Lucy McCarraher interviewed by James Rick on The Full Potential Show

I was recently interviewed by James Rick for his Full Potential show. Here's James Rick's summary of what we said and his own commentary.

The problem with the law of attraction is that it’s so attractive. We want to believe that we can sit, feel, imagine and visualize all the good things we want to come our way and believe that they are going to drop out of the sky. And if they haven’t yet – you’re just not believing hard enough.

Laws, according to the scientific definition, work every time – no matter who is using them, without fail. Otherwise it’s not a law, it’s a theory. Well, I’ve applied the law of attraction to get water to jump into my mouth and transform watermelon into salmon and it hasn’t worked yet. But, I have noticed that the law of gravity has never let me down once, nor has the law of cause and effect – if I lift the cup of water to my lips and drink (cause) then I get hydrated (effect).

So I decided to have Lucy MaCarraher tell us The Real Secret which is also the name of her new book, based on scientifically proven “Happiness Habits” for not only feeling better but laying the foundation for DOING (causing) the things you want to show up in your life (effect).

HAPPINESS HABITS

Smile - It’s such a simple act, but smiling literally released endorphins and makes you feel better. This means you don’t have to wait for something to happen in order to smile, you can smile to make yourself feel better. The more you do it, the better you’ll feel!

Breathe Deep – Breathing deeply sends a signal to your brain and nervous system that all is well. Typical reactions to threats – like fight or flight – make breathing shallow and reinforce stress in the body – but breathing deeply reverses those signals and puts the body at ease. I’ve conditioned myself to do this so that I’m no longer uncomfortable in most social settings.

Be Kind – The act of kindness lights up the same areas of the brain as when you eat chocolate. Some simple ideas for follow through are to look for the positive in people’s work or actions. Verbally let them know how much you appreciate them. Get in the habit of writing thank-you cards on a regular basis.

Organization - Do you have a clean work environment (me neither) or a decent filing system? At the very least, by having an organized system (even if your work environment is chaos), you’ll feel less stress and more empowered through the day.

Set Goals – Our brains are hard-wired for setting and achieving goals. We run our lives on goal-directed activities, achieving goals and closure. In a way, that’s why email can be so addicting. Lucy recommends balancing short-term, daily achievements on a to-do list and long term goals that might take a year or more to accomplish. The balance is critical though – otherwise you’ll lose interest in goal setting. Many people forget what they should be doing because they don’t have a routine that reminds them. Solution: create a routine that incorporates everything you want to accomplish on a daily basis PLUS reminds you to set it up again the next day.

Healthy Eating & Exercise – Lucy has a clever strategy for eating healthier and exercising (according to the Hawthorne effect) – by simply focusing on something and taking note of it, you improve it. So if you’re not exercising or eating healthy – but you take note of it for 30 days, odds are that you’ll automatically begin improving how you eat and how much you exercise. Skeptical? Try it for 30 days!

Friendship - 5 close friends have been correlated to a good sense of well-being. At the same time, you should avoid or disassociate from friends or family members that bring you down. And if you can’t avoid them, be mindful when aggravation happens. Have a selection of thoughts or people that bring happiness in life – use these to press the right button. If you smile, you might see the humor in what someone is doing. Have some emotional and mental tricks that give you a new option before you act…like counting to 10 before you respond.

I take a bold stance on the movie “The Secret” and call it a lie. That might upset you if you’re a fan of “The Secret” or especially, if you’ve starred in it. I do plan to have stars from “The Secret” on the Full Potential Show and from what I understand, they’ll agree activating imagination and clearly defining what you want is only the first step. And a first step is nowhere near a complete process. A half-truth is only half the truth, no matter how you slice it. Lucy’s The Real Secret promises to deliver the other half. Scientifically-proven button pushing that will create the kind of foundation that makes real, results-oriented actions a reality.

Self efficacy, you have to have it to believe it, believe it to have it. Nobody is luckier than anyone else, but people who believe they are lucky see opportunities – where an unlucky person wouldn’t see the opportunity or won’t take action that leads to more positive results. If you’ve created your vision board and you know what you want (based on The Secret).. in the words of Thoreau:

"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."

Do have a look at the full interview here and you'll find more about Happiness Habits on this blog and in your own copy of The Real Secret.

