ANOTHER LOOK
AT THE LAW OF ATTRACTION
A few caveats to consider

By ROSEMARY J. STAUBER

Sweeping the nation, it seems, with a generous push from Oprah is the concept of the Law of Attraction. Oprah has promoted the concepts addressed in The Secret on her television program and on her XM Radio Soul Series.

(The secret is basically the Law of Attraction: What you focus on is what you attract to yourself. If you are constantly fearing the worst and obsessing about it, that’s what you bring more of into your life. If you pray, plead, and beg for enough “just to get by,” that’s what you get. If instead, you focus on abundance with imagery and accompanying positive emotions, that is what will come to you.)

This is not a new idea. It has been around in various written forms since at least the early 20th century, and even before that, according to The Secret. In 1977, when I was in the process of getting the Bexar County Women’s Center going, I was looking for funding and establishing programs. The “form” then was imagery: If you create a detailed image of what you want, it will happen. Not by magic, the theory went — it’s when you build a good enough image that you automatically do what you need to do to make it happen.

My process for building the Women’s Center image was to write the proposals. They required extensive detail so that the image was well established in my conscious and unconscious minds, and it came to be. When I left, the Women’s Center was thriving, with a near $1 million budget, and was operating various programs my staff and I had envisioned and described in the many proposals we wrote.

The Secret is an inspirational film in which many people explain how the Law of Attraction works. There are also vignettes focusing on people who attribute their success to this secret.

The vignette that impressed me the most is the one by Jack Canfield, co-author with Mark Hansen of Chicken Soup for the Soul. Jack said his annual income was around $8,000. A man named W. Clement Stone inspired him to think big. He took a $1 bill and converted it to $100,000 and put it on his ceiling above his bed. It was the last thing he saw at night and the first thing in the morning. His goal was to make $100,000 that year. He had no idea how. He had written a book, and it was on the market. He realized that if he could sell 400,000 of those books for 25 cents each, he would have his $100,000.

Then he went to the supermarket and saw a display for the National Enquirer. He thought if he could get an article into that publication, he could sell the 400,000 books. A few days later, he was speaking at a conference. A woman came up to him afterwards, saying she wanted to write an article about him. He asked which publication she wrote for. She said she was a freelance writer, and the National Enquirer bought most of her stuff. That caught his attention. She did write the article, and the upshot was that he made $92,300 that year. That was OK with him. Close enough.

His wife then suggested that if he could do that with $100,000, why not $1,000,000? And that’s what he did with Chicken Soup for the Soul. He made that his goal, and his publisher wrote him a check for $1,000,000.

The movie is very inspirational and some critics say “too glitzy” and too focused on material things. The principals in the movie do talk about abundance in all areas — financial, relationships, love, etc. It’s all right with me to focus on material things. Once one achieves financial abundance, one can do with it what s/he wants, after all.

It sounds very simple. The tenet is basically this: Anything you want is yours for the asking. All you have to do is “ask, believe and receive.” Where it breaks down, usually, is in the “believe” part. Many have been so steeped in the negative, we are not even aware of the unconscious negatives that are defeating us. And often, people give up just before the success begins to break through.

Michael Losier published a small book, The Law of Attraction: The science of attracting more of what you want and less of what you don’t. In it, he guides us through the process of listing what we don’t want and replacing it with what we do want. Therefore we are beginning to choke out the negative and replace it with the positive. He also describes a child’s toy that resembles a cylinder. If you put a marble in the top, the goal is for it to come out the bottom. However, about midway on the cylinder are holes that sticks slide into. These sticks block the progress of the marble. They represent our self-doubts and are what keep us from believing and thus from reaching our goals. Learning how to “pull out the sticks” and therefore rid ourselves of the doubts is the tricky part. Losier includes forms that allow us to move in the process.

I have concerns about the Law of Attraction — caveats, if you will. One is that it encourages denial. One scene depicts a very worried-looking man chaining his bicycle to a post. When he returns, nothing is left but the chain. The implication is that he attracted the theft by focusing on it, perhaps obsessing on it. (Various speakers in the movie stress that the more emotion that goes into your imagery, the faster the process of attraction works.) Another scene features a woman diagnosed with breast cancer who heals herself over a three-month period with positive thinking and watching funny movies. I am concerned that people watching this sequence will not get the treatment they need.

Another concern I have is the “blame the victim” mentality that can arise from these views. Thus, if you develop an illness and die, it’s because 1) you attracted it to you and 2) you weren’t strong enough in your positive thinking to ward it off.

While I absolutely believe in the power of positive thinking and the importance of rooting out negative beliefs about ourselves, I also will continue to lock my car, get my annual mammogram and physical and buy insurance. I also have the perhaps na95ve belief that we are all going to die, and no amount of positive attraction can make us live forever.

As for bad things coming to us because we attract them, think about the infant with fatal cancer, the 2-year-old who is molested and many more. Some bad things just happen. We can certainly use the Law of Attraction to deal with them, but I don’t believe we necessarily attract them.

Rosemary J. Stauber, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist in San Antonio and founding director of the Bexar County Women’s Center.