Have you noticed that the large majority of self-help books that promise (and usually even make a serious, laudable attempt at delivering) one or another method of improving one or another area of your life, start with a tragic story of either the author himself or another, really or supposedly real person finding himself in a state of unspeakable misery? Like, one author started his book by telling in great detail how he was shot in the stomach by a street thug and suffered horrible pains when getting cured at a hospital. Some books describe someone's extreme injuries, some awful diseases.
The thing it, it gets really devastating. By the time you have seen twenty such books, you can easily end up convinced that you can never get your life in order unless you lose a limb, get cancer or at the very least have your home burn down first.
Of course, when accused before court, the self-help authors could defend themselves by claiming that they never said a terrible injury or disease was a prerequisite for happiness; they were trying to say their method works even when you have cancer or such. From the legal point of view, that's true. But we know and they know that our subconscious isn't capable of this kind of logical reasoning. The subconscious reads "How to become happy... John had cancer", "How to have perfect health... Mary was born blind" etc. dozens of times and it connects life improvement with extreme misery. That's how brains work. So your brain can easily end up convinced that good health and happiness are unattainable for someone who has all four limbs, functioning senses and has no uncurable disease. You won't be aware of it consciously, you just notice how each new self-help book will be more difficult to open until you stop and ask: hey, what the hell is wrong with me? And you realise eventually that there is nothing wrong with you. It's the destructive self-help authors who are writing their books in a monstrously wrong way.
