I suspect "only you can help yourself" is a spin-off of "God helps those who help themselves", and I have just done a little searching to try to find the origin of either. Bottom line? "Only you can help yourself"(with no thought or mention of "God") likely stems from "typically-American pragmatism: the can-do, self-reliant, nothing-is-impossible, rugged individualist American ethos." --Dave Armstrong
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Originally Posted by divine1966
If you are passive and maybe aren’t ready to make change or even ask for help, then no amount of help will change anything.
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I can understand why some people might view a plea for help as an act of some kind of so-called "self-help", but then that clouds the matter of the source of the help that is actually needed and thereafter provided. As shared:
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Originally Posted by all74
...can we help ourselves? Sure, if we actually know what the problem is and have the resources and the level of functioning to do so.
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Many people like to refer to addictions recovery as "self-help", but here is the origin of virtually all addictions recovery:
"If we are painstaking about this phase of our development [Steps Four through Nine]... We will suddenly realize God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves." ("A.A.", pages 83-84)
I was told I would have to pick up the hoe if I wanted to grow potatoes, but my doing so did not make me the provider of my food.