Sense of coherence > seductive self-help

Mar 16, 2025

Authors would write themselves out of a job if self-help actually worked as advertised. Cynically, self-help purveyors need people to never graduate in order to keep the cash flows coming.1 Which helps explain why the self-help industry is a multi-billion dollar industry. In the United States alone, there are an estimated 15,000 self-help books published per annum.

The implicit arrangement with someone transacting in self-help is that they have got it all figured out. And I do think, at least initially, the motive to write comes from a good place - wanting to help others.

Yet those who preach the loudest oftentimes fail to live up to the demands of their writings. Nor is it unusual to find their behavior exhibits the opposite of their exhortations.2

For example, a friend of mine had her husband haranguing her constantly about faithfulness. He knew she was cheating. She must be. When in fact, he was the one cheating on her with multiple women.

In psychoanalysis this is called projective identification: a subconscious process where someone unconsciously projects their own unacceptable parts to someone else. This is considered to be a primitive defense mechanism.

It is far better to focus on establishing one’s sense of coherence (within the salutogenic framework) than the latest self-help fad.

The Seducer

One of the top-selling self-help books of all time is Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. First published during the Great Depression, it has gone on to be a continual bestseller, with millions of copies sold.

It distills his earlier work The Law of Success, which was supposedly based on decades of studying successful businessmen like Henry Ford, J.P. Morgan, and Thomas Edison. Hill said both books were inspired from a conversation with Andrew Carnegie.

Think and Grow Rich winnows the sixteen laws found in The Law of Success to thirteen steps. They all encompass a positive mindset, developing goals, and taking action. And, above all, believe in yourself and your capabilities:

“You are the master of your destiny. You can influence, direct and control your own environment. You can make your life what you want it to be.”3

By all accounts, Hill lived an extraordinary life. Unfortunately, it was not the life he sold to millions of readers. He managed to be a conman, terrible husband, and vainglorious charlatan all-in-one.

For one, the purported conversations with Andrew Carnegie never happened. Carnegie’s biographer could find no record of Hill ever having met Carnegie. Further, claims he advised President Woodrow Wilson and President Franklyn D. Roosevelt have no basis in fact.4

His portrayal of himself as a successful businessman obscured the fact he faced bankruptcy and mail fraud charges linked to his lumber company, Acree-Hill. Subsequent ventures were plagued by bankruptcies, fraud accusations, and more warrants for his arrest.

To single out another example, he set up a school called the Automobile College of Washington, where he promised graduates they could earn $75 to $200 a week. In actuality, the pupils were paying for the privilege of providing free labor to Hill to build cars for Carter Motor Corporation.

Essentially every business venture and charity he was involved with was linked to deceptive or outright illegal practices. For an exhaustive dive into Napoleon Hill’s life, see The Untold Story of Napoleon Hill, the Greatest Self-Help Scammer of All Time.

On the personal front he faired no better as an abusive, serial philanderer. Married five times, his first marriage was a shotgun wedding. His dalliances were with prostitutes, and he once took his young daughter without telling his wife, threatening never to return. Wife number one, Edith, accused him of both emotional and physical abuse throughout their five year marriage in the divorce proceedings.

Hill’s abysmal failure in family life was glossed over in his official biography as “the price he would pay for wanting to make his own way in the world, and do it on his own terms”.

To be sure, Napoleon Hill represents an extreme example of self-help follies. The point remains traditional self-help is not a solution in and of itself.5 Many self-help books are devoid of the larger context, setting one up for disappointment from the get go.

Of course the industry won’t present it as such, because people want answers nicely packaged and parceled. No matter that life is messy and, on some level, we are all hypocrites.

Instead of putting an exclusive focus on problems, it is preferable to adopt an integrative approach. Westernized medicine falls into a similar trap of de-contextualization as self-help in its focus on pathogenesis, or what caused a disease. It’s a whack-a-mole “process” that negates the gestalt that comes from a holistic viewpoint.

Personally, it has been a struggle to finish any post - I now have at least fifty percent more drafts than posts and my last published piece was nearly a year and a half ago. Once a post takes on a general form, I find myself ranging from dis-interested to mildly disgusted.

The words fall flat despite their earnestness. Either I’m writing to impress others - those amorphous types that whisper all the ways in which I’m stupid and a poor writer that is, to put it politely, “in over my head”, but if pressed to say who these people are I draw a blank. These are the shadow people whose approval lies beyond my grasp because they are apparitions from my subconscious.

As I wrestle with unfinished drafts, I can’t shake the feeling that I am slipping into the same trap as self-help books—offering insights without truly embodying them. The more I write, the more I question whether I am just another voice preaching ideas I haven’t fully embodied.

