The mythical ‘law of attraction’ is deeply ingrained in our society. But you are not responsible for who approaches you, only who you seek and keep in your life.

The creation and growth of the Pearl of Purity starts with a proper view of responsibilities, moves on to optimal speech and actions and is completed with mindfulness. In the previous article I explained what slime does to us and how a proper view on personal responsibilities protects and cleans us from it. Still, I have to address one specific belief about the ‘law of attraction’ that is deeply ingrained in our modern society. This myth holds innocent people responsible instead of the culprits. It is imbedded in our language grammatically, stemming from a perception that perverted society for thousands of years. Once you recognize the falsehood of this particular belief, your Pearl of Purity becomes a mighty tool to expose psychopaths in plain view without you ever needing to lift a finger or open your mouth.

THE MANTRA OF “WHAT YOU ATTRACT…”

After I discovered that my ex was a psychopath, after I learned about this disorder and the implications of certain behaviour, arguments and reasoning, several small incidents occurred in its aftermath. For example a man interrupted my best female friend and I while we were talking in a pub. He introduced himself by praising my best friend for her naughty and dangerous appearance, while putting me down for looking like a bleeding heart, the sweet girl next door. Not only was it a red flag how he tried to triangulate two female friends to compete for his ‘approval’, it was also disturbing that he treated admirable traits – an idealistic profession and friendly appearance – as something to be ashamed about. But instead of feeling slimed, I recognized the red flags and stared at him as if he was a curiosity.  The meeting ended with my friend demanding him to apologize to me. And after he had and I acknowledged it with a nod, I turned my back to him for I did not approve of him.

This man was not the sole freak or stranger who tried to devalue or demean me without provocation and out of the blue since D-Day. I am even quite sure that you too have noticed how many toxic people approach you. They seem to be everywhere in multitudes and keep on coming. You do not like them. You do not want them in your life. You do not even know some of these people. And you wonder, “What the heck is wrong with me that I attract these people?” You are sure that deep down you think not well enough of yourself; that some hidden negative self-belief within is visible to others.

STOP!

You are just about to accept the slime from the mantra of  “We attract what we believe we deserve”. This mantra is touted since the 20th century as the law of attraction. It tells us that whatever happens to us and whomever appears into our lives is something that we caused mentally; that if we but validate ourselves, think positive, only good people will knock on our doors; and that if abusive people try a shot at us, we are somehow magically responsible for that. More, it claims we have control over who and what happens in our life with our thoughts and beliefs.*

We cannot control nor are responsible for the behaviour, actions, words and choices of the psychopath we had a relationship with. Then how could we be responsible for a total stranger trying his luck with any of us? How could we control strangers and coincidence? Our beliefs and feelings do not function like invisible strings pulling in a multitude of strangers like puppets from all over the world. You do not consider yourself a puppet on a string of beliefs and feelings of someone else either. So, do not consider your self-belief as an immensely powerful puppet-master.

The mantra is wrong and turns responsibilities 180° around. We have no control over who crosses our lifepath. Toxic people may try us out when we are whole, confident and self-validating as much as when we are not. It is not our fault, nor our shame, nor our responsibility.

“But,” I hear you argue, “what about all those bad relationships I had in the past? Surely, there is something I must learn about the fact that I serially picked awful partners.”

And I wholeheartedly agree with that remark. There is much to learn about our vulnerabilities, mistakes and responsibilities in this regard. But it is an entirely different situation. While we have control over who we seek out or choose to keep in our lives, we cannot control a stranger’s choice to try us out. It is exactly the latter the new age mantra tries to slime you with.

THE ORIGIN OF THE MANTRA

Desiring a person can feel as if we are bewitched, as Frank Sinatra so eloquently sang. Most of us had a crush once on someone who never noticed or heard of us. Or someone claimed to be attracted to us, while we never invited or returned the feeling. A coincidental glance had meaning or was imagined to be purposeful. In the worst case, a stalker blames the target for leading them on, even though the opposite is true. So, though it feels different, the admirer (who is attracted) is the active participant responsible for his or her feelings. Whereas the one being admired (who attracts) is passive and innocent. This seems confusing since grammatically ‘to attract’ is an active form, and ‘to  be attracted’ is a passive form. The real active individual of the two is not the linguistic active person. This perpetuates confusion on who is responsible and who is blameless. No doubt it was the bewitching sensation that created the linguistic mess in the first place. Perhaps it helps to use the verb ‘to admire’ instead. At least the grammatical activity aligns to that of the reality.

