I am so sick of the fake positivity in the manifestation world. No, I’m not talking about manifestation itself – I know it works, and I’m not here to debate that. What bothers me is what women are being taught along with it, which is that certain feelings are dangerous and you’d better not have them.
When I was struggling the most with money, I trained myself not to think about being broke. That’s what I was told to do: don’t focus on the negative, focus on the positive, because what you focus on is what you attract. So I wouldn’t let myself think about not being able to pay rent. Whenever the thought came up, I would turn it around. I’d affirm the exact opposite: “Money comes to me easily. I always have more than enough.” I would say these things even while staring at a negative bank account.
But I wasn’t affirming from some abundant place inside me. I was affirming because I was terrified that if I let myself think about lack for even a minute, more lack would come. So, fear was really in charge the whole time. I stayed stuck in that pattern for a long time. Manifestation does work, but in my case, it was fueled by the very thing I wanted to avoid.
I sat through a masterclass once where a woman talked about how much she loved logging into her bank account. Every time she opened it, she’d imagine a large number waiting for her. And every time, a large number was indeed waiting for her. I remember sitting there thinking, “Well, of course it is.”
But she never mentioned the things she’d done to get there. She only described picturing the number and then seeing it in her account, and she made it sound so effortless. I knew it wasn’t that simple. She had an audience, clients, and a business that brought in money every day, which explained why the number was there. Still, I tried it. Every morning for weeks, I opened my bank account, closed my eyes, and pictured the number I wanted. The whole time, it felt silly. There was nothing there.
The truth is that money doesn’t just materialize in your bank account because you wished it so. Someone has to find you, stick around long enough to want what you’re selling, and trust you enough to pay. It’s a chain, and every link matters. I was standing at the end of that chain, hoping for money to appear, even though the first steps weren’t there.
I want to be clear that I wasn’t lazy about it. I was working constantly. But I was neurodivergent and didn’t understand what that meant yet, which looked like me hyperfocusing on the parts of my business that felt safe and avoiding the parts that actually mattered. I built the back end, and built it beautifully. I put all my energy into systems and structure, the things no one could see, and avoided the visible work of getting in front of people, which was the only thing that would have brought in any money at all. Avoidance is part of how a neurodivergent brain works. The most important task is often the one you avoid for months. So I knew exactly what would bring people in; I just wasn’t doing it, and I had a daily practice of imagining money appearing in an account that had no reason to receive any.
The manifestation instruction goes like this: don’t look at your reality. Your reality is in the 3D, and you’re trying to get to the 5D, and the 5D version hasn’t caught up yet, so if you keep looking at what’s in front of you, you’ll stay stuck in it. Instead, step into the life of the woman you’re becoming. Feel it as though it’s already here. Live from the end.
You know what that is? That’s called future-faking yourself. At least that’s what it felt like to me. It wasn’t inspiring or visionary. It felt like I was lying to myself completely and just hoping that lie would somehow turn into the truth. And for me there was another layer. I tend to take things literally. That’s just how my brain works. So trying to imagine a life I couldn’t see, to embody a version of myself who didn’t yet exist, or to feel wealthy while I was counting coins, felt almost impossible.
I couldn’t envision her. Doubt filled me, and it made sense. I was looking at my life, and my life was looking right back at me. So I did the only thing I could do. I tried not to think about my bank account or the rent. I kept quiet about it. Avoiding things became my routine, and I got pretty good at it.
When it doesn’t work, and it doesn’t, there is only one explanation available to you in that framework. You did it wrong. You weren’t positive enough. You let a negative thought slip through. You said the affirmation but didn’t feel it. Your vibration was off. You need to want it more, or want it less, or detach from the outcome, or get more specific, or stop being so specific.
Every time you fail, it just feels like proof that you’re doing something wrong. So you double down. You repeat more affirmations, watch your thoughts even more closely, and put even more effort into fixing what’s going on in your mind, even though nothing in your actual life changes.
I also set myself impossible challenges during those years – unattainable goals with no infrastructure underneath them and no honest assessment of what I could actually do. And when I didn’t hit them, which I never did, I blamed myself. I got stuck in that cycle for far too long.
Here’s what was missing, and it took me years to uncover: your subconscious is running a story that was written when you were a child, before you could evaluate it, and it tells you what you’re allowed to have. You did not choose it, and you cannot talk it out of anything.
Affirmations are only words. They show up in your conscious mind, but that’s not where the story lives. So you can stand in front of a mirror saying, “Money comes to me easily” for a year while deep down, another voice says, “No, it doesn’t, and you don’t deserve it anyway.” There’s a mismatch. You desperately want the thing you’re trying to manifest, but underneath you don’t even believe you can have it.
Pay attention, because this is the part that really matters: you manifest from the story, not from the affirmation. So if the story is based on fear, then fear is what you get back. It doesn’t matter if you have a negative thought or not. Fear was the fuel the entire time, powering every affirmation you made, and that’s what you end up building.
