You End Up Attracting What You Are Trying To Avoid

We spend a lot of time and energy trying to prevent something we don’t want to happen. But why do we end up getting everything the other way around?

This is a question we often ask ourselves. The solution may lie in changing your perspective and focus.

We claim to control many situations: work, studies, couple relationship, social relationships, etc.

We need some illusion of control to tell ourselves that everything is in its place.

To do this, we make a list of all possible dangers, telling ourselves that we can then intervene to protect ourselves from their possible consequences.

The reality is quite different. These dangers that we think about and prepare for are a recreation of our mind that generates anxiety in us as we anticipate what might happen.

We end up losing ourselves in all its possibilities, which prevents us from valuing and enjoying the present moment.

Where can we focus our attention?

In a way, with our thoughts, we determine our behavior, our habits and ultimately our destiny.

For this reason, it is essential to take care of our focus of attention. Without realizing it, we can easily become rooted in suffering by pondering negative thoughts, especially those connected in a circular fashion.

A good strategy for identifying our “thinking tendency” is to watch those thoughts to, in a way, be caught “in the act” of self-destructive intellectual process.

In this way we will understand this thing that we are spinning all over the place and then we can ask ourselves if there is really any point in always thinking about it.

Questioning your own feelings is essential in order to improve ourselves.

It is also important to open up to other perspectives that we are not yet able to see at the moment.

Our brain doesn’t understand refusal

Our mind is prepared to understand certain types of information through language. Depending on what our brain understands, we may get one experience or another.

This is why we can sometimes communicate with ourselves by hurting ourselves, without even realizing it.

Our brain associates thoughts with images and the “NO” is not embedded in these images.

If you want to have proof of that, you can say to yourself “I’m not going to think of a pink elephant” and you will see that you have just visualized it in your head.

This phenomenon which occurs in our mind is called in psychology “Theory of ironic processes” (Wegner, 1994).

Wegner’s theory tells us that attempts to control internal experiences are often doomed to failure because we do not understand how they work.

So we end up getting the opposite of what we were claiming. This is how we generate the opposite of what we wanted to control.

When we are preoccupied and hurt by an event, repeating to ourselves over and over that we don’t want to think about that event is only going to intensify the thought of it.

The same thing happens when we send these messages to other people.

Attract what you want instead of avoiding what you don’t want

In order not to fall into this common mistake of attracting what we want to avoid, it is important to change your perspective.

In other words, changing our point of reference and consciously guiding our thoughts, choosing for ourselves the place in which we leave them free.

When there are recurring thoughts about an unpleasant event, we can use the following strategies:

• Speak in a positive way, building affirmative messages about what we want to achieve, instead of: “I don’t want to think about this argument with my spouse”, say: “I want to think about how much I love my spouse” .
• Focus our attention on a fun activity: listening to music we like, dancing, cooking, playing sports, etc.

• If we want to change something important, we will have to do something different, change our habits and behaviors that maintain what we don’t like.
• Think and seek what we want, what we need and what we would like to attract to us. Incorporate these messages into the way we communicate.

As you try to control what you want to avoid in your life, you will think about it more and end up attracting it.

Trying to suppress this thought is not a solution and even promotes its reappearance.

The smartest strategy is to pay attention to what you want and focus on it, instead of pretending to avoid it.