Sham
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But if this book achieves nothing else, my most fervent hope is that it provokes some thought about the things you always took as “givens”—like the knee-jerk assumption that self-esteem is good for you in every case.
A few procedural notes. Though the bulk of the research and writing of SHAM took place over the past eighteen months, one could say that this book has been a work in progress for the past twenty years—or my entire career in journalism. Many sources who originally were consulted on other, seemingly unrelated topics ended up shaping key parts of my thinking on self-help. I have interviewed many of my sources multiple times during that span, and have watched their own positions on self-help evolve as the movement slowly refined or redefined itself. In one or two cases, I’ve watched as sources were effectively conscripted into the movement and became unwitting gurus, of a sort, in their own right. They shall remain nameless, though the alert reader can probably take a good stab at who’s who.
I would like to thank my editor, Jed Donahue, for being the irredeemable pain in the ass that he was throughout the editing phase of this process. Time and again he forced me to dig deeper, find one more source, unearth better evidence than I’d given him to begin with. Don’t almost all writers say something like that about their editors? Yes. But if you didn’t live through the editing of this book, you can’t appreciate how sincere I am in saying it about Jed. I would also like to thank my agent, Scott Hoffman, for his major contributions to the concept of this book.
Finally, it occurs to me that there’s a second way in which self-help is like a thawing lake: In both cases, once you fall in, you’re in danger of never coming up again.
Steve Salerno
March 2005
NOTES
INTRODUCTION: HOPELESSLY HOOKED ON HELP
1. On their hilarious cable TV program Bullshit, confirmed skeptics Penn and Teller made this point succinctly. Referring to self-styled guru Hale Dwoskin and his so-called Sedona Method, which promises to solve a cornucopia of problems for its followers, they remarked, “If the problem is that you have $295 too much, he can help you.”
CHAPTER 1. HOW WE GOT HERE—WHEREVER HERE IS
1. You, on the other hand—again, depending on the state in which you live—have the right to simply stand in front of your car with a baseball bat and tell your banker to get lost. At that point he may choose to go to court and take the next step, which would be engaging armed marshals to visit you with a court order. This is why repo men often come in the dead of night, when you’re presumably asleep.
2. Harris did not invent this way of looking at human behavioral function, which was rooted in the “transactional analysis” theories of his mentor, Eric Berne (Games People Play). But in terms of mood, Harris’s effect on the course of SHAM, and society, vastly outweighed Berne’s.
3. Self-help gurus from the Victimization camp did not, of course, invent the idea of projecting onto others the blame for all of one’s major failings. Blame shifting figures in some of the key passages in the Bible, beginning with a little bit of interplay between God and Eve in the Garden of Eden. In Genesis 3:13, when He asks Eve to explain that nasty apple business, she replies, “The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.” (Several millennia later this morphed into the rather snappier trademark line of comedian Flip Wilson’s Geraldine character: “The devil made me do it!”) But not until the 1960s, with the meteoric ascendancy of self-help publishing as a category, did this idea coalesce into a true philosophical system targeting the average Jane or Joe.
4. Sample est motivational patter: “Don’t you realize you’re acting like a dumb motherfucker and your whole life up to now has been nothing but meaningless bullshit?!” Erhard, who was born with the rather less exotic name Richard Paul Rosenberg, cleverly picked the name est for its two levels of meaning: It was an acronym for Erhard Seminar Training as well as Latin for “is.”
CHAPTER 2. FALSE PROPHETS, FALSE PROFITS
1. An acquaintance of mine jokes: Can Chicken Soup for the Ax Murderer’s Soul be far behind?
2. Her doctoral dissertation was titled “Effects of Insulin on 3-0 Methylglucose Transport in Isolated Rat Adipocytes.” In other words, the usual background for relationship counselors.
3. Deryk’s legal surname is Schlessinger, not Bishop. This is a practice Dr. Laura strongly discourages among her listeners.
4. One wonders how this might play out geopolitically, given the many disparate (and probably unresolvable) views of heaven and its entry requirements. “We have seen bin Laden’s view of godliness,” says Robert Ellwood, “and it is not a comforting one.”
5. Check out, for example, the cover photo on her Financial Guidebook.
CHAPTER 3. DR. PHIL MCGRAW: ABSOLUTE POWER
1. For the record, beef prices in some commodities markets actually had dropped by even greater percentages the week before these remarks were made. And beef markets recovered a few weeks after the show. Those facts were only haphazardly reported at the time, however.
CHAPTER 4. TONY ROBBINS: LEAPS (AND BOUNDS) OF FAITH
1. Both men are colorful characters with fascinating backgrounds. Grinder was a Green Beret whose facility for languages at one point made him useful as an “operative for a well-known U.S. intelligence agency,” to quote his official bio. And in 1986 Bandler—who also, apparently, did some covert work for the CIA—was arrested and tried for the murder of Corine Christensen, the ex-girlfriend of Bandler’s friend John Marino. It was a bizarre case involving cocaine and Christensen’s work as a professional dominatrix, among other things. A jury acquitted him.
