One of my pet peeves is people who exploit others.

Like seriously, if you’re going to be a bad person, go commit insurance fraud. Step on a kitten. I don’t know; rob a bank. 

But to exploit the vulnerability of a person who has an emotional lack and is susceptible to falling for it because of brain wiring, neurobiology, and the psychological functioning of humans?

You can visit the hell of fire and brimstone. I have no sympathy for you in my heart, and I hope every single person you meet immediately sees right through you.

In keeping with that theme, let’s discuss advice found on the repository of all wisdom: the internet.

Relationship advice is so popular online. The self improvement market in the U.S is estimated to be valued at $13.4 billion in 2022, and globally, it’s worth more than you can ever spend on all your vacations – $40 billion. Over 40 million self help books sold in the US in 2019, and relationships and personal transformation were in the top categories. (This blasts the idea that no one wants to improve themselves nowadays. Maybe the advice is keeping people stuck, or maybe the wrong people are reading it. Anyway, something to think about.) In fact, self help is one of the most popular genres, with over 50 million searches per year and multiple topics repeating themselves. It’s like the YouTube version of the makeup industry; millions are invested, millions buy it, and the sellers make billions.

Here’s one alarming fact to spice up your day: research found that less than a fifth of it is grounded in empirical evidence and science; it’s personal experiences, stories, or however the author dealt with their own trauma.

But anyway, relationship advice is super popular. Just take a look at the endless resources you can pay for and the amount of ‘link in my bio’s’ you hear after watching relationship videos.

One of the reasons it’s so popular is that it appeals to the most basic human need of survival: attachment. (I’ve written before about how humans are unique in the sense that emotional threats trigger the survival mechanism; biology and emotions are inherently linked; bodily expressions are often symptoms of emotions and everybody has them. See: Moldy Cheese and Fire Alarm Systems: Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn.) 

Anyway, anyone lacking in a basic area is vulnerable to exploitation. This is true both physically and emotionally; it’s why you see traffickers offering food, shelter, warmth, etc. And emotionally? The same is true. We humans have universal basic emotional needs, just as we do with physical needs. There are homogenous ones that all humans share, and then they can branch out, and the same is true with emotion. (And then once your brain links a certain source to survival, it will literally suppress reality to make the situation with that source plausible to live in. But that’s a conversation for a different time.)

We are born with one basic instinct, to attach. I heard this said so perfectly by Kate Gray, LMFT (go check out her stuff right now! It takes a moment to click codependencykate.com. And check out her Spotify, YouTube, twitch…everything!) And you need to attach to survive; it is physically impossible to make it in this word as an infant without a caregiver. The ones who were left out, died. And the ones who didn’t have their emotional needs met, have worse physical health. And the ones who didn’t get touched at all? Died. Emotional health is part of physical health; in fact, one can say that emotional health is physical health and physical health is emotional health. (Again, see: If You Have a Body, You Are Emotional.) To assess how much your emotional circumstances might have affected your health, check out this Adverse Childhood Experience scale.)

Anyway, we all have this attachment need running through us. The same way there are endless videos advising people how to be financially stable, and those get wildly popular – again, survival – there are endless videos trying to fill the hole of emotional survival. 

An unhealthy childhood is often characterized by a child modifying themselves in order to keep an adult attachment. This often translates into an unhealthy adult relationship, where I focus on how to modify myself to keep the attachment instead of how I can fully behave from my own values.

Unhealthy advice is often focused on: how do I keep this other person? How do I do what they want so they don’t leave me (while ironically the video editor is calling you selfish)? The videos are titled: ‘Respect him more so he doesn’t leave!’ Or, ‘Modify your personality so he’ll want you!,’ ‘Have more sex and everything will be okay!,’ or ‘Don’t expect chivalry if you won’t give up your autonomy!’ 

One of the markers of unhealthy relationship advice is that it is focused on how to keep someone else. ‘Do this not to lose ____!,’ Do this to get ______!’ ‘You better not do this, or else ____ will leave you!’ It is centered around getting someone else.

And one of the markers of healthy relationship advice is: Here’s how you build up yourself and your values, and maximize who you can become. (Ironically, the best way to keep good relationships is not to hinge all your behavior around keeping them. If you have to, they probably weren’t great anyway.) Here’s how you develop your internal world. Here’s how you get in touch with your experiences, and here’s how you behave from your values, not from the experiences of the reactions around you. Here’s how take advice about vulnerability and emotion for yourself. You focus on where things are coming from for you. And if someone is not meeting those standards, here is how you set accountability for them and leave if you must, not teach them with these materials (because we can never change other adults, and if they wanted to stop their wrong behavior, they would have already.) Here is how you focus on setting boundaries and developing your sense of internal safety when others have a bad reaction to it. Here is how you develop yourself. It is not marked by keeping someone else; it is marked by being your best self. It is centered around self development.