This wrongly ascribing responsibility with the attraction dynamics surely must lie at the root of how society has treated and viewed women – often regarded as more attractive than men – for thousands of years. They were witches, sorceresses, nymphs, or Sirens who used spells to make a man mad for her and lead him on the path of war, destruction and rape. Not even a queen (e.g. Anne Boleyn) was safe from such accusations. Greek epics were written over one woman’s fatal attraction (the Ilias and the Odysee). Women are obliged to stay  indoors or be covered from head to toe. When raped they are ostracized by their husband, neighbors and family, or forced to marry their rapist or stoned to death. Even in the West her dress, make-up, alcohol intoxication and flirting behaviour is still put under the microscope, while the media pushes for the sales of perfume, make-up, wonderbras, surgery and dress. And though victims are blamed less, on some subconscious, magical, karmic level they are still blamed for it with the mantra.

It was slick guru-like salesmen in the 80s and 90s, trying to get rich on the sales of books and life coaching sessions on how to acquire the life you dreamed about, that heavily promoted this mantra. What are the odds that these men proclaiming to possess the ‘secret’ key to success were high in psychopathic traits? At the very least it fits the psychopathic projection patterns, blaming and pushing responsibility on those who are in fact innocent. Be very critical of this mantra and recognize it for what it is: a psychopathic slime tactic that makes no sense at all. You are as little responsible of a psychopath coming up to talk to you, as you are for another Jack In The Box starting its business around your corner.

WHAT MAKES US IRRESISTIBLY ATTRACTED TO THE WRONG PEOPLE?

Many of you may have discovered a pattern of being attracted to abusive or unavailable people. The root of this attraction to the wrong people often took hold in our youth. Ken Page says in a blog article that “Even though we may be adults, all of us have unresolved childhood hurts due to betrayal, anger, manipulation or abuse. Unconsciously, we seek healing through our partner. And we try to achieve this healing by bonding with someone who we sense might hurt us in similar ways to how we were hurt as children, in the hope that we can convince him or her to finally love and accept us. Our conscious self is drawn to the positive qualities we yearn for, but our unconscious draws us to the qualities which remind us of how we were wounded the most.”* He continues to explain that those people we feel almost instant chemistry with are exactly these individuals we instinctively recognize to be able to harm us the most. It is as if we are trauma-bonded not just to an individual, but to a certain type of personality within a population. We are already trauma-bonded to certain persons, before we ever met them.

I know that I was trauma bonded to the wrong people since my 7^th year. Though I had a loving home, I was scapegoated by my peers and elementary teacher. This teacher had created two classes, each with a different label – ‘favorites, intelligent, middle class’ versus ‘leftover, dumb and poor’. To cover up his selection method from criticism by parents, he sacrificed some bright children to join the ‘leftover’ group. I was one of those sacrificial lambs. The next school year the two groups were joined to be one again, and I learned I had an invisible stamp on my forehead that read ‘dumb and poor’. Meanwhile, the teacher disliked evidence of my intelligence and subtly belittled me: he expressed surprise on my academic results, blocked me from certain books though I had top reading levels, and ridiculed my career aspirations as weird for a girl. I was excluded and ignored by my peers. I could not comprehend why I was not worthy to be anyone’s special friend or why it was ridiculous to even have a thing for the alpha boy in class.

As a result I have felt compelled to prove the opposite is true far into my adult life: that I was bright, a worthy friend to shallow, popular girls, and a worthy choice of a woman by the side of the cool, ‘bad boy’ alpha male. That I admired and sought exactly the people that were forbidden to me, whether for friendship or romance was a perverse dynamic that only perpetuated the trauma. I made the first steps in the right social direction when I was a sophomore. I started to choose my friends based on how truly fascinating they were in a meaningful way, and shallow popularity status became irrelevant. Still it took me a decade to realize that, instead of socially awkward and an ugly duckling, I was a socialite, the glue between people, a natural group leader and a swan. Unfortunately I still believed that only if I could make an unattainable man choose me, I proved myself worthy of love. The psychopath was the stereotypical bad boy and represented that lifelong dream of a 10 year old. Only at the end of it, did my inner child realize that the alpha boy from elementary school – like the popular girls – was not worthy of me. These men were unattractive and abhorrent to me now. And perhaps for the first time, alpha status of a man is irrelevant to me.

WHAT MAKES US ATTRACT (WRONG) PEOPLE?

When I Googled this question, I encountered answers such as ‘taking care of yourself’ and ‘confidence’. But it goes even further than that. Sure, men and women approached me when I was “confident and single”. But they did even more when I was “confident and in love”. Then it was as if I was a magnet, an irresistible pot of honey, even though nobody knew I was taken. The answer is that the most attractive people are exactly those people who are not occupied with whether they are attractive or not. Likewise, the people who put in the most energy and focus on it, are the least attractive. When we validate ourselves, build our Pearl of Purity, we cease to care about validation through attraction, and our attractiveness rises with it.

