The Secret? The Law of Attraction Invites Delusional Thinking

"I just read The Secret, so I'm feeling very positive," she told me. "I'm going to put my wish out to the universe and attract the relationship that I want." 

What? My friend is a smart, successful businesswomen, experienced with life, love, and the active pursuit of a good life. I didn't want to be a wet blanket, a negative crimp in her style, a realistic pain in the neck, but I couldn't just sit there and say, "What a great idea?" I restricted my comment to, "I think The Law of Attraction is BS." "It is?"she said, her tone expressing surprise and disappointment.

I didn't go on to crush her with reality and logic which she clearly didn't want to hear at that moment.
Later I found a terrific article on the topic by Paul Sloane, a British Twitterer. http://is.gd/aN3AL   

 Here is an excerpt from his writing.

"The Law of Attraction as expounded by Rhonda Byrne in her best-selling book, The Secret, and by her many followers claims that all you need to do is to think about the things that you want in your life and the 'Universe' will supply them in abundance - whether they are positive or negative. So if you think about money you will get money; if you focus on your debts you will stay in debt. If you think about being slim you will become slim whereas if you constantly worry about how fat you are you will stay fat. Unfortunately for the proponents of this law there is no scientific evidence to support it.  (Bolding is my addition. Smart people generally look for evidence of truth and fact.) There are plenty of anecdotes from people who believe the law worked for them but for each of these stories there are many other possible explanations. No one has carried out a controlled experiment showing that the so-called law actually works.

Furthermore the law runs up against some very practical difficulties. What if several people all want the same promotion and think about it furiously? How can they all get the same post? The law implies that whatever difficulties you have in life are the result of you thinking the wrong thoughts. So it appears that an abused child, a rape victim or a prisoner in a concentration camp was somehow to blame because they thought negative thoughts. This is offensive to victims and flies in the face of common sense."

Mary Karr, NST in the Extreme, and Prayer with Resistance

Here's an interesting add-on to the earlier post about prayer. Mary Karr, author of Lit, describes the extremely nasty self-talk she generates as she is recovering from alcoholism.

“ . . . my inner monologue—what you would hear more or less constantly, should we turn up the volume on it —went, Oh shit, stupid bitch. What’ve you done now? Fuckup fuckup fuckup . . . “

Later in the book, she notes with self-aware surprise, that prayer ultimately helped her to reduce the negative self-talk and moved her toward recovery, despite her long-term resistance to the Higher Power tenet of AA.

Prayer is really a form of cognitive restructuring, changing what you're saying to yourself, a big category of techniques that are useful in breaking the negative self-talk habit.

Prayer, Religious Upbringing and NST

Comment from a reader: 
"How much of our default to NST as intelligent adult women begins with training in childhood? I'm suspecting it's a practice embedded deeply for girls and all the more entrenched with religious upbringing. In my case NST was couched as almost virtuous behavior - humbling yourself before God - I'm a bad person, forgive me, being the proper way to pray."

At the "Break the Negative Self-Talk" presentation ten days ago, the topic of prayer was also brought up as a potential, subtle, and unintended form of negative self talk. e.g. "God, help me to stop being so selfish, mean, and angry all the time." The prayer is saying, "I'm a bad person," exactly as the reader comments above. How could this prayer be restated, acknowledging a need for improvement, but not dumping on one's self? "God, help me to be a caring, kinder, calmer, woman." That's a good example of plain old cognitive restructuring, changing what you're saying to yourself.

Yes, it's a small difference, in perspective, but it isn't a self- put down. You're asking for help to be a better person than you already are, rather than asking for help because you are a bad person. Even if you just say those two sentences out loud right now, as if you were saying them to a friend, a therapist, a partner, or a higher power of any kind, the latter will feel better than the former.