Self-help is dead; long live self-help

The problem with self-improvement and the promise of self-unfoldment

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If you like reading my work, it’s the best way to support my writing and help see more of it in the world. For now, everyone will get the same content, but that will change soon. 🫀 - Mel

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One of the easiest ways to notice a trend emerge in a community is through its language. And by far the biggest vocabulary change I’ve noticed recently is that people are using the world “unfolding” a whole lot more.

So… I think we are on the cusp of a significant shift in the leading self-help paradigm.

Let me explain. 

I’ve been wanting to write about this for a while. It’s no secret that we are obsessed with improving ourselves. The self-help economy is well over $10B, and we all know the friend who has gone deep into meditation or tried to dissect and heal all their relational patterns through the lens of attachment theory. (Me, I’m that person).

The thing is, self-improvement on its own leads to nowhere.

Sherry Ning

explains it well: “[It’s]…futile because it implies self-deficiency, and what’s incomplete can not complete itself.”

Self-improvement whispers: You need to do more, you need to have better discipline, you need to become secure, you need this framework and that framework. It is a staircase/treadmill that never ends.

Honestly, the whole Huberman thing is weirdly timely and symbolic with this shift— he might be the clearest embodiment of this paradigm, what with the taking cold showers, mastering your emotions, building extreme discipline, etc.

Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with self-improvement; it’s a very empowering part of the journey. But it’s incomplete. And in extreme cases, it can lead to hyperfixations on power and control. 

There are many people who are starting to realize this – people who have dove deep into self-improvement and come out of the other side to a seemingly endless plateau. Now more than ever, we have reached a critical mass eager for the next paradigm.

I’m not the first one to notice this shift.

Jonny Miller

lays it out astutely here. I want to expand on the CLG graph he brings up, as it maps really well onto what we’re discussing.

To-Me is the state in which many people turn to self-help. It is a victim state, where life happens “to me” and there is no empowerment or control. 

By-Me is the state in which we wake up from the victim state, reclaim power, and regain control of our lives. Think books in the vein of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, The Subtle Art of not Giving A F*ck, etc. 

Through-Me is unfoldment, it is the state in which we wake up from the control and power paradigm and see that there is a whole lot more to life than ourselves (ahem, our ego). We can co-create with life, we can let it unfold through us.

Among the existing self-help books out there in this realm, the most well-known is Michael Singer’s The Surrender Experiment. It’s a fantastic book if you want to step inside the mind of someone who is deeply living their life in Through-Me mode. 

(Shoutout

Danny Miranda

for writing about this book with such conviction on Twitter that I had to go buy and read it).

So what is self-unfoldment?

If self-improvement is climbing a staircase to nowhere, self-unfoldment is peeling the layers of yourself like an onion.

It says: Everything you have ever needed or wanted is literally inside of you. You are whole. You are complete. All you need to do is let yourself see it. Maybe more discipline is what you want... or maybe it isn’t? It is ever-shifting and ever-changing because you are ever-shifting and ever-changing.

Self-unfoldment involves seeing the fullness of you in all your multi-layered beingness and allowing all of your parts to exist together. It means listening with earnestness to what arises from your wholeness. 

Finally, I couldn’t write an article about unfolding without mentioning Aletheia — the talk of the town. Their therapeutic/coaching work in developing and teaching the Unfoldment Paradigm is literally why everyone is using the word “unfolding” now.

This concept is, of course, nothing new — especially when it comes to religion and spirituality. Think of people saying “Jesus/God acts through me…” This is also a foundational tenet of non-dual practices like Tibetan Buddhism and Daoism. 

What Aletheia has done is married the spiritual with the psychological in a wholly unpredecented way, and it’s creating the vocabulary and structure upon which an entirely new paradigm of self-help is being built.

I’m really excited to see where it goes.

Closing Thoughts

From the outside looking in, the difference between self-improvement and self-unfoldment can be very subtle. What looks like By-Me for one person can actually be Through-Me for another, and vice-versa. 

But from the inside looking out, the difference is astronomical. It’s the distinction between rigidity and fluidity, between the strength of a rock and the strength of water.

It is unlearning rather than learning, undoing rather than doing. Most fundamentally, it is knowing how to Get Out of Your Own Way. And in my personal experience, it’s a lot more effective and enjoyable.