About a week ago during one of my regular blogging brainstorms I came across an interesting topic I was initially planning to discuss today, but after watching an interesting movie that had multiple topics and issues related to my topic, I will hold off on my earlier ideas and discuss them at a later blog entry. As I have mentioned throughout my earlier posts the personal development and the self-help gurus linked to the personal development world have a notorious dogma attached to them. These recurrent beliefs were further strengthened during a movie I saw over the weekend. Darren Aronofsky is the director of the film “Requiem for a Dream” which depicts the fate of four individuals pursuing their twisted version happiness. Each of these four individuals has a dramatic theme linked in an attempt to give the audience a provoking underlying message. Among these four individuals is an older woman who feels that her ultimate destination of happiness will come from making an appearance on television; an appearance on television would make her feel like she is wanted, young, and important again. This particular “vision” of happiness that she has comes from an individual on television named “Tappy Tibbons”— essentially a parody of Tony Robbins through an infomercial throughout the movie.
As the movie progresses, the audience gets the feeling that the older, and more naive woman is being exploited by Tappy Tibbons. She follows his every message and quirky ways of thinking so much so that her entire demeanor changes for the worse. The message that I get out of this movie about self-help gurus is unmistakably clear—these gurus are out to exploit the naive and simply have no real value in helping those with a legitimate need for help. It is through this parody that one is able to clearly distinguish much of the distaste and disgust that some individuals have for Tony Robbins and others like him. As I have continually written about much of the dislike towards the self-help community and the leaders involved I would like to touch on some of the reasons why I think that many are not taken seriously.
Clearly, the movie is picking off of some of the peculiar techniques that many of the self-help speakers have used at their seminars, but maybe it is the fault of the self-help community that have single-handedly created their loss of credibility through the years. Between the bizarre TV ads, miraculous claims, and other seemingly unimaginable
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