2. Though I’m sure Robbins did not intend it this way, even the name—Dreamlife—projects that same hollow quality, that sense of unreality, that surrounds Robbins and SHAM as a whole.
CHAPTER 5. “YA GOTTA WANT IT!”
1. Interestingly, this is no longer the case in sports itself. Players routinely skip games to tend to family matters.
2. Unfortunately, some coaches take this approach because their own egos are so inextricably tied to the success or failure of their teams that they simply can’t bear the thought of losing.
3. This is a common way of depicting performance throughout the sales world. The home-improvement firm for which I worked during the 1970s expressed our sales numbers as batting averages: total dollar sales volume divided by total number of customer visits.
CHAPTER 7. KILLER PERFORMANCES: THE RISE OF THE CONTREPRENEUR
1. Hackers have emerged in droves from the underground and now wear the pinstriped raiment of the network-security expert. A case in point is “Dark Tangent,” who founded Def Con. Today, using his less colorful given name—Jeff Moss—he commands large per diems in exchange for teaching companies how to keep the Dark Tangents out. A second reformed hacker, Christian Valor—yes, that is his true name—once admitted to topping $90,000 in annual consulting fees; he boasted that his collection of grungy T-shirts had given way to Armani. But eclipsing them all is the fabled Kevin Mitnick. The best-known computer criminal of all time has gone mainstream with a consultant venture he calls Defensive Thinking.
2. Some of that six hundred thousand consists of repeat offenders being released for a second or third time, so, in effect, each year’s six hundred thousand is not a discrete amount. Because of the way the figures are compiled, some of those six hundred thousand have already been counted at least once in the thirty million.
CHAPTER 8. YOU ARE ALL DISEASED
1. In recent years, a scandal rocked the Catholic Church when it became clear that a disturbing number of its clergy had been involved in sexual-abuse cases. Clearly the Church has not done right by an alarming percentage of those who trusted it; most shocking were the documented cases in which Church officials protected or covered up for priests whom they knew to have committed sexual abuse.
2. Other attempted definitions of the term codependency read as oblique, New Agey pabulum. Typical is this, from a Web site headlined “What is codependency?”: “Boundari
es are personal human property lines. Every human is a Stand Alone Model. Certain conditioning through guilt can wrongly convince us that we are not.” Even a leading medical dictionary describes codependency as “a relational pattern in which a person attempts to derive a sense of purpose through relationships with others.” It has been pointed out that the definitions put forth for codependency could describe most people whose lives are built around empathy and self-sacrifice, which are qualities we once admired in ourselves and others. The world of codependency also includes many subordinate labels that twelve-steppers apply to members of malfunctioning family units. Two of the best-known are enabler (a person who covers for the dysfunctional family member or otherwise tries to make everything all right) and scapegoat (a person who comes to believe he or she is the source of the family’s problems). I once received a list of sardonic “children’s book titles that didn’t make the cut.” One of them was Daddy Drinks Because You Cry. That is classic scapegoat thinking.
3. In contrast, the psychologist/“masculist” Warren Farrell (The Myth of Male Power, 1993) in some interviews has sounded as if he revels defiantly in his more misogynistic outlooks.
4. This study was presented at a conference held by the International Doctors in Alcoholics Anonymous, which bills itself as “a group of approximately 4500 recovering health care professionals of doctorate level who help one another achieve and maintain sobriety from addictions.”
5. Bill W. himself succumbed to emphysema in January 1971, after at least twenty years spent trying to quit smoking. Apparently Bill’s higher power had no power over cigarettes.
6. The cultlike devotion among Recovery groups has even resulted in internecine squabbling. For instance, a fairly wide gulf separates those trying to conquer heroin addiction via methadone use and those trying to conquer it via twelve-step programs. Though they’re working to resolve their differences, the reality is that each group routinely competes with the other for new funding, grants, and publicity. Since each thinks the other is philosophically and procedurally misguided, each group also acts as if it begrudges the other its success stories.
7. For the purposes of the study, both alcoholism and substance abuse are considered psychatric disorders, along with mood disorders and anxiety disorders. Also, it’s important to understand that the groups are not necessarily distinct from one another, so you can’t simply add the numbers to get a total picture of the problem. As NIAAA’s Ann Bradley explained to me, some depressed people are also in the anxiety group, and vice versa. Some alcoholics are also drug abusers but have no mood-disorder or phobic symptoms, while presumably at least some people are in all four groups: both alcohol and drug abusers, as well as suffering from both depression and anxiety. However you slice it, it’s a sad commentary.
8. Founded in 1976, SLAA is the oldest and largest of the various major sex-addiction organizations, with more than twelve hundred affiliated groups worldwide. Another of the larger groups in this category, Sex Addicts Anonymous, publishes a newsletter called the Plain Brown Rapper.
9. Experts credit Dr. Benjamin Rush, a Revolutionary War–era physician, with first floating the disease model of alcoholism in 1784. Among the other things Rush believed were physical diseases: dishonesty, all mental illness, and having black skin.
CHAPTER 9. LOOKING FOR LOVE . . . ON ALL THE WRONG BASES?
