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You know I think a lot of the problems is we are looking for magic when it is dull and boring around us. If all else fails, just stay at the surface and say everything is as it seems and nothing is deep or dramatic, and do nothing else but your eisenhower matrix (what’s important and urgent first, four squares on a two axis box). Because when we say nothing is magical we stop looping internally trying to find a touch of divinity when what we need is to interact with the world in a structured way to build momentum to change our environment.
How would you square this with AA being equal and sometimes superior in outcomes to conventual therapy?
Sorry I don’t understand the question and how it relates to my comment? If you’re currently writing on an eisenhower matrix, if that’s what you’re asking, I suppose you’d have to evaluate for yourself which options place where on the two axes in relation to your own life. Probably AA takes preference for you, we often frame things in a way leaning toward what we already chose haha :)
Sex and the City saved me from a lifetime wasted with self-help books by one wonderful scene of some pathetic lady crying in the self-help section on the floor. It made me realize that is pretty much every self-help reader ever. They are never helped, they are just on a hamster wheel to the next self-help book, a little of their wallet moved from their pocket to the author.
Well this is just categorically wrong.

There are some very good works out there that can provide tangible benefit.

There are requirements inherent in the audience that are needed to receive benefit.

You have to be able to critically discern the misleading propaganda and other crap which many people cannot do, but some people can.

The people who are never helped, are the people who can't discern what amounts to lies from truth (without intention). Bad information may work to get a positive result in an authors circumstance, but it may not apply broadly.

People are fallible, and its important to recognize words like all, none, never, always, need to be used properly or be discarded as false statements.

Information can be valid, while not being sound.

>>The people who are never helped, are the people who can't discern what amounts to lies from truth (without intention).

There's so much wrong with this sentence. Like, it apparently never occurred to you some problems can't be treated by medical treatments. Instead, it's the "patient's" fault for picking the wrong book?

You should read what was actually written, and not hallucinate things that are not actually there.
Do you think the screenwriter of that episode thought to themselves "I have done my research and I will write an episode revealing how the self help industry works?"

Or do you think they thought to themselves "This will be funny: we have this wacky character crying in the self help section, it's ironic because with all those books, she should be the person least in need of self help!"

I think it's the later. If the episode was saying something that's true, it's merely by accident.

I'm not sure if you'd categorize it as a self help book, but i'd call my reading of man's search for meaning as genuinely lifechanging. I haven't read any other 'self help' book, so i suppose it worked!
This is why I claim stirner is the greatest self help book author ever. “The Unique and its Property”, his magnum opus, is a defense of following your own self interest.
imo depression is a physical circumstance that selects its own downstream psychology. I don't think you can talk or reason out of depression without a radical reframing that causes your physical behavior and circumstances to change. your body and its habits create preferences for psychological intensity, which gets it hits of feelings it would get normally if the being that inhabited it were free and self accepting.

the self or ego speaks language, and the therapist's demeanour is intended to create a physical peace where the self can run and exhaust itself before becoming receptive to a (hopefully constructive) reframing. where I diverge from my psychologist friends is I think using language to relieve the suffering of the being only works accidentally, or when some language can overflow the self and unseat it from its dominion of the being. there's a state of enlightened duality where you can see your thoughts without feeling them or being directed by them, much like what meditation recommends, and from that state the being literally just chooses experiencies that bring it peace or joy. sustaining that is an effort and skill that can developed with practice and exercise.

trying to reconcile the symbols and artifacts of language with other symbols and artifacts of language is a treadmill to me. how's that working out? couldn't say precisely, but wisdom is shown to be right by its results.

Yes, the self alone is shouting in the void and appalled and confused at what it hears back. Expand the boundary to encompass enough, loose momentum and be still, and healing happens.

Mindfulness is a tool and a habit that should be embodied in everything.

I recently wrote in a document (filled with too much ego, since it's called "starting points toward a cybernetic theory of karma"):

> I suspect, subjectively we each get the world we need - but you only see when reaching the point of total stillness, so that your energy points outwards from the ordinary. Then your world view shifts, and making sense of how it works with the conceptual tools you have... Truth is a pathless land.

Framing the practice of therapy as a space for the “self to run and exhaust itself” before becoming receptive to reframing is one of the more concise and clear explanations of what therapy can be.

What complicates the process is that language based thought and emotion run as a two way feedback loop, repetitive thoughts can create neurochemical repeating patterns which can change what someone is able to experience. In this way artifacts of language alone can have an immense amount of power no?

Though subtle, speech and writing are physical acts. Perhaps thought is not.

I don't know any practicing therapists, but the self and the ego are very different things in the freudian/jungian framework. Having a precise language - regardless of the framework - can be very helpful for gaining productive detachment.

But in fiction language transcends itself and enters the realm of image and dreams, where we might encounter the psyche as soul again, without the -ology.