The personal growth movement, which often recommends therapy, aims to build people up so they are bigger, better and stronger than they were before.
In essence, that movement works on the premise that we are deficient and lack in many ways without intervention. It is focused on “improvement”. Thus, we aren’t good enough as we are.
On one level, that feels right. But on another level, that can be a hindrance.
Inherent in the personal growth movement is the tacit view that we are faulty, but through discipline and focus, and in developing ourselves in the areas we are “weak,” we can overcome challenges to live more happily and fruitfully than before.
Discipline and effort are certainly crucial to getting free from suffering. There’s also certainly nothing “wrong” with become more skilled, improving in an area where we lack prowess, or seeking advice and role models for how to achieve things we otherwise don’t know how to do.
But there is nothing in that personal growth model that teaches acceptance of ourselves or how things actually are.
The standard model of psychology that has risen to prominence in the West and become the endorsed practice for a medical-style approach to treating mental illness – labelling struggles, for instance, as an “illness” we can recover from – is similar.
Conventional psychology ironically does little to address the client’s deep inner experience. Instead, it offers pathways to developing stronger coping mechanisms and strategies in the face of life’s challenges. A sceptic might say psychology more often than not provides clients with psychic first aid so they can get back on the carousel of life and continue to function as good little workers, consumers, parents or whatever.
Personal growth similarly teaches people how to improve themselves and their situations rather than forcing much examination of the circumstances in which these difficulties arose. In other words, personal growth rarely encourages participants to look at the ways in which they themselves actually produce their own challenges – to examine their own psyches and find the wounding and unhelpful early programs that contribute to the behaviour they now feel trapped by. Even when it does, the focus is on undertaking that work to get “fixed”.
There are a growing number of self-help and personal growth practitioners who have emerged out of the other side of the movement realising their deep dive has shown them a completely different way to tackle the same complexities.
The alternative, higher consciousness model is not about personal “growth” but about becoming more comfortable in your own skin.
People on the personal growth path want to manifest their dreams, fulfil ambitions, improve their self-image and get better relationships. Nothing in that shows people how to accept life as it is, develop self-love, or learn to be okay when things go wrong.
And of course people want what they want. It’s part of the Western mindset. Even me now suggesting that letting go of aspirations and ambitions seems preposterous, and flies in the face of what most people want.
We are hardwired to desire more, no matter what we get. That’s the human condition. And that’s the crux of why people usually experience unhappiness even when nothing is going wrong. It is the nature of desire to desire – there is nothing in desire that speaks about fulfilment or contentment.
Desire is a primal, dopaminergic drive of the human organism to improve and optimise its circumstances. We can thank our cave-dwelling forebears for their persistence in this regard because the entirety of what we call civilisation is the accumulated work and effort of countless generations dissatisfied with how things are.
In the earliest stages of history, that dissatisfaction focused on finding more efficient and less effortful ways of doing basic things so as to improve quality of life and survivability. Unfortunately, that instinct and drive within us has no “off” switch, so that even now, those of us experiencing the benefits of general health and prosperity in the Twenty-First Century still find ourselves dissatisfied.
In this observation lies the prime reason we see a continued swell in people seeking help for mental health struggles despite living in an era where we generally have better quality of life than any generation has experienced before.
However, when we boil it down into our own personal life circumstances, few of those observations hold much water. Again, we want what we want. Few people want to be told that there is more peace in letting go of a desire than there ever is in fulfilling it (even though it’s true).
And everything comes down to desire. Every type of dissatisfaction or unhappiness you experience has its twin in a desire for things to be different. Whether you’re unhappy in your job or unhappy about the way you look, being okay with how things are generally just isn’t on the radar – and to accept that brings pain and deeper experiences of agony to the surface because we want relief from those dark feelings of helplessness and hopelessness.
By all means, play with your circumstances for greater personal benefit. Change your job. Repair a relationship. Take up yoga. But doing those things will return you full circle to what drives people into the personal growth movement in the first place.
Beneath that dissatisfaction lies the ways we are put together – how we function as people – that created what we perceive as problems in the first place.
Personal growth mostly encourages people to bull through their hardships with tenacity and discipline, if not brute force. When that is undertaken with totality, it can certainly achieve effective outcomes. But the majority of people face burn-out instead. They don’t get the results they see on Instagram. They lack totality. They fail, and then often wind up feeling even worse than they did before because the personal growth movement holds up a gold standard that participants can use as a great big stick to beat themselves up with.
And in the process, those coaches and mentors don’t offer much to address the reasons for failure in the first place.
Herein lies the opportunity to do the real work.
If you want to look better or change jobs or gain a more fulfilling relationship, that’s great. But what would it be like to live completely okay with not having any of those things? What would it be like if you could be completely okay with life, freeing you up to enjoy this moment right now, this imperfect life, and the truth of the imperfection we all are?
And if you want to improve in those areas, and yet you struggle, what is deep inside that produces that failure – that acts as invisible hurdles to you getting what you want?
This is the essence of mindfulness-based psychotherapy.