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This series of articles is for former self-help book junkies and current addicts who have begun to see that no number inspiring stories or “easy, surefire” self-help systems will ever make a lasting difference in their lives. There is a surefire way to change for the better, but it isn’t easy or quick. Does that bother you? If you are anything like I was several years ago, you bet it does. For me, success had to come effortlessly, because I couldn’t trust myself to stick with a difficult path over the long haul. When the going got tough, my self-confidence would get going, so I would jump at any chance to take the easy way out. Needless to say, I was a self-help junkie. This book contains a lot of what I learned the hard way once I stopped being suckered by books, tapes, CDs, and videos that promised an easy path to a new life.

This is not to say that self-help books and such don’t usually contain helpful insights. My problem was that they weren’t helpful enough. I was inspired by the inspiring stories. I just couldn’t stay inspired long enough to translate that emotional high into sustained action. I also found that some self-help systems were helpful. Again, the problem was that they didn’t provide me with a sustained sense of self-confidence, and whatever residual effects they produced vanished completely when I confronted tough obstacles. For a long time, I blamed myself, which would lead to bouts of guilt and even lower self-esteem. The self-help systems must be good, I reasoned, otherwise they wouldn't be in a book, so the problem had to be that I lacked the guts to stay with the systems long enough. It was only after many years of trying, quitting, and trying again that I took it upon myself to learn enough psychology to realize that the problem was not me but the unrealistic promises self-help authors generally make. The same is probably true of you. I found that the reason self-help paraphernalia are only partially helpful is that they attempt to provide superficial answers where psychoanalytic insights are needed.

When most people hear the word “psychoanalysis,” they think of Sigmund Freud’s version of it, which today is generally recognized as being incorrect in many important respects, particularly when it comes to self-help. Freud made numerous discoveries, yet managed to get the processes of psychological development mostly wrong. One of the researchers correcting Freud’s errors was the late San Francisco psychotherapist Joseph Weiss, who made several pivotal discoveries of his own and organized them in a therapeutic system known popularly as control-mastery theory. This series of articles is based on those discoveries, which were made about fifty years ago, together with other insights that I developed along the way in my own struggle to accomplish what you are now trying to do.

What Pathogenic Beliefs Are

People who find their paths to a better life blocked by unseen forces tend to think that the problem lies with their genes. Joe Weiss, however, saw inhibitions as resulting from what he called pathogenic beliefs. Pathogenic beliefs are beliefs that slow or stop self-development. These beliefs are learned through experience, and operate either through our emotions or as part of what we take for granted about ourselves and life, so much so that we don’t think to question them or even consider them as being beliefs. Examples of beliefs that are inherently pathogenic would be: “I am less talented (or less intelligent) than most people,” “I am physically less attractive than most people,” “human relationships are dangerous,” “I don’t need anyone,” “being independent is scary,” “I am not important,” “I don’t deserve to succeed,” “I hurt other people whenever I try to get what I want,” “there is something genetically wrong with me,” “nothing I do will ever make a lasting difference in my life, “if accomplishing something is difficult for me, it must mean that I lack talent,” "settling down is a natural part of life.”

More often than not, these beliefs were developed in childhood, and now operate behind the scenes, shaping our thought processes and emotional reactions. As it turns out, children use a number of instinctive shortcuts to help them learn about themselves and the world around them much more quickly than they otherwise could. The price we all pay for speed is degraded quality. Kids make mistakes right and left, and many of those mistakes don’t get corrected in the natural course of growing up. As a result, the personalities of most people are peppered with pathogenic beliefs. We find satisfactory ways of working around many of these, and come to consider the workarounds as expressions of inborn personality traits. But others stand stubbornly in the way of important goals and must be removed through psychoanalysis if those goals are to be achieved. The important point to remember about pathogenic beliefs is that they cannot stand up to scrutiny. That’s why gaining a psychoanalytic perspective on your behavior can give you the edge you need to begin beating these erroneous ways of thinking and feeling about yourself and others.

How Pathogenic Beliefs Can Be Combated

Gaining insight into your past automatically helps you to feel better about yourself because it lessens the fear that there is something genetically wrong with you. The realization that what has worried your about yourself is rooted in learned mistaken beliefs will do little to change any of the pathogenic beliefs, though. They will continue to operate until you begin challenging those beliefs in your daily life, thereby demonstrating through experience that they have nothing to say about the person you truly are. The reason pathogenic beliefs persist into adulthood is precisely that they are not combated in a person's everyday life. Rather, the person accepts these beliefs as reality early on and thereafter attempts to eke out an existence based only on what these beliefs will allow.

In a sense, you don't really need to understand your pathogenic beliefs through psychoanalysis in order to live the life you want. All you need to do is to grasp for the life you want and continue fighting toward your goal no matter what obstructive thoughts or feelings or emotions might arise along the way. What is most important is that you begin living the life you want. As you keep reaching for that goal, you will gain experiences that will undermine the credibility of your pathogenic beliefs, thereby diminishing their effect on your personality. You gained pathogenic beliefs through experience, and you can lose them the same way. If you never give up in your pursuit of the life you want, your pathogenic beliefs will become defeated, and a new you will emerge. It's a sure thing. It cannot not happen.

How Psychoanalysis Helps

In actual practice, however, most people find it too difficult to avoid giving up when every feeling and thought and emotion tells them that they are surely going to fail and that they are wasting their time and acting stupidly by not facing reality about themselves. One reason psychoanalysis is helpful is that it enables you to bring the beliefs behind these ways of thinking and acting and feeling and emoting out into the open so that you can recognize them for what they actually are. The skill of the unveiling these beliefs does not make them go away, but it does lessen their force, thereby helping you to combat discouragement.

Very often, a person in the grip of pathogenic beliefs has no notion of what is wrong, and therefore no clue as to what to do about it. The pathogenic beliefs may also be such that the person has no clear direction in life. In this case, psychoanalysis is essential because defeating pathogenic beliefs must be the person's first goal in order for his true self to begin to emerge. Part of the reason you're miserable is that your true self yearns to emerge but cannot because of these mistaken beliefs. Get rid of these beliefs and you will not only feel better about yourself, you will begin to recognize who you truly are.

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