Guest Post At Mindful Construct: “3 Things The Personal Development Critics Got Wrong”
I've published a guest post at Melissa Karnaze's blog Mindful Construct called "3 Things The Personal Development Critics Got Wrong." It mainly deals with critics' arguments against personal development's ethic of taking responsibility for your circumstances, including the claims that this ethic encourages selfishness and self-blame.
I think this article will be a useful summary for people who have recently discovered my work at this blog. I think you'll also appreciate Melissa's articles, which take an approach to personal development that's rooted in cognitive science and psychology. Enjoy!
Personal Growth’s “Victim Culture,” Part 2: Support Groups and Selfishness
In this series, I've been responding to the common criticism that personal development encourages people to see themselves as victims, and discourages them from taking responsibility for their problems.
Recovery groups -- for example, Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) -- are a frequent target of anti-personal growth authors. The critics have many concerns about these groups, as we'll see, but a common complaint is that, by encouraging members to share about their personal suffering, they trivialize the suffering of genuinely needy people.
The "Trivialization" Argument
The argument goes like this: recovery groups tend to serve as a forum for people to talk about challenges they're facing, or their past hurts. Giving people a place to talk about their emotional issues implies that those issues are really important -- that the suffering these people are enduring is significant. If I'm part of a support group, for instance, and the group gives me time to "check in" about marital troubles I'm having, that necessarily implies that my marital issues are important enough to merit the group's attention.
However, even if I'm having conflicts with my wife, there are clearly people in the world who are suffering worse than me -- people with terminal illnesses, living in war-torn countries, and so on. By treating my suffering as if it deeply matters, my group may encourage me to see these people's suffering and mine as equivalent. And if I start to see the world that way, I may become less interested in helping genuinely unfortunate individuals.
Wendy Kaminer, in I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional, seems very concerned about this possibility: "Recovery gives people permission always to put themselves first, partly because it doesn't give them a sense of perspective on their complaints," she writes. "The failure to acknowledge that there are hierarchies of human suffering is what makes recovery and other personal development fashions 'selfist' and narcissistic."
What About The Facts?
Like many arguments against personal growth, this argument is usually presented as if it were common sense. Kaminer, for example, doesn't offer evidence that people in recovery groups, on average, give less to charity, express less concern for people in third-world countries, or do anything else suggesting a "selfist" mentality -- except to say that, in her own visits to recovery groups, she didn't hear a member remark that another person's suffering was worse than their own.
What's more, there's psychological evidence suggesting that people who join support groups actually tend to become more generous as a result. For instance, a New Zealand study of a support group for chronic pain sufferers found that participants in the group became more inclined to help others. Similarly, a study in Communication Quarterly reported that people in an HIV/AIDS support group "experience[d] increased self-esteem associated with helping others."
Granted, no two support groups are the same, so this research doesn't prove that the recovery movement in general creates more compassionate people. It does, however, cast doubt on Kaminer's claim that support groups foster selfishness in their members. What's more, these studies make intuitive sense -- oriented as they are toward mutual support and caregiving, it seems natural that recovery groups would help members come to understand the joys of serving others.
How About The Philosophical Navel-Gazing?
On a philosophical level, we can begin to see the oddness of Kaminer's argument if we look at the following example.
Suppose you and I were close friends, and I griped to you about marital conflicts I was having. I don't think you'd somehow conclude, with righteous indignation, that I must be equating my relationship troubles with the plight of, say, paraplegics. Nor would an outside observer conclude that, because you allowed me to vent about my problems, you must be encouraging me to see my marriage and things like paraplegia as morally equivalent, and thereby turning me into a self-centered person.
In other words, no one would morally condemn the kind of conversation Kaminer is complaining about if it took place outside a support group. There's no reason to make it wrong simply because it occurs in an AA meeting or a similar context.
But at a deeper level, do we really need to believe in what Kaminer calls a "hierarchy of human suffering" to be interested in helping others? We'll explore that question in my next post.
Self-Help and Selfishness, Part 2: Cultivating Compassion
We've been talking about the argument, sometimes made by critics of personal growth, that self-development practices are basically selfish. This criticism goes that, when we "work on ourselves" -- whether by taking workshops, meditating, or something else -- we only benefit ourselves, and the time we spend doing those practices could be better used serving others' needs.