Curiosity and the unconscious

My inquisitiveness follows meandering, esoteric routes. Year to date I’ve dug into grief, sehnsucht, near death experiences, and the nature of time.

Curiosity around one’s experiences is important to follow on a personal level because it involves our unconsciousness. Our subconscious is critical because it is both the elucidator and obscurer of our umwelt (the German word for our subjective experience of the world).

To truly change and truly understand ourselves, the subconscious must be drawn into our conscious awareness - or else we find ourselves in the same song and dance despite our best effects. So much of what we do comes from our habits. And our habits (including our habitual thinking) are derived in large part from items percolating below our awareness.

Tendrils from the subconscious consistently shoot up and us, being in our harried, industrialized state, miss them. So months and years go by where we feel stuck in the same behaviors despite our best intentions and remediation attempts.

Perhaps instead of positing, like self-help, that we have got something figured out, we take time to just be. Many would scoff that there simply is no time. Where is the time with a full-time job and kids? You barely keep up with friends every time and again. No matter that you somehow find the time to watch hours of contents across screens big and little everyday (and I get it because I burn time on Twitter and Instagram).

This misses two related points: 1) there are some things too important not to do and 2) the price is the price. We try to haggle over how much something costs like we are in a bazaar. Costs extend past fiat currency to our finite quantities of time, energy, and focus.

A non-reflective life will lead to waste. Period. Psychological research (and philosophy) shows time and time again, that we don’t truly know ourselves, what we want, or what makes us happy. Frittering from one task to another precludes deep thinking necessary to orient our lives between the buoys.

In our Westernized world, we are bombarded with information beyond what we can consciously take in, rendering us unable to fully process what’s hitting our sensory organs. There’s no way we will be able to simultaneously pull subconscious thinking into our awareness.

We live and move and have our being in a reactionary milieu. Could this be one reason why there seems to be a dearth of original thinking compared to past times? A reactionary lifestyle by definition cannot at the same time be intentional.

I’d be willing to bet large sums of money that those reading this post are conventionally successful and deemed to be good problem solvers. Thus, instead of throwing out a one-size-fits-all approach, it’s best left into your hands if, when, and how to implement more reflection. And by reflection, I mean a pause from the daily grind.6 Contemplation is critical because it greases the wheels of the subconscious.

My reflection times are at night after my son goes down, when I’m alone in the house during the day (which is rare), and at a nearby coffee shop. Pre-kids, I also liked to take trips to nature spots where I could alternate physical activity with rest.

To be sure, sometimes at night I’m too tired. What’s most important is not letting the “too tired” me become the dominant habit. Also, once quiet time is implemented, you’ll find yourself looking forward to it because of the dividends it pays. In itself it becomes its own reward.

Salutogenesis (a sense of coherence)

Taking long enough to sit and be a human (be)ing instead of our normal human (do)ing is critical to our well-being. So too is embracing our curiosity as something of meaning rather than another task to check off.

This brings us to salutogenesis - a theory coined by Aaron Antonovsky, to describe what enables and maintains our well-being. The word comes from health (salus) and origin (genesis).

Dr. Antonovsky came up with the outlines of this model while conducting research on menopausal women in Israel. The target group in his epidemiological study were those who had survived WWII concentration camps. Going through the results, he was shocked to find a group that were in good health and, by all accounts, lead a good life in spite of the hell they had gone through.

In our instantaneous culture, it’s worth noting Dr. Antonovsky spent the better part of three decades discovering and then refining his theory of salutogenesis. Further, the theory of salutogenesis first crystallized into a coherent whole while reflecting when he was on sabbatical.

Salutogenesis doesn’t subscribe to a binary point of view where one is simply sick or not. It is replaced by the ease-disease continuum, which allows for multiple possibilities, and, de facto, probabilities. After all, disease comes from the Old French “lack of ease”.

The medical system falls short in its pre-supposition of a stable, internal environment (homeostatis). Rather, we live in a “heterostatic disequilibrium”, where we are under constant bombardment from various stressors.

Or, as Iain McGilChrist puts it,

“In an organism, by contrast, what has to be explained is, not how it changes, but how it remains stable, despite constant change on an unimaginable scale…Let me give some idea of that scale. There are an estimated 37.2 trillion cells in the human body. Each one of these cells performs many millions of complex reactions every second. In doing so the cell does not act atomistically but within complex feedback systems with other cells.”

The answer one arrives at depends on the question one asks. Homeostasis acts as if there is a fixed, unchanging point that our bodies are trying to get back to. But this equates to statis, which is not how the world works. Salutogenesis begins with the premise that change is the only constant.

Irrevocably commingled with salutogenesis is a strong sense of coherence, as this is linked to better mental health, the ability to rise to life’s challenges, and greater meaningfulness. Coherence refers to making sense of things.

