For over 30 years, I was on what I thought was a healing journey. I did therapy. I read every bestselling self-help book I could get my hands on. I filled journals with affirmations and gratitude lists. I chased mindset hacks and goal-setting systems like they were the key to finally fixing whatever was wrong with me.
But here’s the thing I wish someone had told me a whole damn decade (or three) earlier:
I wasn’t broken. I was traumatized.
And all the self-help in the world wasn’t going to heal the part of me that still believed I had to earn my worth, perform perfection, and smile through the quiet ache of not being okay.
Are Self Help Books Bad? Not exactly… but they’re not the whole story.
Let’s answer the question head-on: Are self help books bad? No, they’re not evil. Some are insightful. Some are empowering. A few have changed lives.
But here’s the problem: the entire self-help industry (and let’s be honest, a large part of the therapy world too) is built on the premise that you need to be fixed. That if you just rewire your thinking, optimize your routine, and hustle through your resistance, you’ll become the person you were meant to be.
The problem is, trauma doesn’t live in your mindset. It lives in your body.
And until you understand that — deeply, viscerally — you’ll keep circling the same block, wondering why all your effort still leaves you feeling like a failure.
Why I Didn’t Think I Had Trauma
I used to skip over anything that mentioned trauma. That was for veterans, refugees, survivors of “real” violence. I was a white, suburban girl from a “good family.” We had birthday parties. Vacations. We looked fine from the outside. What I didn’t understand back then is that trauma isn’t always about what happened. It’s about what didn’t happen after.
Trauma is what happens when you go through something overwhelming, and no one helps you process it. When you’re left to cope, alone, with too much — too much fear, too much shame, too much pressure. When your nervous system learns to live in a constant state of tension, but you don’t know anything different because it’s been like that since childhood.
So no, I wasn’t abused in any textbook way, but I was parentified. Ignored. Shamed for expressing needs. Taught to perform niceness instead of feel my truth. I learned to freeze and fawn, to overachieve instead of cry, to work instead of rest, to fix instead of feel.
And that is trauma.
The Body Really Does Keep the Score
If you’ve never read The Body Keeps the Score by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, I highly recommend it — even if you’re skeptical of “trauma talk.” It was the first book that ever made me feel fully seen. One of the most important takeaways is this:
“A great number of the diagnoses in the DSM-V are essentially manifestations of unresolved trauma.”
That sentence stopped me in my tracks. I’d had plenty of diagnoses over the years. Anxiety. Depression. Eating disorders. ADHD. I took medications — and I’m not here to shame anyone who does. Medication can be life-saving. I’ve used it. I support it.
But it’s worth pointing out that there’s a multi-billion dollar pharma industry riding on a book (the DSM-V) that doesn’t even officially recognize complex trauma as a diagnosis.
Let that sink in.
We are medicalizing human responses to pain and survival — and then wondering why we’re still stuck, even after years of “treatment.”
What I Needed Instead of Another Fix
What I really needed all those years was to understand that trauma shaped how I moved through the world. That my freeze responses weren’t laziness. That my perfectionism wasn’t going to get me the love or approval I’d never gotten. That my fear of visibility, my burnout, my shame spirals — none of that meant I was broken.
It meant I had survived in the only way I knew how. And now, I needed a different kind of support to learn how to live — not just cope. That’s what trauma-informed healing is. Not fixing. Not optimizing. Not upgrading your mindset. But learning to feel safe in your body. Learning to listen to your protective parts without judging them. Learning to honor your limits without labeling yourself as “not trying hard enough.”
One last thing.
If you’ve spent years trying to become more disciplined, more confident, or more consistent, I have a gentle suspicion that those things might not actually be the problem.
I created the Have Your Own Back workbook for thoughtful, capable people who can show up brilliantly for everyone else but somehow disappear when their own business needs them most.
It will take about fifteen minutes to go through and may just give you language for experiences you’ve struggled to explain for years.
