Living in a perpetual loop of consuming information without doing the work is what keeps you stagnant. It kills your growth. If you’re using self-help to unlock your mental prison without ever leaving the cell, clinging to books and articles, podcasts, and seminars, all the while convincing yourself you’re healing, you are deluding yourself. Because you don’t need more self-help, you need the truth.
But what is that truth?
The truth is, you need to start doing the work.
That’s it!
If you still feel lost, it means you aren’t doing the work, which is why nothing changes. Since nothing changes, you feel as if you’re drowning in pain and become disillusioned with change.
You succumb to the thought that living in your own personal hell is inevitable. That chasing your tail, endlessly circling pain, is the life you were destined to live.
So, let’s break down why you don’t need more self-help and how you can begin to rebuild your life from the inside out.
Why You Don’t Need More Self-Help: You’re Addicted to the Illusion of Progress
You need not another surface-level fix, but rather, to face the uncomfortable truth. The truth is that you are where you are because of you. And no amount of reading, watching, listening, or talking will change that until you decide to do the work and start climbing out of the pit you’re trapped in.
Instead of doing the work, you bounce from one thing to another because consuming the content feels like doing the work.
It’s like watching a video on how to work out; by the time you’re finished with the video, your brain gets just enough dopamine to feel like you exercised. As such, you either don’t work out or work out as hard because you’ve already triggered the reward system.
The same thing happens when you consume self-help information. It’s the reason you aren’t seeing transformation.
Yes, it does help. But the real question is this: do you want to spend years chasing healing, or do you want to collapse that timeline? To change faster, you must do the work. Otherwise, the insight will short-circuit, and you’ll fall back into the pain you were desperate to escape.
What’s needed is the coupling of the self-help content with a radical confrontation with your inner demons.
Love yourself more?
Yes.
Allow yourself to be present and centered?
Of course.
Refuse to face the raging demon wreathed in fire, penetrating your soul with a sword comprised of lies; lies about who you are, your worth, and your abilities?
No!
The War Within
Does healing begin with love and kindness for yourself? Yes.
But love and kindness aren’t just hugs and butterfly kisses.
Sometimes it’s putting on armor, locking your shield in place, gripping your sword, and diving into the fray to protect a loved one.
In this case, that loved one is you.
Heaven is paved with gold, but the road to get there isn’t. It’s fraught with fire and blood.
Not because some dangerous person is out to get you.
No.
It’s because life is hard. Pain and suffering are real. Emotional wounds and trauma will claw at you the entire way.
The inner demons will stab you through the heart with daggers of stress, anxiety, hatred, resentment, depression, grief, and bitterness. They’ll tear at you incessantly until you believe their lies as truth. Until you lose resolve, give in, and accept your place among their ranks as they sit back and laugh while you do their job for them.
The war, then, is loving yourself enough to do what it takes to pull yourself out of hell, regardless of the cost.
This is what it means to bear your cross. This is what it means to die to the old self so the new might be reborn.
Until you’re ready to cut all ties, swear off all oaths, and prepare yourself to fight to the death, you won’t experience the change you desire.
Not because it’s impossible, but because you aren’t willing to fight.
Why aren’t you willing to fight?
Because the truth hurts.
The Truth Hurts: That’s Why You Keep Reaching for Self-Help
Self-help works if you use it as a scalpel, not a crutch. But instead of performing surgery on your soul, you flirt with discomfort, obsessed with quick wins and hacks to “optimize” your life, not confront what’s really broken.
Overcoming yourself is challenging. It’s the dark night of the soul, painful, raw, and emotional. You uncover thoughts and feelings better left buried.
So, you jump from tactic to tactic, never fully committing, because feeling like you’re making progress is easier than confronting the real issues.
It doesn’t matter how the trauma got there; if you continue to cling to it, you’re the one preventing your healing. The question now isn’t, “Who caused the trauma?” but rather, “How long are you going to play victim to it?”
The truth is, every time you blame, run, or hide from your brokenness, pretending that life is okay despite the burning anger or shame, you put power back into the hands of the ones who hurt you.
If you’re the one who’s caused the pain, but your overwhelming guilt shifts blame to the person you’ve hurt, then ask yourself: “How long are you going to lie to yourself?”
Regardless of the scenario, you don’t need more self-help. That’s just outsourcing your healing, a Band-Aid on a gaping wound. You don’t need more Band-Aids. You need a fire for purging, a scalpel for cutting, and thread and needle for stitching.
Stop running. Start taking responsibility. Because if you want to know who’s responsible for how your life looks right now, the answer is you.
Healing Is a Death and Rebirth
Breaking this cycle means putting your old self to death while resurrecting the new. Jumping from one self-help hack to the next doesn’t bring healing.
Healing happens in the fire. Walking through it, standing in it.
The fire of doubt, of fear, of insecurity.
Choosing forgiveness when it doesn’t feel justified.
The fire of accepting yourself, flaws and all, looking at it and calling it good.
The fire of loving yourself when you feel unlovable.
Sitting with your wounds, and holding yourself in that space because that tired, broken inner child wants rest. And instead of shunning them, you stay.
You may find yourself screaming, shouting, weeping, and laughing all in one go.
A hysterical, cataclysmic release.
A guttural yell into the fabric of existence itself. The fiery Phoenix burning itself down to rise from the ashes.
To do this, you must embrace the truth. The truth of who you are, your life, and your place in the world.
You Don’t Need More Self-Help. You Need to Stop Lying to Yourself.
How do I know this is possible? Because I crawled through my own personal hell on bleeding hands and knees, desperate to find a way out of depression. Searching for and trying anything and everything to find relief.
Initially, my problem was believing the lie that there wasn’t anything wrong with me. I thought my pain was caused by my situations and circumstances, by the people “out there.”
Then, it shifted to something is wrong with me, but change is hopeless, I’m going to feel this way until I die.
Finally, I entered the stage of truth where I realized I was the problem. My thinking and feeling patterns were what kept me trapped in emotional turmoil, shrouded in burning darkness.
Did the self-help help? Yes, but only to a point. I spent years surfing self-help books, podcasts, and programs with little results.
It isn’t that nothing happened from consuming the content, but I didn’t stick with anything long term, and as such, nothing stuck with me.
I cobbled together healing over the years, jumping from one shiny object to the next because I wouldn’t discipline myself to one practice or another. Unfortunately, this prolonged the suffering I experienced.
Once I dedicated myself to the process of change, change began to occur. Rapidly. The years of the self-help foundation assisted in this change dramatically. But I could have found freedom much sooner had I used certain tactics relentlessly.
The Road to Change
Self-help becomes self-mastery when it stops making you feel good and starts making you tell the truth. Change happens when you take full responsibility for your life, whether it was your fault or not, not by driving guilt or shame deeper, but by realizing you don’t have to carry it anymore.
Telling yourself the truth hurts. It stings and burns. But it also liberates. It’s the only thing that can.
Freedom starts when you stop lying to yourself, not through comfort but through brutal honesty.
It’s saying, “I am a depressed person,” and then sitting with that thought, feeling it without trying to escape. Acknowledging “I am angry. I am resentful. I am narcissistic. I am selfish.” And owning those flaws without flinching, that’s when healing begins.
Stop applying Band-Aids to a situation that needs surgery. Instead, stare your demons down, embrace the truth, then grab your scalpel and get to work.
If this message hit, it’s because it was meant to. And if you know someone who’s still lying to themselves, still bleeding under Band-Aids, send it to them. The truth doesn’t heal in silence; it heals when it’s shared.
Until next time,
Josiah