1. Also, even more than most SHAM gurus, Gray has a penchant for stating his “profound” points in circular terms. The very first line of Mars and Venus in the Bedroom is a classic example: “One of the special rewards for learning and applying advanced bedroom skills is that sex gets better and better.” But wouldn’t that be the whole point of “applying advanced bedroom skills”?
2. Data from two other major studies—the National Health and Social Life Survey (1992) and the American Sex Survey compiled by ABC News’s Primetime Live (2004)—suggest that even if men and women once were sharply divided in their sexual habits, that gap is closing. For example, in the ABC News poll, though gender differences in the lifetime total of sex partners were clear at their outer limits (one man admitted to four hundred encounters, four times the highest figure for any woman), the “average” number of partners—between five and ten—was reported by 26 percent of men and 29 percent of women.
3. The seven sisters are Better Homes & Gardens, Family Circle, Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, Redbook, and Woman’s Day. In their halcyon days, these seven magazines had a combined circulation of 45 million. Ladies’ Home Journal still runs “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” though many industry insiders consider it more campy than relevant.
4. Schlessinger had a point here, but that’s a separate issue from the substance of this woman’s call, and whether Schlessinger handled it properly.
5. The service offered by the dating sites is not self-help in the classic tradition; subscribers are not so much “working on themselves” as looking for someone who’s a good fit for the self they already have. It must be said, however, that the dating sites have their own problems, exemplified in the “we know best” paternalism of Neil Clark Warren and his eHarmony.com, which chooses its customers’ prospective dates for them based on Warren’s much-ballyhooed “29 points of compatibility.” It’s interesting that so many people nowadays would think the path to personal fulfillment lies in surrendering control of one’s options to others.
6. And it doesn’t help that society has grown ever more suspicious of over-the-top displays of romantic ardor. A latter-day Cyrano who stood outside his lover’s window spouting intimate verse probably would run afoul of stalking laws in many jurisdictions.
CHAPTER 10. I’M OK, YOU’RE . . . HOW DO YOU SPELL OK AGAIN?
1. The change involved a different way of doing the count. With minor variations from state to state, the official count involves comparing the number of students who began twelfth grade with the number of students who actually graduate—a methodology that, of course, ignores all of the students who never even make it to twelfth grade.
CHAPTER 11. PATIENT, HEAL THYSELF
1. I learned this firsthand when I was an employee at Rodale, where we were mandated to observe feng shui’s strictures.
CONCLUSION: A SHAM SOCIETY
1. Even this could change, however, if SHAM gurus have any say in the matter. Some have extended their activity into the political arena. Case in point: After writing eight of SHAM’s airiest, most introspectively spiritual books, Marianne Williamson decided to fix America. The result was Healing the Soul of America: Reclaiming Our Voices as Spiritual Citizens. In this ninth book, which has served as a springboard for lectures and workshops, Williamson weighs in on politics, violent crime, America’s global role, the perils of capitalism (“Our national conscience is barely alive as we slither like snakes across a desert floor to any hole where money lies”—this, from a millionaire many times over), and sundry topics great and small. Her antidote for these problems is “holistic politics,” even if she has trouble explaining exactly what actions that might entail. In interviews about the book, Williamson has shown a propensity for sweeping statements that almost invite belly laughs. She assured one interviewer that the world’s problems can be easily solved—“all that we lack is the intention, the will, and the mass commitment.” That’s a bit like saying that such-and-such disease can be easily conquered—all we need is the money, the diagnosis, and the cure.
Though she expects her followers to cast out the demonic oligarchy that rules America, she is curiously pacifistic in her view of world affairs. In her book as well as public appearances, she has issued a clarion call for Golden Rule–based diplomacy: “If you give to a person,” she has said, “the form of good that you receive in return may or may not be the form that you had in mind and your attachment to the form of the result is in fact part of what you want to heal. When you understand spiritual law, then you realize that everything you give, good or bad, will in fact come back to you tenfold and that’s just the way it is
.”
Sounds good, Marianne. Now go tell it to bin Laden.
2. Psychologists generally agree that extended exposure to truly horrific circumstances can have tragic lasting effects, but post-traumatic stress syndrome has been misapplied to almost any situation in which someone has a bad day.
3. Fraud occasionally occurs because defense witnesses know who’s paying the tab and what they’re expected to say on the stand.
4. The most notable case was Sutton v. United Airlines, which challenged the airline’s vision restrictions.
5. As is usually the case in diagnosing self-help’s effects, it is probably a slight oversimplification to attribute their stance entirely to Empowerment. Elements of late-stage Victimization may be in play here as well, since these people probably feel “trapped” in their bodies and that their obesity is “not their fault.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
For the past two decades, STEVE SALERNO has been a freelance feature writer, essayist, and investigative reporter, writing on business, sports, and politics and their wider social ramifications. His articles have appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Playboy, Reader’s Digest, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Good Housekeeping, and Sports Illustrated, among other publications. He has also served as editor in chief of the American Legion magazine and as editor of the books program associated with Men’s Health magazine, a division of Rodale. In addition, Salerno has been a visiting professor of journalism/nonfiction writing at three different colleges. An accomplished musician, he lives in Pennsylvania.