(Don’t) Send Positive Messages to the Universe

In recent years we have witnessed the growing popularity of energy movements, which can also be regarded as a kind of parapsychological trend. As their basic assumption, energy movements hold that there exists a type of energy that emanates from the human body, connects to everything and can be directed.[i] They advise people that by sending affirmations to the universe and thinking positively they can obtain anything. Negative thoughts, they stress, will block what a person can achieve in life.

According to energy movements, how the events in our lives unfold depends on the energy frequencies emitted by our thoughts, so these movements believe that people themselves create the events that will happen to them. For example, according to energy movements, if a person keeps thinking about their debts, the debts will keep growing, because thinking about debts sends negative frequencies out into the universe.

How Energy Movements Are Imposed

For the past quarter of a century, the shallow idea of attributing everything to energy has been systematically imposed on people. There are many books on energy and many film scripts produced with large budgets. The most famous of these are the film Avatar, made with a budget of 237 million dollars after a preparation period of about 15 years, and the book The Secret, which was once much talked about.

In Avatar, the film adaptation of energy movements, the blue Na’vi people emphasise the energy bond between human beings, living creatures, nature and the whole universe. Moreover, the sacred tree of life Eywa, the symbol of the relationship between humanity and the universe, is given the role of a Mother Nature that receives all the messages in the universe and answers them.

The Law of Attraction and Affirmations Sent to the Universe

The Secret, which played a major part in making energy movements so popular in the 21st century, is a bedside book for followers of energy movements and for energy therapists. The book has influenced people’s daily lives so much that we see many people, often without even realising it and even if they have never read it, absorbing its teachings as an integral part of their lives. Among these teachings are much-repeated notions such as “sending affirmations to the universe” and “attracting the negative”.

Sayings we sometimes hear from people around us, such as “don’t think negatively or you’ll attract the negative”, reflect the concept known as the law of attraction, which The Secret dwells on most. The concept energy movements emphasise most is sending affirmations to the universe. People who believe in the teachings of energy movements behave strangely in company: when a negative subject comes up, they say aloud that they do not want to attract the negative, or they make a cross with their hands or body so that the bad thing will not happen to them as well.

We Tend to Avoid Uncertainty and to Control Everything

So why have people recently been seeking remedies for their psychological, medical, material and spiritual problems in the methods of energy movements? We can explain this with the psychological concept of the illusion of control. The illusion of control is the condition in which an individual is more eager and inclined than normal to control the events in their life. Naturally, no one wants misfortune in their life, and everyone wants to prevent or control every unexpected situation. Since people cannot know in advance what misfortunes may befall them, they turn to certain beliefs and judgements simply in order to prevent them.

A second reason is that people, especially under today’s conditions, take the easy way out: wanting to make money quickly and solve their problems quickly, they try, under the illusion of control, to control everything in their lives. Energy therapies promise people a shortcut to solutions here. Energy movements and energy therapy experts advise people not even to let anything negative cross their minds lest they attract it, while at the same time recommending a range of techniques for attracting positive events.

For example, energy movements say: “Do you want money to come your way soon? Keep muttering ‘money will come, money will come’ for a week and you’ll get money.” The energy therapist’s affirmation advice is so broad that even if one attempt brings no result, in the next attempt a result may appear to have been achieved simply through the ordinary course of daily life. Moreover, people who have paid considerable sums to enter this therapy process naturally want results, and through the placebo effect they may feel they have achieved results even when they have not. Sometimes individuals also exaggerate to those around them how much they have benefited from energy therapies, because they dream of becoming therapists themselves and starting courses in the future.

Distortions in the Perception of Reality and Paranoid Delusions

Some go even further and, by reciting certain numbers given by the energy therapist a set number of times a day, expect health, happiness, money, marriage, peace and so on. (For example, some energy movements say: “Read the numbers 2, 12, 8, 6, 4, 7, 3 in order 24 times a day and you will find peace in your marriage.”) Over time individuals begin to believe that such numbers, too, send affirming energy into the universe and protect them from misfortune, and eventually distortions begin to appear in their perception of reality. This is a kind of losing oneself in one’s own assumptions, because we also see such distortions in thought patterns in people who display psychotic behaviour.