Posted by Lucy

The Law of Attraction Killed my Friend

        

I worked as a radiotherapist in the cancer centre of a large city hospital and in the years that I worked there I came across at least five cases similar to the one reported below - women who came for treatment when it was too late and after they had tried to ‘cure’ themselves using the Law of Attraction techniques.

It is this experience that motivates me now to warn as many people as I can of the dangers of the kinds of advice given in books like The Secret by Rhonda Byrne. I still feel overcome with helplessness and anger when I think of the women who I saw die needlessly because of the advice given in this book.

It became the reason Lucy and I titled our book The Real Secret - we wanted to attract attention to the dangerous ideas associated with The Secret with a book of our own based on simple, sensible, scientifically supported research.

This article has been taken from the April Edition of Fair Lady Magazine.


A Deadly Secret

Every time I enter a book shop, there it is – in hardback, paperback and on DVD, millions sold, its author’s success serving as personal proof of the validity of her message. I cringe with revulsion and pain, and think of the dear friend who fatally embraced Rhonda Byrnes’ self-help missive, The Secret.

In 2004, I moved from LA to the university town of Eugene in Oregon, a state wedged between California and Washington. I am given Selena’s* phone number by a mutual friend and when I meet her for lunch I’m greeted by a petite, vivacious woman in her late 40s, her smooth brown skin laden with turquoise Native American jewellery, her laughter quick and joyous.

We quickly discover that we share a sense of adventure, a love for travel and music, and contempt for President George W. Bush, and we bond over her disintegrating relationship and my imploding marriage. Otherwise, we are an unlikely pair: I need my thoughts rooted in logic and my medicine grounded in scientific research; Selena is the new-age vegetarian with a deep distrust of Western medicine and convention, and a passionate embracer of all things alternative. Selena has lived through two of America’s major wars, Vietnam and Iraq, both based on lies. Unfortunately, her well-founded distrust of the American establishment has spilled over into a vague, intellectually careless dismissal of the media, the sciences and ‘Western medicine’ in general.

She argues that natural remedies are not advocated by pharmaceutical companies because they cannot be patented, and reminds me of the abusive treatment of the mentally ill in America and the brutal post-World War II pharmacological experiments on black Americans. I point out that times have changed, and greater regulation combined with the profit motive make it highly unlikely that medical and pharmaceutical companies are paying thousands of researchers to devise new ways of killing potential customers.

She visits me one day, excitedly clutching a copy of the DVD The Secret and starts raving about how suffering is the product of one’s own negative energy, and material success and emotional fulfillment can be realised through positive thinking. I am taken aback by her fervour and appalled that the multilayered complexity of life can be simplistically reduced to positive or negative emotional energy. Was apartheid the result of black people thinking negatively? Was the holocaust some sort of mass suicide by negative energy? How does positive thinking realise a meal when there isn’t a morsel of food in sight? Where does positive thinking end and delusion begin?

Selena drops the subject, surprised and a little embarrassed by my stream of rational objections. She is happy and madly in love with a new man. She goes travelling and meets her lover for a few idyllic weeks in Thailand before rejoining him in Eugene. He thinks it is too early in their relationship for them to live together but invites her to stay with him until she has found a new place. She slides into a depression, lying around, unable to galvanise herself into looking for her own place. Is it menopause? Is it because she doesn’t really want to move and would prefer him to ask her to stay? Both.

Beset by tears and hot flashes, Selena sticks to herbal remedies and desperately tries to be positive. As she emotionally disintegrates, so does her lover’s patience. He ends the relationship and pushes her to move in with a friend.

I urge her to visit a doctor for hormone-replacement pills or anti-depressants. She instinctively grimaces and argues that the pharmaceutical industry’s aggressive marketing has resulted in a generation of absurdly over-medicated Americans.

A few weeks later she gives me the shocking news. About eight months prior, she had noticed a lesion on her vulva. Her gynaecologist had said it was pre-cancerous and needed to be removed and biopsied. Selena had been reluctant to ‘have that done to my body’, and ignored the lesion until it morphed into a sore. Now her stunned and angry gynaecologist, who had assumed she had gone elsewhere for a second opinion and treatment, has informed her she has stage-two cancer of the vulva. Radiation is not an option; she is referred to a surgeon for removal of her clitoris and a chunk of her vulva.