As I noted earlier, there's much research in psychology showing that, the happier we feel, the more generous we're likely to be toward others. This is why, I suggested, personal growth practices that help us develop peace and happiness benefit more than just the immediate "user."
I can imagine a critic responding: "but why do all these things to 'develop' compassion? Why not just go out and be compassionate by giving your time and money to those who need it?" As Barbara Ehrenreich writes in her important book Bright-Sided, "why not reach out to others in love and solidarity or peer into the natural world for some glimmer of understanding?"
Do Motives Matter?
It seems that, to some personal development critics, being compassionate, kind or generous is simply a matter of taking the right actions. If you give your time, energy or money to someone, and receive nothing material in exchange, you qualify as a compassionate person.
From this perspective, it doesn't matter whether you actually feel a sense of love or kindness toward the person you're serving. Perhaps, for instance, you hope to tell others how generous you've been and receive praise. As long as your actions help someone else, by definition, you're being compassionate.
On the surface, this makes sense. If I give money to a foundation that helps children with a serious disease, for instance, those children will benefit even if I don't really care about them. Even if I only want to brag about how giving I am to my friends, or get mentioned as a "platinum-level donor" on the charity's website, I still serve those children with my contribution.
False Compassion Creates Suffering
However, this example becomes more troubling when we look at what I'm getting out of my donation. I'm giving to the charity because I want recognition from others. But what if I don't get the kind of recognition I want? What if my friends don't praise me for my generosity, or at least don't praise me as much as I want?
The answer, I suspect, is that I'll feel resentful. I'll see my friends as insensitive and uncaring, and retaliate against them in overt or covert ways. So, by helping someone out of a desire for recognition, I actually set myself and others up for suffering.
This problem becomes clearer when we look at acts of false compassion within a family. In a common scenario, a parent gives a lot of time and energy to their child, in the secret hope that the child will please the parent in return.
If the child doesn't show the kind of appreciation the parent wants, the parent feels resentful, and strikes back at the child through abuse or neglect. In other words, when a parent serves their child out of a desire for recognition, rather than genuine love, both parent and child are likely in for suffering.
Compassion as a Way of Being
When we help others out of actual feelings of kindness, rather than a desire to prove that we're "good," we don't create this kind of suffering for ourselves and others. If our actions are solely motivated by a desire to help, it doesn't matter whether the other person falls over themselves to thank us, and we won't resent them if they don't.
This is why I think personal growth practices that help us develop genuine compassion for others, like Buddhist metta meditation, are so important. Metta may be the most obvious example, because it involves explicitly wishing all beings well, but many other self-development methods help us cultivate kindness in subtler ways.
The Promise of Psychotherapy
Psychotherapy is a great, and frequently misunderstood, example. Critics often talk about therapy as if it's merely a self-indulgent exercise in griping about the past (an issue I'll deal with at length later). I think this ignores many key goals of therapy -- the most important one being, for our purposes, to meet needs that went unrecognized in a client's early childhood.
As I touched on earlier, psychologists often observe that, when a parent's early needs for love and recognition were unmet, they unconsciously seek to meet those needs in their relationship with their children. In other words, the parent expects the child to give them the affection and appreciation they never got when they were little. When the child doesn't meet these needs, the parent gets angry and withdraws their love. (There's an illuminating discussion of this in Kathleen Faller's Social Work with Abused and Neglected Children.)
As long as the parent's childhood needs are unmet, we might say, the parent will have difficulty experiencing real love and compassion for their children. However, a skilled therapist can help the parent meet those early needs outside the family structure. When the parent no longer seeks validation from their children, genuine love becomes possible.
Once we can see why actually feeling compassion -- not just looking compassionate -- is important, we understand why "working on ourselves," and our own peace and happiness, can actually be a gift to the world.
Other Posts In This Series:
E-Book: Why Growth Is Good
Most Popular Posts
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Thoughts on the Mankind Project Lawsuit
Personal Development Politics, Part 2: The Elections and Self-Responsibility
Regulating Self-Help, Part 2: What Is a Benefit?
Rainbow Right-Wingers, and Other Myths About Personal Development Politics
Authenticity Answers, Part 1: How Deep Is Your Want?
