In trying to better handle my emotional life, I am beginning to see the following in the kinds of highly rated self-help books out there. They fall into two camps, it seems:

Increasingly popular:
* Emotions are overrated and tend to cause emotional reasoning, which is bad.
* Logic is so awesome it should be given a medal.
* Don't set your sights too high, you'll be disappointed and get learned helplessness.
* People tend to be too full of themselves and unreasonable because of it.
* "Ego" is bad.
* If you don't like your circumstances, its time to better adapt to them.
* When feeling depressed, take baby steps and don't trust your judgement, don't try to make any major changes.

Decreasingly popular:
* Validate your emotions, they have a message to convey, but be careful with Fear, it's the one that lies a lot.
* Thinking is often more of a problem then emotion because that is where cognitive distortions lie - emotions just follow them. The problem is negative expectations that seem logical.
* People get depressed because their expectations are too low and they need to be more assertive.
* Work on your self-esteem, and build your ego strength ... too many issues are caused by absorbed emotional invalidation.
* If you don't like your circumstances, you're playing in the wrong ballpark - find your niche.
* To fight depression, you might just need a lifestyle overhaul - DO make major changes.
* "Reasonable" means "think small and pessimistically" for too many people, so it's time to be UNreasonable!

So why oh why is it ... that for me the second set of assertions, and books and authors which say those things, seem to do me far more real good than the first, apparently increasingly popular type (still useful, but less so)!?!? (I just find it challenging to make these helpful messages stick). Apparently what is helping me the most is no longer as widely accepted in psychology circles, or so it appears to me. Bah!!!! I'm helped more by things that increasingly popular theory says "should" make me worse!? What the ...? Oh well, never was much for the "mainstream" I guess.

I wonder if various competing theories simply go in and out of vogue as theorists notice more people having issues in specific directions, probably due to cultural changes and differences in parenting and school systems over time. The problem is, all these competing theories will do some good to some people ... to heavily paraphrase Lincoln, you can't use one model to treat all of the people all of the time. Perhaps what works best for a 40-something like me is not what works best for a 20-something today? The cultural landscape can change a lot in 20 years. What do you think?