Vulnerable after two intense love affairs and two rejections in a row, Selena says she cannot live with being ‘genitally disfigured’. She insists cancer is a product of ‘negative energy’ and wants to rely on alternative therapy and ‘positive energy’ to cure herself. I suggest the possibility of reconstructive surgery and point out that we probably spend less than 1% of our lives having sex and there are so many joys in life beyond sex and romantic relationships. After all, it seems contradictory to emphasise spirituality and an alternative lifestyle and yet risk her life to stay conventionally intact.

She is unmoved, and suddenly becomes a repository of passionate tales from the Internet about people who avoided invasive surgical and pharmaceutical interventions and cured their cancer with alternative therapy. She calls a mutual friend and itinerant psychic in Hawaii. The cards are thrown, the energies in Oregon are analysed in Hawaii courtesy of satellite technology, and Selena’s decision to stake her life on alternative treatment is further validated. I offer my support and tell her that I really hope I am wrong.

She retreats to Ashland, Oregon, to receive ‘light therapy’, and dutifully limits her diet to puréed organic greens and herbs recommended by her alternative practitioners.

Physically, Selena looks wonderful and her skin glows, but she quietly volunteers that the lesion is not getting smaller. Yet her chosen course of treatment places her under acute pressure to be positive no matter what. She cannot vent any understandable anxiety and fear because it is only positive energy that will cure her, so she determinedly remains upbeat and spiritual, about to follow up the Ashland experiment with another alternative treatment in Hawaii. At least she will spend time in a beautiful place. She pensively admits, however, that she cannot swim in the ocean because the salt will irritate her sore. And she cannot have sex.

I am returning to South Africa and feel desperate and helpless as we hug goodbye. I deliver some upbeat, encouraging platitudes before getting into my car and weeping uncontrollably. My emails and calls from South Africa go unanswered. On June 22, I am bursting with thoughts of Selena.

I call and leave another message on her cellphone and get no response. I call again shortly after, and a man answers. I ask for her and he bluntly announces that he is her father and that she passed away on June 22.

Selena died just nine months after receiving the cancer diagnosis. My beautiful friend with the simple dreams so many of us share – to laugh and love and be loved – spent the last nine months of her life not living it up, but frenetically disciplining herself, avoiding decadence, limiting her culinary choices to raw green mush, unable to swim, and unable to have the sex for which she was throwing her life away. In a dreadful irony, she spent the last two weeks of her life in a Eugene hospital, wracked with agony as the cancer charged through her body.

Since alternative-medicine practitioners reject pharmaceuticals and practice optimistic denial, they have little to offer those in acute pain. By the time Selena’s suffering forced her into the clutches of ‘Western medicine’, it was too late for anything but morphine and palliative care from medical doctors and nurses who couldn’t understand how she could have been so naive and irrational, while alternative-medicine acolytes quietly blamed her for not being sufficiently positive, thereby ‘surrendering’ to the ‘negative energy’ that ‘causes’ cancer.

I relay Selena’s story to a relative who is a Rhonda Byrne fan, and she, too, defensively responds that ‘deep down, she must have been negative’. Therein lies the exquisite paradox: The Secret is always ‘proven’ right, whether it works or not.

How ironic, when so many doctors and therapists have pointed out that it is the repression of one’s true feelings that generates stress. Oprah Winfrey has done many positive things for the world but helping turn The Secret into an international bestseller was not one of them.  

*Name has been changed.
Photo: amandaism/stock.xchng
This article was originally printed in the South African Fair Lady Magazine

Posted by Annabel

The Real Secret - what to do when the universe hasn't delivered everything you ever wanted is available in paperback and kindle on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk

The Secret and The Lies

Rhonda Byrne has just brought out a new book called The Magic. Her first bestseller was The Secret, and she followed this up with The Power, which said nothing very different. The Magic is perhaps the most honest title, because it says explicitly that there is nothing 'real' about her theories. Why, though, have they attracted such a massive following? Here's The Real Secret to her success.

We bought (and bought into) the The Secret by Rhonda Byrne because we are human, and therefore fallible. We were looking for happiness, or something; at the very least an improvement in our lives. So when we heard about this book called The Secret which has the answer, we thought, maybe what Byrne is saying is true ..maybe there is a secret way of getting everything you ever wanted... I’ll give it a try...what harm is there? Twenty million people can’t all be wrong? Surely?...and anyway I can find out for less than £20, so no great loss if it’s just a scam. 

So lots of us bought the book - just to see what it says  just to make sure we hadn’t missed out on something important that 20 million others seemed to know about.

