LOA is not a law - two examples

by Blair Warren

I have been involved in a discussion on a forum and learned that critics like me don’t provide examples when we try to debunk The Secret and the Law of Attraction.

That is news to me, but just to make this person happy I posted the following for his consideration:

Example 1:

Verbal Exposure Therapy in which patients are instructed to repeat their worst fears to themselves hundreds and hundreds of times in order to desensitize themselves to their fears. Does focusing on what they “don’t want” cause it to come true? No. It often causes them to get well which is what they *did* want.

Here’s a link about a recent news story that discussed this type of therapy:

http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=2893713&page=1

Example 2:

Here are a couple of excerpts from page 17 of the book Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, Harvard College Professor of Psychology:

“...thinking about the future can be so pleasurable that sometimes we’d rather think about it than get there.”

He continues a bit later…

“For instance, volunteers in one study were asked to imagine themselves requesting a date with a person on whom they had a major crush, and those who had had the most elaborate and delicious fantasies about approaching their heartthrob were *least* likely to do so over the next few months.”

Of course, these two examples do not prove The Secret does not work for some people some of the time. But they do provide evidence that The Secret is not the *universal law* it is being portrayed to be.

Some people just seem to be “wired” differently than others. And to tell these people to avoid thinking about what they don’t want and only focus on what they do want is ineffective at best and harmful at worst. See the book White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts: Suppression, Obsession, and the Psychology of Mental Control by Daniel M. Wegner for more details.

Posted on Monday, February 26, 2007 at 08:12 AM

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