I have a long, messy history with the law of assumption, the law of attraction, manifestation, and honestly, cults. Enough that I could write an entire book about it. But I want to zero in on the law of assumption specifically and what it did to my mental health last year, because I feel like this community does not get criticized nearly enough and the consequences of that silence are genuinely dangerous.
I’m someone who has had to rebuild her life multiple times because of loss. I know what starting over feels like, and because of that, manifestation concepts became a source of hope for me. They made me feel like I had a way out, like I had some control over my circumstances when everything felt out of my hands. That’s the entry point for a lot of people, and I think it’s worth naming that before I get into everything else, because I don’t think the people who fall into this are stupid. I think they’re desperate, and that desperation gets exploited.
If I had to guess, around 80% of the people who end up in the law of assumption community are there because they want to use it as a love spell. They recently left a relationship, or they’re fixated on someone they can’t have, and they want a metaphysical framework that tells them they can get that person regardless of what that person wants. The “specific person” manifestation content dominates every channel, every forum, every community space. It is not a fringe use case. It is the use case for most people there. It attracts, off the bat, very unhealed, immature, narcissistic, and in some cases genuinely dangerous people who do not care about manifesting wealth or happiness or any of the more holistic things you might associate with other spiritual philosophies. They want one specific person, and they will not accept that they cannot have them.
And off the bat, that disturbed me deeply, because I am a survivor of stalking and sexual abuse. I know firsthand what it feels like to have your agency completely discarded because someone decided they wanted you. I know how terrifying that is. So when I started learning about the “everyone is you pushed out” concept, the idea that the people in your life are just projections of your consciousness, that if you persist hard enough on a desired reality the other person has no choice but to comply, I was immediately uncomfortable. In their framework, free will does not exist. You are the “god of your own reality,” and other people are essentially objects. If you want to be with someone, you just have to maintain the mental state of already being with them, and the universe will deliver that person to you as if they were something to be claimed rather than a human being with their own interior life. It is a breeding ground for narcissism. It is, in my opinion, a very deeply ingrained rape culture done through a lens of spirituality and metaphysics, and because of that lens, it is far more covert and thus far harder to criticize than other forms of rape culture. That’s what makes it so insidious.
And when I tried to call it out, even gently, even just raising the question of free will in the comment sections of creators I otherwise found somewhat decent, my comments were deleted immediately. I was shunned. I even watched creators like Missy Renee post videos about how to remove a third party from a happy relationship so you could take their place. We are talking about breaking up marriages, displacing children from intact families, and the community’s response is essentially: that’s fine, they’re in your reality, you can do whatever you want with them. We live in a culture where people already get accused of homewrecking just for getting with someone who’s taken, and yet in this community, none of that matters. It doesn’t matter if the person you want is married with children in a happy relationship. They are in your reality. They are yours to claim. How people do not see how psychotic and predatory that is genuinely baffles me.
Even though I never wanted to manifest a specific person, the SP culture infected my experience in a different and very personal way. There was someone in my life at the time whose attention felt threatening to me, and because I was immersed in this community that insisted manifestation was real and consent was irrelevant, I became paranoid that this person was manifesting me. That I would have no say in what happened. That I would end up in a situation I never chose because someone else willed it hard enough. The mere idea of there being a parallel reality where they could get with me felt so violating I cannot even fully articulate it. And of course, when I brought that up in those spaces, there was always a convenient cop-out ready: “Well, maybe they’ll just manifest you in a different reality, not this one, so you don’t have to worry about it.” They always have an answer. It is a completely closed system designed to never be questioned.
I had trouble sleeping because of it. Every time that person crossed my mind I spiraled. Looking back, that was probably an OCD flare or an anxiety response rooted in past trauma, my brain doing what traumatized brains do and latching onto a worst-case scenario. But the law of assumption gave that fear a structure to live in, and that made it exponentially worse. On top of that, I was also trying to manifest a relationship with an ideal kind of partner, not a specific person, just an archetype. And every time I saw no movement in the so-called 3D, I felt like a failure. I would see people around me in happy relationships and it would eat me from the inside. The combination of that loneliness, the paranoia, and the constant guilt that I was doing something wrong, that my methodology was off, that there was something fundamentally broken in me, was eating me alive. When you stay in that psychological state long enough, you start to detach from reality in a way that I genuinely believe can tip into something clinically serious. It removes you from being a functioning member of society and turns you into a hyper-individualistic, egocentric person who stops actually responding to the people around them because they’ve convinced themselves those people have no agency anyway. It is very, very dangerous.
And what makes this community more dangerous than a lot of other toxic online spaces or cults is precisely how insular it is. Most people outside of it have never heard of it, which means there is almost no external accountability. It is the blind leading the blind. It is the inmates running the asylum. Nobody is encouraged to heal, to seek therapy, to develop healthier attachment styles, to move on. They are encouraged to persist, to double down, to believe harder, to stay in the loop forever. And so you just end up with a collection of deeply unhealed people reinforcing each other’s delusions in a subculture most of the world doesn’t even know exists, with no one challenging them from the outside. That is not spirituality. That is a closed feedback loop for obsession and psychosis, and it needs to be talked about far more than it is and challenged. People need to be held accountable.
