Book Review: Approval Addiction

Title: Approval Addiction

Author: Joyce Meyer

Publisher: Warner

Date: 2005

ISBN: 0-446-57772-3

Length: 255 pages

Quote: “[I]f a person is an approval addict, he or she will have an abnormal concern and an abundance of thoughts about what people think of them.”

Joyce Meyer links her “approval addiction” to her abusive childhood. I suspect it may also be linked to her extroversion. As a result I find it hard to relate to or evaluate this book. I believe it may actually be what a former approval addict, which Meyer says she was, told herself in order to succeed in a controversial ministry, which Meyer obviously has done. As such it may be valuable.

To me it sounds like the general free advice some churchgoing types used to throw around, not with a noticeable benefit to anybody, but with the effect of making young people feel unfavorably judged. How could we possibly seem to need both this piece of free advice and that one, and then that other one… Meyer admits that the second half of this book contains general psychological advice not specifically for approval addicts, which she says she found helpful after she was free from approval addiction. I find it hard to imagine how she found it helpful. I find the combined effect of the two halves of the book, in fact, a bit schizophrenic. First readers are told not to compromise their standards, to act independently of whether others give or withhold approval, and then they’re told that now they’re free to be doormats, accept all the blame and fault-finding others dish out so lavishly at the churches where this kind of advice is uttered…and keep claiming that they’re forgiving everything, automatically, that no harm done to them is worth taking any notice of, when in fact they’re not even being told how to pardon anything but just being told to sweep everything under the rug and (fake) smile smile smile until they either go insane or walk away from these hotbeds of verbal abuse that call themselves churches.

Attention tooth-baring churchgoers! A real smile is an involuntary spasm of the eye muscles. Bared teeth, in the absence of that real natural smile that can’t be forced or faked, are not a smile. Even though our mouths will open wide, baring our teeth, in a grin underneath a real smile if we laugh out loud, the grin without the real smile is not a happy or “friendly” look. It’s a threat display, the facial expression of a rabid dog. If God had wanted everybody to have to look at your teeth all the time God wouldn’t have given you lips.

A story Meyer tells as an example of the wonderfulness of what she calls forgiveness is instructive, all right—mostly for what Meyer seems to want to ignore about it.

On pages 107-108 Meyer quotes an account of an old woman in the courtroom where a man has just been convicted of the murders of her husband and her son. The old lady is Black; the murderer, who has confessed, is White; the murders were motivated partly by race bigotry. The old lady is asked, “How should justice be done to this man?” The narrator does not mention a spark of malice in the old lady’s eye, although I find it hard to imagine one not being there, as she says she wants the murderer “to become my son…to come twice a month to the ghetto and spend a day with me so that I can pour out on him whatever love I still have remaining in me,” and she wants help to limp arthritically across the courtroom and “take Mr. Vanderbroek in my arms and embrace him.”

Such extravagant, melodramatic acts of pardon always incorporate a little subtle revenge. Here is a hate-crazed bigot who has always felt entitled to vent all his hostilities on Black people, placed at the mercy of several very angry Black people, sentenced by law to accept “mothering” from a Black woman. (He’s probably felt that he’s outgrown all need for mothering and become superordinate to all women too.) He’s always felt that he’d be defiled if he had to sit a foot away from a Black person on a bench, and now one of them is proposing to take him in her arms! Is there any doubt that all the Black people in this courtroom are loving every minute of this scene? Talk about heaping coals of fire on the head of a thoroughly defeated enemy. The pleasure this story gives readers, as well as the people involved, is both vindictive and sadistic.

If Joyce Meyer had been endowed with the capacity to think through ideas like these, rather than just repeating what was preached at her, I’m sure Approval Addiction would be a better book. As things are…I think the contents of this web site will prove beyond all doubt that I do not suffer and have never suffered from “approval addiction,” so I can’t judge this book. It may be helpful to its intended audience.

Not everyone looks at the photo on the front cover, the tired eyes above the tense ugly grin aggravated with loud-enough-for-TV lipstick, and thinks “That poor woman needs a long vacation before she tries to talk to anybody,” either; my feeling is that when you look like that picture it’s time to go home. Meyer had, at the time this book was published, 51 other books in print. She admits that a lot of this book has been recycled from the others. Surprising? Not. Even if it serves its intended audience well, Approval Addiction is at best an example of what happens when writers try to publish too much too fast and become tired.