatic experiences and conflicts. The path to self-knowledge has no easy and immediate solutions.”
**Marietta Pepelasi is a counseling psychologist and psychotherapist. She has written poetry and prose, and in 2013 she held her first solo painting exhibition.
Podcast
In the Being Well podcast of July 21st with the title: Is Self-Help Making You Miserable, father and son, Rick and Forrest Hanson, discuss some of the pitfalls of the self-help industry, which they are part of. On the one hand, there’s nothing wrong with trying to help oneself to heal, mature, develop certain skills, understand how the mind works, discern defenses and behaviours that might not facilitate living or be in our best interest, become more agentic or find out more of why and how to stop “shooting ourselves in the foot.” As Forrest puts it there’s nothing wrong in trying to “achieve some kind of reliable happiness and wellbeing in a very chaotic and often unreliable world.” On the other hand, they claim that the field of self-help has several problems, from cults, gurus and snake oil salesmen to rampant misinformation and pseudoscience [the quantum this or that]. Especially, when this comes from scientists or professionals who know better, it can be misleading and can lead people down undesired rabbit holes. Furthermore, beyond this obvious stuff, there are still all kinds of issues and complexities about modern self-help content.
They begin by clarifying that in this episode they will not cover all the problematic aspects of the industry, but mostly focus on two big questions: What are the more implicit issues that tend to show up in self-help broadly? & What’s the right balance in a person’s life between trying to heal, grow, and get better in different ways, versus a relentless craving or seeking where the goalposts are just constantly pushed back for them. They’re always working on something….. so they never really get to actually just feel content?
Guidelines for better or wiser living have always been around and people have always seeked ways to live and relate better. Since antiquity, philosophers, teachers and religious leaders have always posed questions or offered advice and guidelines, some useful, some not. Rick refers to the Stoics, the Tao Te Ching, and religious texts. He notes that there’s a long-standing effort to offer counsel and tools to people so that they can then use themselves to live and co-exist better, and that it’s not specific to modern forms. It’s easy, he says, to see that some of the pitfalls exist out there in the world and they are not unique to the very modern self-help industry. For example, poverty, suffering and illness have in certain contexts been reframed as punishment. Some suggest this is so because we are born in sin and some because of sins committed in past lives. It may be worth considering the economic and political implications of these ideas. Rick comments that these ideas: “advantage people who are in upper caste positions.”
Another point made on the podcast is that “when the individual is the primary unit of analysis, all problems become personal problems. When what we’re looking at is you as a person and our whole framework is what you’re doing to change yourself and improve in different kinds of ways, it all becomes about you.” Spend enough time exploring the self-help world and you soon realize that an irrational de-contextualization and generalization takes place, where the only factors at play seem to be one’s desire to change and their actions, for instance. It is a kind of gaslighting and it can deflect people from reality and instill guilt and a sense of helplessness. Socioeconomic and political factors, individual differences, geography and accommodation circumstances, opportunities for employment, cultural contexts, peers are all disregarded and rendered invisible.
It soon dawns on you that some spaces are actually promoting a harsh, though at times subtle, neo liberal framework, within which human behaviour, relationships, families, societies, causes and problems, are understood. Rick notes that “a sort of underlying neoliberalism in the way that the self-help industry tends to operate. The individual is the primary driver of things. It’s about personal responsibility. It’s kind of this very Western, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. You know, if we just deregulated everything, then it would all be okay because individuals would be able to kind of shine through without being burdened by whatever…… it is interesting the degree to which some, many people in the self-help space are very progressive and I would say social democratic. Still, there are some people in a self-help space, I’ll call it self-improvement space, who do tend to tilt toward laissez-faire capitalism and more of that rugged individualistic frame.”
It was sort of refreshing to hear that things. like say poverty. actually do exist and do impact physical and mental health, level of access to services, education and employment prospects, and possibilities of self-actualization. To quote them: “The greatest mental health issue in the world, certainly in America, is poverty……If you want to improve mental health, raise people out of poverty. …And there are obvious ways to do that.” Rick also refers to factors like the influence of peers. He uses his son’s [Forrest’s] experience in school, as an example of the potential negative impact of other kids, peer groups and school dynamics: “And then think about the causes of that, the way the school system is structured and the way kids are disconnected from ordinary life and put in these kind of places, like schools and malls, where it’s Lord of the Flies a fair amount of the time…”
Another issue they talk about is that it is easy for someone who has access professionally to an effective medicinal or psychological tool to become reductionist, and view it as an effective panacea ignoring individual differences and contexts. Also, they refer to how often in personal growth and mindfulness spaces one can find a competitive and performative atmosphere. Forrest notes: “Status is everywhere and power games are everywhere. And just because people are a little bit more kind of psychologically knowledgeable doesn’t mean that those power games go away.”
Additionally, they discuss the inherent conflicts within the industry like the fact that on the one hand, the goal is to help people solve certain problems, move more towards self-actualization or create more joy and contentment in their lives, and on the other hand, all this is bad for business. Forrest says that “a great way to make money is by finding new things for people to feel insecure about. And the problem with this fundamentally is that the incentive structure changes for people who create content. When the incentive is to keep somebody buying things, contentment is bad for business.”
Throughout the podcast Forrest and Rick highlight the wisdom of a balanced middle path, where our efforts to mature, become aware, heal or reclaim agency is balanced with the knowledge that “we’re situated inside of a broader context. And that’s the piece that often gets lost.” They comment on how the self-help industry tends to propogate the idea that “you’re the problem, do this thing, your problem will get better. If it doesn’t get better, it’s because you didn’t do my thing well enough,” and at the same time they focus on the importance of personal agency: “There’s this huge forwarding and foregrounding of agency……. People’s lives tend to change when they start to take more responsibility for what’s going on in them.”
Finally, Forrest sums up the talk by offering some core principles that people could consider while engaging with self-help material or any process of growth or healing, in order to avoid the various pitfalls, and to be more discerning, selective and agentic about the whole process. He concludes that the recent huge mainstreaming of psychology and self-improvement content has introduced useful information into our lives: about how to raise children in healthier ways, about attachment theory, about the impact of our past on our current wellbeing and the need to integrate past experience and aspects of ourselves, and has helped us understand ourselves and our relationship dynamics, which is all positive, but not without its problems.
You can read more on this topic in the third part of an older post (4-6-2023) in which I included a presentation of the book, Manufacturing Happy Citizens: How the Science and Industry of Happiness Control Our Lives by Edgar Cabanas and Eva Illouz, at: http://www.trauma-art-alexandritonya.com/?p=10445&lang=en