Statistically, 1 to 4% of the people you meet on the street, at work, in the gym, at work, or in the pub are psychopaths, and plenty more are toxic. They are predators and opportunists and regard everyone, including other psychopaths, as possible prey and opportunity. It is a statistical certainty, that no matter how well or low you think of yourself, that a psychopath will appear in the periphery of your life. It is nothing personal. It is just who they are and how they behave. So, please stop taking it personal.

You can grey-rock people you already know to be toxic or strangers, but you cannot cloak yourself everywhere, all the time, especially when you are in the company of good friends. There will be moments, when you are your natural relaxed self and your Pearl will shine. You smile and laugh. People in the environment will notice. Some may come to you, intrude and behave obnoxiously. More, the less you care about being noticed, the more likely that you are noticed.

So, face it,  toxic people may attempt to approach you regularly. In the end, it does not matter whether all the psychopaths, Machiavellists and toxic people of the world come knocking on your door. All that matters is that you are not attracted to them yourself, that you can discover them for who they are, say ‘no’ and just close the door on every one of them without thinking twice about it, let alone feel slimed over it.

THE PEARL OF PURITY EXPOSES TOXICS

So, what is truly happening then, when we seem to detect a rise of psychopaths approaching us? Why does it seem as if all the muck of the world surfaces and tries to stick to us like slimy glue?

First of all, there is the ‘blue car phenomenon’. This phenomenon explains how you notice certain objects, subjects or people more because of a shifted focus. Certainly after the discovery we are hyper vigilant. We learned about red flags, and so we notice them more than we would have in the past. We also accept their implications more readily. Before, we missed its significance, especially when we were love-bombed and flattered.

Secondly, our response to red flag behaviour has also changed. Aware of the lovebombs meaning, and being more self-validating, we become immune and less responsive to flattery and slime tactics. Not a month after that rude stranger in the bar, I met a long ago acquaintance again at a private party of one of my friends. He was always a touchy-feely flatterer. I was never particularly attracted to him, but I never minded him either. This time though, I did not respond to his flattery. Before long, he ended up crawling on the dance floor to look under my skirt and entered the bathroom (that had no key to lock it) while I was seated on the toilet. He refused to leave it and blamed me for not locking it.

So, what had happened? What was different? The psychopathic process starts with the lovebombing, becomes devaluing and ends in discarding, always in that order. When someone flatters me nowadays, it does not make me glow, nor does it make me bashful. This non-response is not what a psychopath expects. So, he or she moves on to the next step in the hope to elicit a response. They switch to the devaluation tactics. So, one moment they showered us with flattery, the next they insult us and behave obnoxiously. Instead of it happening over weeks or years, it happens within five minutes to an hour.

The most interesting of these disturbing encounters is the actual outcome, the discard phase. While the Pearl inherently attracts many people, including toxic people, it makes us immune to toxic tactics, beginning with the lovebomb as well as the devaluation behaviour. And not used to this, the toxics end up exposing themselves too quickly, not just to us, but our friends as well. As a result, it is not the psychopath who discards us, but our friends that discard him or her. It was my friend who told the intruder in the bar that he was wrong and ordered him to apologize to me. As for the floor crawler – another man came to my rescue and pulled him out of the bathroom and he has never been invited to my friend’s private parties again.

This is the hidden and true power of the Pearl of Purity. The iridescent mother-of-pearl makes us seem transparent, and yet we are beyond the reach of the psychopath’s influence. They grasp for us, but fail. In a senseless and grotesque dramatic gesture, they then try to stomp on the Pearl, but end up removing their mask with everybody looking. And if onlookers have to choose between a Pearl of Purity and a Toxic Swine, the conclusion is readily made for them: they stand up against the swine.

So, what really is happening is not you attracting wrong people because you do not believe in yourself, but you are exposing wrong people with little or no effort by shining your iridescent light on them.

CONCLUSION

You can find fault within for admiring and choosing the wrong people, but not for attracting the wrong people. The mantra that ‘we attract what we believe of ourselves’ is a myth to slime the pure as well as the innocent. In fact it works the absolute opposite: the less you care about attracting attention and admiration, the more attractive you will become. You cannot avoid being noticed by psychopaths, nor that they throw themselves onto your path. If they cannot lovebomb you, they will turn 180° and devalue you. But when their slime slides off your Pearl like water off a duck’s back, they only end up exposing themselves in the light you reflect to you, and bystanders, without you saying or doing anything for it. All that is required to expose a psychopath is to be immune to the lovebomb and slime with the Pearl of Purity, and the onlookers end up discarding the psychopath.

