Conscious Choice: You Can't Affirm Away Scarcity

July 2000

You Can't Affirm Away Scarcity

by Maria Nemeth

We’re not used to talking about limits, or about our intense discomfort with them. In fact, one trick Monkey Mind uses to avoid looking at scarcity is to tell us, "If I don’t think about it, maybe it won’t exist." A lot of us take that a step further and believe that we poison our chances of experiencing prosperity if we spend any time at all with "negative thinking" — such as acknowledging our worries about not having enough of what we want or need. If we affirm the positive, we figure, we can somehow fool reality into going along.

I remember thinking, "Maybe if I wake up every morning and say to myself,‘I have enough money. I have enough money,’ it’ll be true." But the real truth is, affirmations like that don’t work. According to Shakti Gawain, who wrote Creative Visualization, affirmations work best when you use them to affirm the truth about yourself. I have found they fail miserably when you use them to suppress negative thoughts or feelings. In the You and Money Course, we call that sugary, "let’s pretend everything’s fine" variety of positive thinking "candy-coating the cow pie." The scenario goes like this:

Let’s say that you come upon a cow pie in the middle of the road — something you don’t want to feel. You need to deal with it somehow — it stinks, and it’s attracting flies — so you carefully pick it up and surround it with candy coating. You really pour on the candy coating of positive thinking: "Scarcity doesn’t exist. I have my greatest good always. I have everything I need." Every time your unwanted feeling of scarcity pops up, you pour on a little more of that coating. The problem is, though, that you haven’t gotten rid of the cow pie. You’ve just covered it up, and it keeps fermenting. You can smell it. So you keep pouring on more and more candy coating. And try as you might, you can’t escape the unpleasant, permeating odor of your doubts and other negative thoughts. It’s not a pretty picture, but it gets to the heart of the problem with wishful-thinking affirmations.

Yet everywhere we turn, people are assuring us that positive thinking will make everything all better:

Harold: "I’ve gone to a number of prosperity workshops. I have been told that if I hold the right thoughts my outward reality will begin to reflect my new thinking. But nothing’s changed in my life over the past year. I still don’t have the job I want. I’m even further in debt. Maybe there’s stiII something wrong with me or my way of looking at things."

Paul: "I just joined a network marketing system to make more money on the side. I’ve seen videotapes of people who are successful at it. They’re sitting on the beach in Hawaii or in their beautiful homes, telling me to think positively and expect the best. They say it’s important to work hard and have a‘winning attitude.’ But how can I have a‘winning attitude’ when I get so anxious about my finances? I try not to worry, but it doesn’t work."

Harold and Paul are trying to use positive thoughts to avoid their honest reactions to scarcity. They’re trying to control thoughts and feelings they don’t even want to look at. But thoughts and feelings need an outlet, and if they don’t get it, they fester and undermine our entire outlook on the world. The effort to make them disappear with positive affirmations is as futile as trying to keep the waves from lapping against the shore of a lake.

Clearly our minds are drawn to the very things we tell them to avoid. So is it possible to cover over your negative thoughts? That’s very much like trying to control the waves on a lake. You can do it, but you have to freeze the lake or drain it first. And you can control the thoughts you don’t want — if you’re willing to freeze over huge areas of your life experience. When you freeze out the pain, however, you also numb the joy, and your enthusiasm for life.

Let’s Get Real

It takes incredible amounts of energy to suppress your thoughts, and that energy would be much better spent in pursuing your dreams. We’ve all met people who maintain that everything is "fine, just fine" — no matter what. And inevitably we get the sense that their bright-eyed smiles and firm handshakes aren’t real. They seem to be outgoing and cheerful and full of energy, but connecting with them is nearly impossible, because we can’t get past the happy-happy facade. That smiling plastic exterior becomes a huge barrier. A minister friend of mine tells this story:

Floyd: "In the past I refused to acknowledge to myself that I had negative thoughts about other people. For years I insisted that I had only positive thoughts. About two years ago I found myself getting incredibly irritated by some of the people passing in front of me after Sunday service. You know, the ones who take a single one-dollar bill and crumple it into a tiny ball and throw it into the collections plate as though the church could just run on air. I tried not to think bad thoughts. After all, they’re God’s children. But after a while I just couldn’t help it. And I hated myself for it. I’d judge them and condemn myself for doing that, and the cycle went on and on. At the same time, my Sunday contributions began to go way down. I talked to some parishioners I knew well, and the consistent feedback I got was that I didn’t seem like a real human being anymore.

"When I thought about it, I realized that my judgments about the people who don’t donate a lot to the church were my own personal experience with scarcity. I decided to face my own negative thoughts. At first I felt so uncompassionate. But when I faced them, I saw that I’m a real human being just like everyone else. And something happened. I relaxed. People started coming up to me and saying,‘You know, Floyd, you’re a lot more approachable than you used to be. I sense a softness about you.’ And the weird thing is, people started giving more money."

There’s something about looking at what you think is wrong with you — your own personal experience of scarcity — and being willing to see it and tell the truth about it. You get more room to breathe, to soften up a little. You make space for compassion. And when that happens, the people and situations around you often have room to shift, too.

This article is excerpted from the book The Energy Of Money, by Maria Nemeth, Ph.D. Copyright ©1997, 1999 by Maria Nemeth, Ph.D. Reprinted by arrangement with Ballantine Books, A Division of Random House, Inc.

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