For example, thought patterns similar to the claims of energy movements to control the universe through thought are also seen in patients with paranoid schizophrenia. The delusions seen in paranoid schizophrenics are thoughts and beliefs that seem true to the individual but are in fact false and cannot be changed. The most common paranoid delusions include, for example, the belief that one can read other people’s thoughts, steer them and make them do what one wants. As you can see, there is a very fine line between paranoid delusions and the claim of energy movements that one can govern the universe with thoughts, do whatever one wishes and make others do it.

Energy therapists are more prone to paranoid delusions than their clients, because over time they come to think they have grown spiritually stronger through meditation and energy techniques under various names, and they may get the impression that they have acquired extraordinary abilities. People who call themselves Theta Therapy or Healing Therapy experts after a three-to-five-hour energy therapy course may, intoxicated by the power that comes from the healing they dispense to those around them, claim to be individuals in constant contact with God. Over time energy experts come to believe that they possess certain abilities bestowed on them by God in order to apply their methods, and they manage to convince those around them of this as well. Just recently, footage of a young, conservative energy expert who claims to perform subconscious cleansing with the Theta Healing method, stepping out of a luxury car, revealed the scale of these people’s earnings and followings.

The Unscientific Methods of Energy Therapy Are Masked by Validated Methods of Psychology

At first, energy movements may seem like a perfectly normal and scientific therapy method that also appeals to people’s core values and religious beliefs. The reason they create a normal and scientific impression is the methods valid in psychology that energy therapists use, along with suggestions such as “realise yourself”.

For example, solution-focused brief therapy is an effective method that many psychologists use in their sessions. In this therapy the focus is constantly on the client’s strengths. Again, in solution-focused therapy change is encouraged through the miracle question technique. With the scaling questions used in solution-focused brief therapy, the client is asked at regular intervals to rate on a scale of 0 to 10 how far the problem has been solved. In this way the client is led to perceive the relief gained by talking through their problems during therapy as relief obtained thanks to energy therapy.

In short, because energy therapy sessions aim to achieve positive change in a short time, some limited positive results can of course be achieved quickly by drawing on solution-focused brief therapy and with the help of other scientific therapy methods, but what achieves this is not energy sent to the universe; it is scientific therapy methods.

Of course, positive thinking has a positive effect on human psychology and on many psychological disorders. But this by no means implies that every illness can be cured simply by thinking positively. Indeed, claiming that energy therapy can cure every illness is an abuse of people’s beliefs, and many people, in the hope of recovery, may get even worse, with potentially fatal consequences.

Negative Memories and Blockages Passed Down from Ancestors

Energy movements try to explain and justify people’s congenital and chronic illnesses entirely through negative traumas inherited from ancestors, negative emotions experienced in the womb, and the negative experiences of the mother or the ancestors. According to energy movements, these negative transmissions are the cause of medical illnesses, and energy therapy sessions try to find cures for medical illnesses by working on these emotions and traumas passed down from ancestors, using a method that has no scientific logic whatsoever.

Some illnesses can of course be passed down from generation to generation through heredity, and research has certainly established that a baby in the womb is affected by conditions such as depression experienced by the mother. But the claim that the emotions, traumas and memories experienced by ancestors are inherited from great-great-grandparents by their great-great-grandchildren, that these memories cause chronic illness, and, not content with that, that these chronic illnesses can be treated only with energy techniques, is a perspective very far from science.

In conclusion, human beings and their lives are too complex to be reduced to the assumption that thoughts alone can create everything. For one thing, there are many variables that affect human life. An event cannot be explained solely by variables x and y. For an event or situation to come about, countless variables outside us are involved. Even a psychiatrist, who trains for years to become a specialist after six years of medical school, can treat only mental illnesses, whereas claiming to solve people’s psychological, medical and financial problems with nothing but the power of the energy emitted by thought, on the strength of certificates obtained in a few hours, not only has no scientific basis but also constitutes the crime of unauthorised practice of medicine under Law No. 1219. Anyone who treats patients or assumes this title without a diploma, even without the aim of obtaining a benefit, is punished with imprisonment of two to five years.

[i] Bioenergy (Parapsychology), Wikipedia (Turkish)