The Pitfalls of Self-Help: Forced Positivity

Being Well with Forrest Hanson and Dr. Rick Hanson

Being Well

Education, Self-improvement, Health & Fitness, Mental Health

4.8 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 13 July 2020

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Do self-help environments force us into inauthentic happiness? And how can we move away from the false front, and into more authentic expression? This is the first of a series of episodes dedicated to some of the self-help community's pitfalls. This is a self-help podcast. And there's a lot to like about self-help! But it has it's issues as well. Today we're exploring one of them: toxic positivity and forced happiness. New Sponsor: Join over a million people using BetterHelp, the world’s largest online counseling platform. Visit betterhelp.com/beingwell for 10% off your first month! Key Topics: 3:00: Rick’s personal experience inside the personal development world. 8:00: Things that tend to limit abuses of power. 10:00: The democratization of self-help, and related pitfalls. 18:00: Act, scared self, and true being. 21:00: Where does toxic positivity appear? 26:00: The importance of authenticity. 29:30: The false front. 32:30: Encouraging other people to be fully authentic. Support the Podcast: We're now on Patreon! If you'd like to support the podcast, follow this link. From Dr. Hanson: Hardwire lasting change into your mind and heart in just a few minutes a day with Dr. Rick Hanson's new program: Just One Minute. Use the code BEINGWELL at checkout for 10% off the purchase price! The Foundations of Well-Being brings together the lessons of a lifetime of practice into one year-long online program. Podcast listeners can use the code BEINGWELL25 at checkout for an additional 25% off! Please don't hesitate to apply for a scholarship if you're in need. Connect with the show: Follow us on Instagram Follow Rick on Facebook Follow Forrest on Facebook Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everyone. Welcome to Being Well, I'm Forrest Hansen.
0:07.0	As you know if you've listened before on this podcast we focus on personal growth
0:11.6	self-development and the key internal and interpersonal strengths that
0:16.2	help us through the hard parts of being human.
0:19.4	To simplify it neatly, this is a self-help podcast and there's a lot to like about self-help
0:25.7	the desire to better oneself and through that achieve some kind of reliable
0:30.0	happiness and well-being in this often unreliable world is a very noble one.
0:35.1	And I have nothing but respect for people who put the time and effort in that's
0:39.4	necessary to achieve that goal. Speaking personally, it's obviously been a pretty big part of my life.
0:45.5	But there's a problematic side to self-help too, from overclaiming
0:50.5	gurus and pseudoscience to forced happiness and toxic
0:54.9	positivity, to full cults and half a cults and everything in between, to
1:00.4	proselytizing elements of self-help to other people and to the abuses of power that some individuals often fall into,
1:09.0	there are plenty of pitfalls to avoid here.
1:12.0	Over the next few weeks, we're going to be exploring some of those topics.
1:15.0	So to help me do that, I'm joined today as usual by Dr. Rick Hansen,
1:19.0	so Dad, how are you doing?
1:21.0	I'm good, and I'm very interested in this topic because both I deal with this space
1:27.1	to a fair extent for a living and second in terms of my own personal life journey from the late 60s on forward,
1:35.0	I've kind of been in the middle of this myself and I've seen the good, the bad, and the
1:40.3	ugly from the inside out as well as the outside end so I'm really happy we're going to talk about this.
1:46.1	Yeah same I mean this is something that I've been thinking about for a long time including kind of
	...

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