MORE ON THE LAW OF ATTRACTION

(Addition from 4/3/2014)

From the start I knew my arguments and this article would be met with some form of opposition. Even before I wrote the article and simply discussed the growing idea that the ‘law of attraction’ is a delusion and just totally inaccurate, in my personal environment, I met some level of resistance (less and more) against the idea. It is this automatic resistance that makes me claim this is a ‘deeply ingrained meme’. If it was not so deeply ingrained, it would not be so hard for most people to regard it sceptically. Even when people agree that it is wrong to blame a victim by saying they attracted evil, they cling to the meme in two ways:

(1) They argue I build a straw man argument, that the ‘law of attraction’ does not mean what I claim it to mean in this article.  Apparently the ‘law of attraction’ is only meant to be empowering, and only supposed to work in the positive direction. So it then follows that if my interpretation of the ‘law of attraction’ is wrong,  the ‘law of attraction’ still stands.

(2) Because the law of attraction is abused by people it does not make the law of attraction itself a delusion. The law of attraction is similar to the gun argument – guns do not kill people, people kill people. It is thereby assumed that the ‘law of attraction’ is a material, physical entity of item, and that ‘law of attraction’ can be used responsibly and for the better of humanity.

So, what does the ‘law of attraction’ actually say? It depends on the authors, but several of the founding authors of this metaphysical ‘law’ stipulate that our thoughts precede the materialization of it, and that this includes negative experiences. For example there is Wallace Wattles’ book The Science of Getting Rich (1910). He states that believing in the object of your desire and focusing on it will lead to the realization of it on the material plane and that negative thinking will manifest negative results. Lisa Nichols, a proponent of this law, gives the example that our mind decides whether we have a bill in our mail or a cheque (which sounds like an extrapolation of Schrodinger’s quantum cat). Agreed there are LOA proponents who disagree with the ‘negative attracts negative’ and the ‘get rich’ popularisation of it, but it has been an integral part of the LOA movement since the start of the 20th century and still is. Visit general media, encyclopedia (such as Wiki) and many many googled proponent blogs and in the majority of them it is claimed that people who have a lot of bad things happen to them and meet a lot of bad people are attracting it because they are not positive thinkers or do not believe in themselves and their own mind power enough. While people are free to believe whatever they wish, the path of the Pearl of Purity is about shedding all assumptions and beliefs we cling to in order to avoid cognitive dissonance, especially those that are used to slime people. My arguments therefore are not invalid, nor a straw man argument.

But it is not just the ‘blame the victim’ part of the LOA that resembles psychopathic thinking so much. The ‘positive’ part of the LOA, that we can control matter and other people and their lives with our mind is very reminiscent on how psychopaths approach life and events. Psychopaths are pathological liars. Around them you find yourself wondering often whether they themselves believe their own lies. They act as if reality is fluid, consequences can be avoided and causes are non-existent. If I use the envelope example from LOA proponent Lisa Nichols, a psychopath can repeatedly act as if they truly believe that if they just say there is a cheque in an envelope, all atoms in the world will alter and whatever was in there will alter and become a cheque. Anyone who lived with a psychopath will also know that despite all hope, all focus and all belief, that envelope will still contain a bill – and most likely a very steep one on something completely useless and irrelevant that they used up or broke already. The whole concept of LOA, positive and negative, sounds like something a psychopath would invent. You might wonder: “So? Maybe we can learn something from them, because they often succeed in life with this tactic?” It is true that they usually get away with it, but not because their mind actually altered atoms in the physical world and causes and consequences, or because the universe loves them so much. It is just that they manage to find others to pay the bill and consequences for them, through scapegoating, through pity-playing a kind hearted soul, by lying, by denying how they are the cause of it all, by manipulating and treating people as if they are but mere puppets on a mind string. If you wish to succeed in life borrowing from a psychopath’s mindset, it means you’ll have to lie, deny, manipulate and regard other beings as mere puppets without their own desires, will and emotions.  At its most basic form, the LOA, even the so called positive side of it, attempts to make you believe it is normal, doable and ok to regard other people as controllable, as puppets at the end of your mind strings. It is like a devil’s temptation: you can wish for anything you want this way, for free! But what you did not know was how it would bring you over to the dark side unwittingly.

Personally I think you will not be anymore successful in getting what you want by believing in the LOA than not. Of course positive attitude, focus, dedication and self-confidence go a long way into accomplishing something. Strong, positive people are likeable. I like such people. And a great meany people like me for similar reasons. This is not so surprising, let alone magical, considering that we are a social animal. But it will also attract the attention from the envious who either want to ride along and profit from it for their own gain or who wish to rain on our parade. There are limitations to our powerful minds, amongst it the commanding atoms and people, consciously or subconsciously. The sole thing you buy by following and believing the LOA is that you are a puppet master and everyone else but mere puppets.

SOURCES

* Law of Attraction (Wikipedia)

** How to develop sexual and romantic attraction with people who are good for you (Psychology Today, Ken Page)

Responsibility Assumption (Wikipedia)

FURTHER READING

1)      Precious Pearl of Purity I

2)      Psychopaths are Opportunists

3)      Idealize, Devalue and Discard

4)     The Idealising, Devaluing and Discarding of Jesus