Self-Help Secrets

I have a furtive fascination with self-help books. It's true. In stereotypical self-help tradition, I'll go ahead and blame it on my parents. They were big fans of Co-Dependent No More and various other tomes during the genre's heyday, the 1980s.
So on my bookshelf you will find the following books (and I include their solicitous subtitles):
Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus: A Practical Guide for Improving Communication and Getting What You Want in Your Relationships, by John Gray.
The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate, by Gary Chapman.
Life Strategies: Doing What Works, Doing What Matters, by Phillip C. McGraw (this last one by Dr. Phil of Oprah fame).

There's something self-absorbed and almost goofy about these books. But, in the spirit of taking a tentative step out of the self-help closet, I'm recommending a new book, Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart: Thirty True Things You Need to Know Now.

First off, I love the title. I'm a sucker for a good title. Second off, it's not so much a self-help book as it is a collection of thoughtful essays on important spiritual truths. Each chapter tackles one maxim. Some of my favorites were "The statute of limitations has expired on most of our childhood traumas," "Nobody likes to be told what to do," and "It's a poor idea to lie to oneself." Then there are the ones that elicited a sardonic grin from me: "The problems of the elderly are frequently serious but seldom interesting," and "Parents have a limited ability to shape children's behavior, except for the worse."

The author is psychiatrist Gordon Livingston. The foreword is by Elizabeth Edwards, wife of vice presidential candidate John Edwards. They got to know each other through a bereaved parents' online community; both have children who have died, in Dr. Livingston's case, he lost two children. So he has some actual hard life experience from which to base his advice. I seems so unfair that tragedy gives him more authority to speak, but to me it certainly does.

Here's an excerpt to give you a sense of Livingston's writing, from the chapter "The most secure prisons are the ones we construct for ourselves":

Probably the single most confusing thing that people tell each other is "I love you." We long to hear this powerful and reassuring message. Taken alone, however, unsupported by consistently loving behavior, this is frequently a lie -- or, more charitably, a promise unlikely to be fulfilled.
The disconnect between what we say and what we do is not merely a measure of hypocrisy, since we usually believe our statements of good intent. We simply pay too much attention to words -- ours and others' -- and not enough to the actions that really define us. The walls of our self-constructed prisons are made up in equal parts of our fear of risk and our dream that the world and the people in it will conform to our fondest wishes. It is hard to let go of a comforting illusion, but harder still to construct a happy life out of perceptions and beliefs that do not correspond to the world around us.

I somewhat hesitate to call this book a self-help book, even though that was the section where it was shelved in the bookstore where I bought it. A label on the back of the book says, "Personal Growth/Psychology." This book takes up an interesting space -- it seems much more serious and world-weary than the average pop psychology book. Yet it contains spiritual truths likely accessible to people of different faiths or of none.