"Be all that you can be" and "live up to your full potential" . Yes, true, be, but don't try to be more than you can ever be as well. Be real about your gifts, your talents and reach as high as you can to fulfill those, not some unrealistic hopes based on the premises that sky is the limit.

"Nurture and understand your inner child" correlated with "we are all victims". Wrong again Forget your inner child - do not fall pray to the sirens call of victimhood and entitlement - we all had difficult childhoods, more or less. We all had difficulties and interruptions but those are the forces that carved our character and that is life - a cycle of crises and rewards.

Therapy had become the new religion of this society, indulging in psychological enemas with an almost pervert pleasure. Psychoanalysis is one of those tools to help you dig to no means and no ends through your memories - and bank accounts. Memory archeology is so 1980 and the therapeutic effect, if any, it is probably more due to the attention and relationships you establish with psychoanalyst than from the method itself.

"Express your anger". No, do not! For once, swallow it, internalize it and let it be the fuel for future changes. Anger is necessary, as opposed to content which doesn't drive you further unless you are an enlightened (Eckhart Tolle for sure doesn't read my blog, so...). Anger is the reality check we need from time to time. Of course, some of it need to be expressed but keep some inside and feed your inner child with it - will help him become a grown up sooner.

Perhaps the main quality of self help books is that it gives people hope - even if it is irrational, we, humans, seems to have a special appetite for irrationality - it looks like mass psychosis sometimes. We like to share madness toward the most mythical things - divinity, love, meaning, hope.

Self help literature comes to fulfill this niche of the human psyche - the need for hope, the need to elude reality and self delusion.

So you may as well give up on wearing yourself out trying to "be all that we can be" and "living up to your potential". Maybe it will help you to know that some people are natural born happy people. They just won the cortical lottery and their brain chemistry will allow them to manifest a high drive temperament and positive thoughts. Stick that on a post it on your mirror, will make you feel better if some mornings you don't feel like smiling to the universe.

One of the things that makes people so unhappy is that they think that they should and could be so much happier and fulfilled. This new found religion of self- help puts a burden on everyone - you have almost no excuse not to be happy and we are in a kind of race of who shows the most happiness and positive thinking.

The scientific truth though is that we need from time to time to slow down, that it is normal to have moments of sadness and even occasional depression. Studies showed that those who reported themselves being happy most of the time were unrealistic, self delusional, overestimating both themselves and the reality. Those that have passing moments of depression tend to be realistic, sometimes cynical, but aware of their own limits.

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