There is a large group of people who believe that
visualization of what one desires will yield positive results. Of course, asking for more details relating
to this bit of magic leads to vague answers that sound like little more than
mystical mumbo jumbo. In the land of
instant gratification, this is worse.
The problems with visualization self-help methods have been
well-documented and thoroughly examined.
Quite simply, these visualization exercises don’t stand up to any kind
of serious inquiry. They are, however, a
gold mine if you write about them or do the standard series of lectures at Red
Lions across America. You, as a speaker
or writer, tell people what they want to hear. (“Just visualize it, and it will
happen.”) The reader or audience member does
the exercise (the less one has to work for the goal, the better), and then sits
back and waits for results. It’s a
win-win situation for the creator of a visualization method whether or not audience
members reach their individual goals.
If, by chance, some people do get what they visualized, you
will have more followers. If, more
likely, there aren’t any results forthcoming, all you have to do is turn it
around on the visualizer. “You didn’t
want it badly enough. You weren’t
focused. Buy my next book, as it will give
you the keys to unlock what you desire.”
(The Secret is so powerful
that it takes several books to teach its basic lessons.) These fictions satisfy a need, which is why
they keep selling. It’s not the success
rate which pulls in readers. It’s the
hope that life’s little problems can be solved by merely wishing them away.
Starvation. Sex
crimes. Herpes. Poverty. War.
Death of a loved one.
Addiction. If the power of wish
worked, wouldn’t this world be a vastly different place? If visualization was science, wouldn’t famine
be wiped out?
If all this “positive visualization” movement did was sell
books to those frantically looking for simple solutions to complex problems,
there would be no harm, no foul. Buyer
beware, as they say. But researchers
Heather Kappes and Gabriele Oettingen published an article in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (a serious publication
where statistical data is mandatory and submitted articles are peer reviewed
before publication) that points out some of dangers of this movement. Experiments were done which showed that the
conjuring of positive fantasies actually causes a person to be less
ambitious. Positive visualization,
according to the researchers, actually drains the body of the energy needed to
get to the desired goal, and tricks the brain into thinking it has actually achieved
it. One experiment that caught the
attention of Forbes detailed what
happened when water-deprived test subjects were told to visualize a glass of
icy water. Their brains responded as if
they had really drank the water.
Interesting in a lab setting.
Possibly deadly if one is stranded in the desert. (As an aside, a website about healing cancer
naturally proclaims that by keeping about a tablespoon of saliva in your mouth
and visualizing yourself without a particular ailment will actually make that
ailment go away! If you still can’t see
the problems with visualization, you need to stop reading now and check
yourself into a mental hospital. Don’t
worry, though. While there you can just
drool your insanity away.)
If you delve into experiments that actually offer “proof”
that visualization works, your investigation will inevitably lead to terms like
“psychic powers” and other New Age thinking that has muddied the waters of the
self-help genre. Dig deep enough and it
all becomes magic. (In fact, just read
the reviews of Creative Visualization
on Amazon. More than one refers to the
book as “magic.”)
There is no real “magic” when it comes to
self-improvement. What one needs to do
is actually spend time reaching into the deepest and often darkest parts of
one’s soul and acknowledging that which you find. You have to look into that abyss Nietzsche
wrote about and see what stares back.
You have to go places you never thought you would, otherwise you are
lying to yourself about yourself. You
aren’t working with a complete knowledge of that which drives you. If you don’t understand those things that
make you tick, no amount of visualization is going to help.
I know plenty of people who love reading self-help books,
especially those in the visualization movement.
(I’ve often thought about writing a few under a pen name to help
supplement my income, and I still may.)
I’ve kept quiet around most of them, as arguing this topic is futile,
and I do believe that it can act as a stepping stone to serious introspection in the right person (a rarity). I can’t help but think, however, that if one
repurposed all that time spent visualizing that which they think will “fix”
them and instead really worked on those things, then it wouldn’t be too long
before real results would appear. To get
there, though, one must know themselves inside and out … not just let a false
sense of self manifest an unexamined goal and hope for the best.
“Faith: not wanting to know what is true.” -Nietzsche
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