Research has linked a higher sense of coherence to fewer and less severe mental illnesses. It was also “an important predictor and modulator of psycho pathological symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in those respondents that ruminate about the pandemic”.

Building up our sense of coherence consists of: a sense of comprehensibility, a sense of manageability, and a sense of meaningfulness.

Another way to state this is we believe the world is understandable (comprehensible), manageable, and meaningful. Humans are not machines, but if one were to apply the machine label, it would be that we are meaning making machines. We all have stories we tell ourselves.

And mental well-being is inextricably tied to these stories. We can make our stories work for us by developing a greater sense of coherence. As Dr. Frankl’s story demonstrates, one can attain a strong sense of coherence in spite of terrible external circumstances.

Born in 1905, Viktor Frankl had an early interest in psychology, striking up correspondence with fellow Austrian Freud in high school. During and after medical school, he assisted with suicidal patients. During this time, he began threading together his psychological theory pertaining to human behavior.

The branch of therapy developed by Frankl, logotherapy, dovetails nicely with Antonovsky in its emphasize on coherence and meaning. Logotherapy posits that meaning is what’s most important for mental health. In other words, meaning, not human drive (Freud) or power (Adler), is our central motivational force.

His hypothesis would be tested under dire conditions, as Frankl and his family were sent to the Theresienstadt and Auschwitz concentration camps. While he survived, his parents and new wife perished. In all he spent three years as a prisoner. During that time, he remained a keen observer of human behavior.

The result was Man’s Search for Meaning, listed as one of the top books of all time. It was written in nine days and discusses how people successfully and unsuccessfully coped inside concentration camps. Then he segues into discussing the theory of logotherapy.

This model relies on a strong sense of coherence. For example, those who survived the camps found comprehensibility by maintaining a purpose. Often this was through clinging to the hope that they would be united with loved one’s if they persevered.7

Frankl himself found life to have meaning even in the midst of unimaginable suffering. Each person must discover what life expects from them rather than what they expect of life.

“Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone's task is unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.”

Unfavorable external conditions are inevitable - life is hard. Events can vary in their extremes but no one is exempt from pain and unfairness.

“What is to give light must endure suffering.”

Yet we always retain agency, as evident through our freedom of choice - in how we respond, in the attitude we choose, and in holding on to hope.

Frankl maintained manageability through mentally rewriting his lost logotherapy manuscript. Other prisoners would console one another, at time giving away their food and offering encouragement. In defiance of the inhumaneness they experienced, a choice was made to remain human.

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Through human connection, meaningfulness was maintained. Prisoners would also encounter fleeting moments of wonder, whether through a sunset or a bird perched on the barbed wire.

By bending but not breaking in the face of suffering, Frankl believed it provided the opportunity for personal growth. Enduring hardship with dignity is a path to deeper meaning.

“To be sure, man's search for meaning may arouse inner tension rather than inner equilibrium. However, precisely such tension is an indispensable prerequisite of mental health. There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one's life. There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how”.

We in the West would be behooved to focus on salutogenesis, not happiness.

Conclusion

In what looks like me meandering is in actuality the search for a strong sense of coherence bubbling up from the unconscious. It is the singular pursuit to understand how things fit into a greater whole (comprehensibility) and what this means (meaningfulness).

The key is learning to trust ourselves and the process. That which is the subconscious guides us, albeit one step at a time. I’m still working on it, and will never “arrive”.

I don’t write because I have it all figured out, but rather to help me attain a more integral worldview: which, of course, will nonetheless be replete with paradoxes, along with imperfect knowledge as we “see in a mirror dimly”.

Henrik Karlsson has a beautiful post on “writing [as] a powerful tool for thought”.

“Good thinking is about pushing past your current understanding and reaching the thought behind the thought. It often requires breaking old ideas. This is easier to do when the ideas are as rigid as they get on the page…
As I type, I’m often in a fluid mode—writing at the speed of thought. I feel confident about what I’m saying. But as soon as I stop, the thoughts solidify, rigid on the page, and, as I read what I’ve written, I see cracks spreading through my ideas. What seemed right in my head fell to pieces on the page.
Seeing your ideas crumble can be a frustrating experience, but it is the point if you are writing to think. You want it to break. It is in the cracks the light shines in.“

We are all muddling through. Rather than seeking tidy answers in self-help, we should embrace the messiness of life. By fostering a sense of coherence—through curiosity, reflection, and meaning-making—we can navigate uncertainty with greater resilience.

A book or post on a subject is not necessarily evidence of mastery, particularly when paired with a profit motive. In this and all things, we should trust, but verify.

I’d love to hear from you in the comments

Trust, but verify

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