But it’s not just that these methods don’t work – they can actually make things worse. Psychologists call this the backfire effect. When you try to challenge a belief with a statement that contradicts it, repeating that statement can actually make the original belief stronger. In fact, research shows that people with low self-esteem who repeat positive self-statements often end up feeling worse than when they started.
So every morning I stood there telling my empty account that money comes to me easily, I was just making that belief even stronger. That’s why it never worked for me before. It always felt fake, and honestly, it was. I was working against a dysregulated nervous system and a subconscious that had already made up its mind, and the words were never going to penetrate that. You have to work through your story first, then you can manifest. There are teachers who say this, but that wasn’t my experience. The space I was in used affirmations as the primary method, with no extra steps.
The Cord You Actually Need to Cut
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Aug 1
There was a time in my life when I was so broke that I honestly didn’t know if I would survive it. I had never felt that kind of darkness before. I was lost, had no answers, and felt completely alone, and my thoughts were destroying me. There were nights I didn’t want to live anymore because I couldn’t see an end to any of it, and it was the most painful thing I have ever experienced.
So the fear is the fuel, which means the real question isn’t how to stop feeling it. It’s what to do with it, and the answer isn’t to smother it and hope for better. Fear makes you shrink. It freezes you, and everything about it says, “Wait, don’t move, don’t make it worse.”
Anger is the opposite. Anger is your body preparing to do something. It’s mobilizing. And unlike the calm you’ve been manufacturing, you can’t fake it into existence or hold it down for long. It’s honest by nature, which is exactly why the world that trained you out of your feelings is most afraid of it.
Anger also has a direction; fear does not. Fear only tells you something is wrong, without any guidance. Anger tells you what’s wrong, who’s involved, and that it shouldn’t be accepted. Every woman I know who finally raised her rate, or left, or stopped doing free work for people who never asked what it cost her, did it from something much closer to fury than to peace.
So if you’re stuck because your manifestations haven’t moved, and you’ve been affirming your way around it, get fucking angry. Not as another technique, but because you have every right to be, and because what you’ve been doing so far has kept you exactly where you are.
This is a somatic practice that happens in your body, and takes about an hour.
1. Let yourself be angry about one specific thing:
Focus on just one thing. Think about the block that hasn’t shifted, the number that stays the same, or the situation you keep avoiding. Bring it to mind intentionally and allow yourself to feel all the emotions you’ve been holding back. Don’t try to see it differently. Don’t search for a lesson or ask what it’s supposed to teach you. Let it feel as unfair as it really is.
2. Get it out of your body:
You can’t get rid of rage just by thinking about it. It needs to move out through your body and your voice. Play whatever music helps you get into that feeling. For me, it’s anything by Korn, Metallica, or Marilyn Manson, loud enough to drown out everything else. Move your body – dance, even if it’s messy. Scream into a pillow, hit the bed, or stomp your feet, jump on the bed. Let the feelings rise up and leave your body. Keep going until you’re tired, which will probably happen sooner than you expect, because this takes real effort. If you can’t make much noise where you live, use a pillow to muffle the sound. Hold it over your face and scream into it, or press your head into the bed and let it out.
3. Rest, and then be good to yourself:
This is the part I don’t want you to skip.
Lie down and take some deep breaths. Notice that the weight you felt an hour ago is no longer weighing on you. Next, do something nice for yourself, just because you can. Take a bath, order your favorite food, bake something, pour a glass of wine, or treat yourself to a sweet treat.
Don’t do this to raise your vibration or as a reward. Do it because living in fear and always forcing yourself to be positive is exhausting as fuck, and you finally set that burden down for a while.
What changed for me wasn’t about getting better at manifesting. It was finally learning to understand myself. I know how my mind works now, where my limits are, what overwhelms me, and what burnout looks like before it happens. I don’t push past those limits anymore. I also don’t set impossible goals and then blame myself for not reaching them. Which means the shame spiral has nothing to feed on. It ended because I stopped supplying it.
I’m not dysregulated anymore. I’m in my body, and I can feel what’s happening in it, including the things I spent years refusing to feel. And now when I want something, it feels possible. Not because I’ve gotten better at pretending, but because I look at what I’ve already built and use that as evidence for what’s coming. I’m not manifesting against a story about why I don’t deserve it. I’ve already faced that story. That work came first. It always has to. You’ve spent long enough faking a feeling you didn’t have. Let yourself feel what’s real for you now.
I spent years repeating affirmations that didn’t change anything, feeling stuck in shame, and not realizing that an old story was the thing running everything. Since no one guided me the way I needed, I had to figure it all out on my own.
That’s why I created my 14-Day Email Coaching Intensive. Every morning I identify what’s actually running underneath what you’ve told me, what it’s doing to you, and what has to go, then I give you the exact move to make that day. After fourteen days, you’ll be able to see the story you’ve been manifesting from. And once you recognize it, you can stop letting it shape your life.
The investment is $397. That’s the difference between understanding why it hasn’t worked and getting to the part where it does. I took the long way, but you don’t have to.
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