Method developed and refined since 2010 across 1,000+ clearance sessions.
Search “law of attraction not working” and you’ll find a thousand people who did everything right – the vision board, the affirmations, the gratitude journal, the scripting – and got precisely nowhere. If that’s you, I want to save you from the usual conclusion, which is that you’re either doing it wrong or it’s all rubbish.
It’s neither. The law of attraction isn’t broken, and nor are you. There’s just a crucial piece missing from how it’s taught – and once you see it, both why it stalled and how to fix it become obvious.
In this post:
The piece The Secret left out
When the law of attraction went mainstream through books like The Secret, it came down to a tidy formula: hold the thought, feel the feeling, and the universe delivers a match. Like attracts like.
The bit that got left out is the one that decides everything: your emotions. Not the emotions you’re performing on purpose while you stare at your vision board. The ones actually running underneath – the dominant feeling you carry around all day without noticing. That’s what’s broadcasting. And if you’re affirming “money flows to me easily” while a deeper part of you is quietly braced in fear that it won’t, the fear is the louder signal. You’re not a match to what you’re asking for. You’re a match to what you’re afraid of.
“Law of attraction not working” – the real reason
Here’s the mechanism, and it’s the reason the law of attraction isn’t working the way you were promised. Your emotions obey what I call the Law of Opposites. (I first learned this years ago from Chris Millbank, whose Reflective Repatterning work seeded a lot of my method.)
Every emotional theme lives in polarity. There’s no “want” without an equally live “fear of not having”. No desire for love without a charged dread of rejection. No reaching for abundance without a wired-in terror of scarcity. The two poles sit there like the ends of a battery, and if the opposite pole is charged – if there’s real fear, doubt or unworthiness loaded into it – then you are broadcasting both signals at once. Want and resist, simultaneously. And a system pulling in two directions doesn’t manifest. It cancels itself out, or worse, the louder, older, more charged pole wins. Which is usually the fear.
So you sit there doing everything “right” on the surface, genuinely baffled, because nobody told you that the charged opposite was quietly running the show.
Why affirmations and vision boards stall
This is why affirmations so often do nothing, or even make people feel worse. Say “I am wealthy” enough times and a charged part of you snaps back “no you’re not”, and now you’ve just rehearsed the gap between where you are and where you want to be. You’ve watered the fear, not the want.
It’s the same problem as trying to sit in “abundance energy” you haven’t actually got. You cannot hold the frequency of having while lack is still loaded in the system – the lack pollutes the signal, and what you broadcast is a wish sitting on top of a fear. The universe, or your nervous system, or whatever you want to call the thing that responds – it reads the whole signal, not just the pretty bit on top.
The fix: clear the contradiction
The fix isn’t more positive thinking. You can’t out-affirm a charged opposite. The fix is to clear the contradiction – to drain the charge out of the fear pole so it stops broadcasting against you.
When you clear the scarcity, the unworthiness, the old fear of being let down, you’re no longer pulling in two directions. The want is no longer fighting a wired-in dread. And then “alignment” stops being a slogan on a Pinterest board and becomes an actual state: your baseline and your desire pointing the same way, so you genuinely become a match for what you want rather than a match for what you fear. That’s what Head Trash Clearance does – it clears both poles of a theme, not just the loud one. And as the charge comes out, your calibration rises and your baseline lifts, which is the version of “raising your vibration” that actually changes what you draw towards you. For the deepest, oldest contradictions – the scarcity you inherited, the unworthiness from childhood – the wound healing work goes after them at the root.
Manifestation, done honestly, was never about forcing the universe to obey your vision board. It’s about removing what in you contradicts the thing you say you want – and then taking aligned action from there. Clear the contradiction, and you stop repelling your own desires.
Want to find the fear that’s contradicting your ask?
The charged opposite is usually hiding in plain sight. The free Head Trash Quiz tells you where most of your head trash is hiding – the themes quietly broadcasting against you.
Take the free Head Trash Quiz →
Where to start
If the law of attraction hasn’t worked for you, stop adding more practice on top – more affirmations, more scripting, more forcing the feeling. That’s just shouting the want louder while the fear keeps broadcasting underneath. The leverage is the other way: go and clear the fear.
And don’t fall into the spiritual version of the same trap, where you decide that “trusting the universe” means you never have to look at the uncomfortable stuff running beneath the surface. That’s just spiritual bypassing in a manifesting hat. The honest route is to clear what contradicts you, raise your baseline, and act from there. Do that, and you won’t need to force the law of attraction at all – you’ll simply stop standing in its way.
Where to go deeper
If you’ve done all the manifesting and it’s not landing, here’s how to clear what’s broadcasting against you:
- The free Head Trash Quiz – find the fear that’s contradicting what you’re asking for.
- The Clearance Club (£49/month) – daily guided clearing that drains the charge out of both poles of a theme.
- The Ascent (£5,777) – the deep, measured work that clears the oldest contradictions at the root and lifts your baseline, with the data to show it. For the most personal version of this work, there’s also my Untethered container.
If you’re not sure where to start, the Quiz points you to the right first step.
By Alexia Leachman · Method developed and refined since 2010 across 1,000+ clearance sessions
About the author
Alexia Leachman is the creator of the Head Trash Clearance Method and founder of Ladder of Growth – the consciousness measurement framework that maps where someone is on the path of becoming. She’s worked with clients to raise their calibration 200+ points on the Hawkins scale, and built The Ascent, a deep clearing programme for people who want measurable, structural change. Author of four books; host of the Fear Free Childbirth podcast (1.8M+ downloads); trainer of HTC practitioners internationally. Her work begins where insight-only approaches leave off: actually moving the baseline, with the data to prove it.
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