I grew up with a single mother who was friends with other single mothers. Several of them had their own businesses. I often heard them bashing men and saying things like, “I don’t need a man to be happy.” While ontologically true, many of them attempted to enter into relationships with men or other women even and tried to hold on to that aspect of their identity. Long story short it doesn’t work. But, because I saw it throughout my childhood, I could easily identify when someone I was with was running that program.

Unfortunately, part of that program is not wanting to hear from other people that one can improve at something. We falsely believe we can fix ourselves. That’s why “self-help” is an irresponsible term in my opinion. If you are reading a so called “self-help” book written by someone else, you’re not helping yourself. That author is helping you. And if you read these books, you will see that it is full of advice and tips that they learned from other people who helped them. So where did the independent being who can help themselves illusion come from? I’ll tell you this, it is killing everyone and everything slowly. So thanks for questioning it if you’re willing to do so. You’re saving the world.

Right before my dad died he told me that his biggest regret was that he thought he was an individual for most of his life. How crazy is that? “In-divide-you-alls” don’t exist. We’re interdependent whether we want to lie to ourselves about it or not. And we can’t help ourselves. You even need trees and other plants for oxygen. The Bootstrap Lie is the worst. A Mormon buddy once told me that in their teachings, the Satan tricked humanity by convincing us that we could help ourselves so that we’d think we didn’t need God or each other. That’s the Fall. Anyone who’s really fallen will tell you that they needed help to get up. When you don’t accept help to get up, you’ll try to bring others down with you. Take the help when it comes. It’s probably the best thing you can do for everyone.

This post is written in response to the article Independent Woman: Independence Builds Barriers by Soul Love. I am not familiar with this author apart from this one article that was shared with me by a friend. My response to this post does not indicate an endorsement of their content or any other offerings they may have.