On Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before?

Julie Smith’s Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? is an excellent primer on the therapeutic, psychological tools taught in counseling sessions. She organizes it thematically, under eight section headings:

• On Dark Places
• On Motivation
• On Emotional Pain
• On Grief
• On Self-Doubt
• On Fear
• On Stress
• On a Meaningful Life

Every one of these sections has techniques I’ve managed, one way or another, to incorporate into my own life — for which I can thank two years of therapy, some of it coached directly, some taught indirectly through little practices and prompts that helped me find my way over time. The section I learned the most from was “On Self-Doubt,” full of fascinating material on reframing how we see the world and our own place in it, but I think the most useful for serious progress is the final one, “On a Meaningful Life.”

I’m of the view that depression, anxiety, and the other mental health troubles people like me experience are signals — the mind trying to tell us something. That may not hold for situations requiring more serious intervention, like personality disorders, but it seems a good rule of thumb for the neurotic clusters of symptoms: depression, for instance, might be better understood as a good old spiritual crisis (not in a religious sense), a breakdown in our ability to generate meaning in our own lives, with the other symptoms emerging from the same breakdown. “On a Meaningful Life” gives the reader strategies for thinking clearly about what matters most and then aligning their actions with those larger values, and that “re-chunking” and explicit ordering of values has been especially important to me in finding my way out of a real, serious identity crisis. One thing Smith stresses, and I’ll reiterate, is how difficult it is to delineate the values we define for ourselves when so much of our lives has been defined by others. I won’t go so far as to say other people’s views don’t matter — I don’t think we can ever wholly define our own selfhood; it comes out of a psychic negotiation between our own cognitive “interface” and what’s expected of us by those outside the “I” — but we do have to take stock of what we believe, or think we believe, and try to live in alignment with it, refining our values and adjusting our lives when we find a disconnect.

There’s one major weakness: relationships don’t get a section of their own. There are frequent references to the need for close connection, just as there is for exercise and good sleep, but only one chapter is dedicated to it, tucked under the meaningful-life section, which undersells how important human connection is to mental health, and how much work managing relationships takes. I’d have liked a whole cluster of chapters on it. The book also isn’t one to read cover to cover, the way I did; I’d urge readers to buy their own copy rather than rely on a three-week library loan, and to dive into chapters as needed — someone grieving a loved one might sit with “On Grief” several times over, someone in a bout of recurrent anxiety with “On Fear,” someone struggling to get things done with “On Motivation.” Reading it that way will be far more useful than consuming it in one go. For anyone who wants to go deeper, Smith provides an extensive bibliography of reliable sources — and, more important, I’d urge anyone who wants to put these tools into practice to book weekly therapy sessions and work directly with a professional. It has made an enormous difference to me, and it might to you.