On self-help advice that just doesn't help me

“You’re not a victim! You need to get out of that mindset,” Ayan said, exasperated.  

I was sobbing breathlessly.

I had just returned from a “family holiday” - three weeks of being hostage to others’ ideas of fun in a foreign place. I had felt invisible to my family and had done everything but holiday. I was overwhelmed and miserable. 

“You can say ‘no, I can’t do it’ - I don’t get what the problem is,” he said.  He seemed unable to understand what went down when I was gone, or how I got here from being an independent, opinionated woman with one too many letters after her name. 

In my head, he made sense theoretically. I could simply say no. But I just didn’t have it in me to. 

Make the coffee, load the dishwasher, chop the ginger into perfect juliennes and the onion into fine slivers… it felt like the only time I was visible was when I was called on to do a chore. And then there was my own guilt when an older woman in the family would do almost everything herself around the home, while the men sat around the TV. 

“Mind over matter, M!” he said, to reassure me. 

I’d heard this brand of self-help advice a million times before. A call to rein in our minds and fix our mindset. David Schwartz calls it eliminating “failure thinking.” Brian Tracy calls it having the “success mindset.”  Carol Dweck calls it nurturing a “growth mindset”, the belief that one can grow and things can change. Both Tracy and Schwartz tell us, the only way is to overcome “excusitis” - a “mind-deadening thought disease” of making excuses for failure.

Ayan’s words landed in my head. But they didn’t percolate into my body.

Instead, they set me off on a voyage into a choppy sea of unknown unknowns about my mind-body. This is the story of how I threw out the ballast - the stories of duty, virtue, and personal-development that don’t serve me - to steer my ship into an embodied life. 

I wanted so desperately to take heed of Ayan’s advice, but I could not understand it. I felt unable. I couldn’t say no when I was called on to do a chore around the home. I was a mute spectator when people spoke for me. I felt voiceless when someone else’s needs were assumed to overlap with mine. I didn’t see how I could just think myself out of these situations. I couldn’t get myself to believe that something would change suddenly. I also really wanted to be a dependable source of support to my family. I felt small for not having the chops to be that person by rearranging my mindset, beliefs and thoughts. 

Life went on. I experimented with CrossFit, found a fantastic therapist, trained to be a coach alongside my life in law, travelled the world, became a runner, practised yoga, and steadfastly avoided being in enmeshed family situations for fear I’d regress into my broken self. Maybe it was all that movement across time-zones, activities and career paths. But one day, it struck me:

I was not the problem, the “mind-over-matter” genre of self-help advice was. It was pushing my mind to do things it was already failing at spectacularly. 

I believed I was a go-getter. I didn’t make excuses. I was high-functioning, always-on, keeping all fifteen balls of mine and my family in the air. I believed I could grow into the perfect blend of dutiful, helpful, and low-maintenance if I worked on my mental and emotional health. When I failed, I showed grit, learned from my missteps and tried again.

In this mind-space, mind-over-matter seemed to imply I needed to make my mind conquer my body, as if it were a beast out to dominate or deplete the mind. I needed to will my body to do better. Speak out. Say no. Ask someone else to step up and work.

I could not relate to this. My body was numb to sensations (as I learned through therapy): a non-playing character in my game of life. I didn’t know what it needed, experienced, or sensed. It had gone into freeze mode, from an extended tenure of my fight or flight responses. Worse still, I had no idea that my body was shut down to a full range of sensory experience and expression. I had only known an unembodied life.

Hearing “mind over matter” made me feel rudderless in deep sea.  It felt like yet another story that I had to tell myself to do things that my body couldn’t.

To be fair, it’s probably great advice if your body leads you well. But mine didn’t. Any advice that told me I should change my mindset, beliefs, or thoughts, was no different than stories of duty and virtue that told me I should be there for my family, or stories of ambition that told me I should be there for myself. They were all just stories. And stories had frozen my body stiff.

@jessicamalonso says it better than I ever could:

Jessica 🍜 noodle soup era @jessicamalonso

‘Should’ is the distance between someone else’s ‘yes’ and your embodied ‘no’

The time had come for me to find ways to hear my embodied self, and what it needed from life. Either my body would have to go along with my mind, or my mind would have to take along my body. Gently, in flow, no force. 

The runs, the yoga, the travel, the stint with coaching and my other adventures had unwittingly put me on this course (I now know) because I did them solo. They showed me that I was habituated to doing things because I should. They taught me what it feels like to do things only when I wanted to.  They helped me spot when I was pushing my body to do things that my mind wasn’t on board with.

Over time, I began to experience sensations. I learned to hear my body speak to me, even when my (conscious) mind hadn’t yet caught up to the situation.  I know when I have a breakout of acne that some unresolved shame is creeping up on my body. I can sense when I have an allergic attack that I am feeling the weight of letting down my family - on some metric of ‘good-daughter’. And I always anticipate, when my digestion is irritable, that I’m about to experience some kind of mental upset. 

Slowly, I began to meet my needs while being there for my family’s. I no longer feel stuck. I speak up when I have a full plate. I use humour liberally when chores are awkwardly assumed to be mine. I patiently stand up for myself if someone else happens to speak for me.

What changed, you ask?

I now know that I often give in to stories about what I should do. Stories about how I ought to be a good daughter, a good wife, an ambitious professional, or a competent lawyer. So I get out of my own way by letting the stories go. This also meant firing my Board of Inner Critics, who never spared a second to let me know I could actually be a career-woman, driver, chef, and all-round domestic goddess… if only I tried harder.

I also know that when my mind’s stories have so much sway over my body, I am likely to be an unreliable narrator of my own experiences. So I always give people in my life the benefit of doubt. This has been my greatest lesson in self-awareness.

What’s not changed is that I still struggle with mindset-based self-help advice. The more I unlock my embodied self, the more I am know this in my body. For me, it’s more like “mind over and matter.”

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Feedback is the greatest love language. Thank you to Sarah, Nic, Jon, Oscar, Latham, Charu and Silvio for giving an earlier draft of this piece so much thought, so much time, so much love.