Review: Being Human: A User’s Guide by David Ellis

A timely consideration of the foibles, failures, and turning points that define our lives, Being Human: A User’s Guide – Past Performance is Not a Guarantee of Future Results by David Ellis is a revealing combination of memoir and self-help manual, and a testament to the liberatory power of self-knowledge.

As a psychologist of more than four decades, Ellis sets out to answer some of the biggest questions that have been brought before him over the course of his career. From uncovering the root causes of our myriad existential problems and seeing the positive side of mistakes to eliminating despair and becoming a master problem-solver, the book acts as a long-form therapy session for the everyman.

Aimed at people who have suffered from untreated trauma or mental illness, or struggled with letting go of the enduring disappointments in the past, the book offers a new perspective on reintroducing joy into every corner of one’s life. Through a mixture of personal anecdotes, anonymized stories from his patients, timeless quotes, and philosophical discourse, the author delivers a tough-love collection of reflection interspersed with practical wisdom and tangible techniques for emotional regulation.

Specifically, Ellis is a firm proponent of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Effectiveness Therapy, and Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), each of which he outlines in the text, but the impact and philosophy of Alcoholics Anonymous receives the most attention. Ellis regularly returns to the life-saving nature of the program, not least of all because he is a recovering alcoholic and a Licensed Addictions Counselor. Normalizing the concepts of AA and demystifying the idea of therapy, the text works as a gentle nudge towards the challenging first steps of radical change.

As an author and therapist who was “exposed to some of the most brilliant minds in the fields of psychiatry and psychology,” readers can expect the text to be heady, with a handful of touchstone ideas that the author often drops casually in the prose, but there is an accessibility to even the most complex ideas or therapeutic theories presented here. In particular, the advice on reframing trauma responses as invasive weeds, rather than personality defects, may act as lightbulb moments for readers wandering in the emotional dark.

There are occasional passages that lean into stream of consciousness and can feel tangential, as well as some moments of humor that may not land as intended. While the book doesn’t rely on the standard cliché aphorisms that one often finds in works of self-help, the book is not wholly clear of this type of language. There are also minor errors that a proofreader should have caught (e.g., “tenant” vs “tenet”), and these casual mistakes can subtly undercut the book’s authority. Overall, however, this book shows Ellis as a skilled scientific communicator and an emotionally adept writer, navigating the line between conversational and educational with finesse.

Despite some structural looseness, the intriguingly blurred line between personal memoir and self-help makes this an affecting guide, and the author’s potentially life-changing advice is backed by an overwhelming wealth of empathy and experience.