We bought the book(s), and then we - most of us, surely - knew just how stupid we had been. How embarrassing. I hang my head in shame. But I hang it only once - some of you did it twice. Shame on you twice. Maybe you thought you weren’t doing it properly the first time...that's what she told us. If it didn't work, it was all our fault. I know, I know... it’s not easy. I forgive you.

According to Rhonda Byrne, these experiences are much more than mere coincidences. We apparently bought the book(s) because we were attracted to the message that they held for us. She claims the "Law of Attraction" means that whatever you experience in life is a direct result of what you think about. It really is that simple. If you think about being fat, you will get fatter. If you think about thin people, you will become thin yourself. If you think about your debts, you will get more debts, but if you think about how much you love money instead, you will attract money. Simples!  And very attractive.

You may not have known this but apparently your thoughts and feelings have magnetic properties and “frequencies". They “vibrate” and "resonate" with the “universe,” somehow attracting events that share those frequencies back to their thinker. That will explain cancer then - bad vibrations. And the Tsunami - negative frequencies. Let's not mention all those unfortunate people in Pakistan who drowned in the floods, or those currently inundated in Australia. They must have asked for it by thinking about it. Serves them right. Don’t you agree? No, of course you don’t, because it's obviously nonsense. What if a thousand people started sincerely visualising winning the lottery? They probably do, every week. Strange how only one or two ever win.

The Secret and The Power deliver their wisdom in a tone of voice that evokes The Bible on the one hand, and Albert Einstein on the other. The problem is, the message is neither religion nor  science. So why is this particular pseudo-scientific, quasi-religious and totally illogical concept so persistent and so attractive?

The first trick Byrne uses is what psychologists call “social proof.” People like to do things other people are doing because it seems to prove the value of their own action, and why advice seems more credible if it appears to come from many different people rather than one. The Secret is peppered with quotations from a group of about 20 “teachers” or “avatars,” many of whom are themselves popular self-help gurus  (so that’s why we bought the first book - they know what sells). In The Power, Byrne’s second book, she also quotes sages like Thoreau, Gandhi and St. Augustine. This ploy, an example of a related logical fallacy called the "argument from authority" is likewise very persuasive. After all, we like to take the opinions of those we consider better informed - like plumbers when our pipes leak, or doctors when our health fails (so that’s why we fell for the second book). 

Byrne also exploits our readiness to believe that we have a vast reservoir of untapped abilities just waiting to be released, if we only knew as much about how the brain and the universe works as she claims to. Byrne’s onslaught of pseudo-scientific jargon serves mostly to establish an “illusion of knowledge”. In psychological terms this is the tendency to believe we understand something much better than we really do. When it comes to scientific knowledge, we can safely say that Rhonda Byrne exploits this illusion to the full.

Lets have a look at her evidence. For example, in The Power we hear about one anonymous woman who left a long, abusive relationship and “never talked negatively about her ex-husband but instead gave only positive thoughts and words about a new, perfect, beautiful husband.” Sure enough, we are told, she soon met her “perfect and beautiful” new husband, and they now live happily ever after in Spain — which happens to be in Europe, the very continent the woman had dreamed of visiting. Good grief! Would you believe it? But we are never told the name of the woman or offered any proof that she existed, and most of Byrne's examples centre on her own experience

The intuitive appeal of such stories illustrates the human tendency to see things that happen in sequence — first the positive thinking, then the positive results — as forming a chain of cause and effect. This is even more likely to happen when all the stories we hear fit an expected pattern, a phenomenon psychologists call “illusory correlation”.

The powerful psychology behind these rhetorical tricks can distract readers from the dangers. Lucy has coached people whose self esteem has been severely damaged by their "failure" to manifest their desires. And what about the women with cancer I have watched die because they believed in the "Law of Attraction"? Yes, they died.

I worked as a radiotherapist treating cancer and I have watched women (always women) die because they read - and believed - in the so called Law of Attraction.

I’ve cried my eyes out in frustration and anger, but it’s useless to argue with books like The Secret and The Power. They demonstrate an exquisite grasp of the reality and falibility of human nature. After all, the only other force that could explain how Rhonda Byrne put two books on top of the best-seller list is the "Law of Attraction" itself.

There you have it - The Secret and The Lies     

Post by Annabel  

The Real Secret - what to do when the universe hasn't delivered everything you ever wanted is available in paperback and kindle on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk