We are all too familiar with the spiritual shorthand for surrender, “What you resist, will persist”—a reminder not to fight the currents of life too forcefully. What if I told you, that there is a quieter paradox at play? One we rarely name because it implicates us more deeply. Sometimes what you persist… will resist you.
There is a kind of desire that becomes too sharp, too desperate, too fused with our sense of identity. The wanting becomes a weight, and the longing a leash, and in trying so hard to claim something, we actually end up pushing it further out of reach.
Freud would have called this the tyranny of unconscious motivation, the hidden wish beneath the visible want. Jung would have called it the shadow of desire, the place where yearning collapses into compulsion.
And modern spirituality tries to package it neatly inside a single, shimmering word: manifestation. Cue, The Secret and Law of Attraction references.
But if you have ever wanted something too much (love, success, belonging, recognition, even healing) you would know that desire can swell into something unrecognisable. What once began as an honest intention becomes distorted by fear of missing out, by a scarcity mindset. We stop moving toward what we want, and instead, start chasing an illusion of who we must be to deserve it.
Ironically, my first long-term employer, gifted me The Secret. A book often misunderstood, but foundational in sparking my lifelong fascination with inner engineering. Back then, its message felt like an invitation: that our lives could be shaped from the inside-out.
But what The Secret doesn’t spend enough time on is the dark side of manifestation:
Wanting with the wrong motivation can become its own resistance. Desiring from fear of missing out, only recreates more desperation. Longing from scarcity reinforces the lack or the longing we crave to fulfil.
And often, our psyche (also read as the universe or god) withholds the very thing we want not as punishment, but as protection. Wanting something for the wrong reasons is one of the fastest ways to lose ourselves and derail growth.
The Psychology of Wanting Too Much
Desire, on its own, is neutral.
It’s simply a compass for direction, an orientation of the self toward something it recognises as meaningful.
But when desire becomes too charged, too fused with our sense of worth, it mutates. It stops being about the thing itself and becomes entangled with the ego’s survival. That is when it shifts from healthy wanting into something darker: desperation and hyper-focus.
Desire and desperately wanting something, what’s the difference, really? On the surface they may look similar, but structurally, they couldn’t be more different.
Desire is grounded, motivated by growth, it is honest, adaptive and has plenty of room for uncertainty. Desire leaves you feeling energised, not drained. Desperately wanting (or just desperation) on the other hand, is identity-fused, motivated by fear, lack and insecurity. It almost demands certainty, sort of like a horse with blinders on, racing toward a goal, in panic. Desperation leaves you feeling like you’re grasping at straws, like you’re constantly bracing for impact, tight and clenched.
With desire, the outcome matters but the self doesn’t collapse if the outcome doesn’t arrive. However, desperation says: “Without this, I won’t be okay.” This is when a want becomes tied to survival whether emotionally, psychologically, or relationally. And when we’re in survival mode, the nervous system starts operating under threat conditions, no longer moving toward a goal but instead toward self preservation.
This is why desperation repels the very outcomes it tries to control.
The Attachment-Anxiety And Hyper-Focus Relationship
Attachment theory offers one of the clearest explanations for “wanting too much.” People with anxious attachment styles tend to over-invest too quickly which leads to them amplifying the emotional stakes and inflating the perceived risk of loss.
In other words, they often hyper-focus on one desired outcome. It would be a gross mistake to confuse hyper-focus for passion, that is not what it is. Hyper-focus is vigilance. It’s the mind constantly scanning for cues of rejection, failure, or loss causing a complete hijack of the nervous system.
How to tell when you’re in a hyper-focused or in a anxiously-attached state? Your cortisol rises which puts your nervous system into a threat-sensitive states which inadvertently shuts down your ability to be creative, intuitive and flexible. Everything becomes tight and tensed; an over-engineered, over controlled state of being which makes it near impossible to move towards your goal.
So, essentially, wanting something too much, triggers your self-sabotage, not because the thing is harmful for you, but because the FEAR of losing it becomes larger than the goal itself. It tricks you into thinking, “Well, if I never have it at all, I never have to risk losing it”.
You know, like when people drive their romantic partners away (often through intense, obsessive, and controlling behaviours) because, “Better push them away now, then risk them leaving later when I’m least expecting it”
Why Our Unconscious Rejects Our Conscious Desires
The unconscious will block any goal that threatens the concept of the current self, even if the conscious mind desperately wants it.
Freud framed this as ego defense.
Jung framed it as shadow sabotage.
Modern psychology frames it as cognitive dissonance avoidance.
We cannot sustainably achieve anything that our identity isn’t ready to hold.
If your self-concept is “I am unworthy” then your ego defence will stop you from proving yourself right and make sure you never get it in the first place.
If you self-belief is that “I’ll fail and/or embarrass myself” then your shadow self will create destructive and resistant behaviour that procrastinates the perceived threat or sometimes sabotages it entirely to protect the stability of the ego.
If your inner mantra is “things never work out for me” then your cognitive dissonance will create a psychological discomfort that can elevate anxiety and stress causing you to avoid or reject things that “work out well” because it conflicts with that mantra, and it wants to restore comfort and balance.
Why? Because the ego’s primary job is stability, not happiness.
The ego would rather keep you safe in the known discomfort than expose you to the unknown possibility of love, success and abundance.
Much of what we chase is entangled with external validation. When a goal is too tightly linked to external approval, the ego perceives it as unstable and therefore dangerous, thus resisting it.
Desires hide motive. The problem isn’t in the thing you want. It’s in the reason you want it.
You can want love, but if the motive is to fill an inner void, the relationship collapses under the weight of expectation.
You can want success, but if the motive is to outrun shame or prove your worth, the journey becomes a chase without a finish line.
Freud called this misaligned motivation: the conscious goal is noble, but the unconscious driver is fear. And when fear fuels desire, the unconscious blocks the very outcome you’re working toward. (Not to punish you, but to protect your sense of self from collapsing.)
This is why people burn out, break down, or self-sabotage right at the doorstep of what they thought they wanted. The conflict is not external—it is intrapsychic—A war between the intention and the hidden motive beneath it.
Untangled by Shanee Singam. A digitized version of a painting I drew in 2023
following a workshop I attended to help ‘Untangle’ my wiring
Manifestations’s Missing Half
Manifestation is not merely about wanting. It is about the quality of the wanting.
Modern manifestation culture, popularised by The Secret, rests on a deceptively simple idea: If you focus your thoughts on what you want, the universe will conspire to deliver it. It teaches you to visualise, affirm, ask, believe, but it doesn’t emphasise on the why. Why do you want the thing in the first place? And if the root of the desire is from a place of lack, insecurity, wounded attachment, or unhealed scarcity… no amount of visualising can override that internal resistance.
For many of us, this became a gateway; a first glimpse into the idea that we are active participants in shaping our own reality. I too, was mesmerised by its premise when it was first gifted to me. It invited introspection. It gave language to intuition. It made the inner world feel potent rather than passive.
Part of the reason The Secret became a phenomenon is because it reduced complex psychological, philosophical, and metaphysical concepts into digestible affirmations. It democratised spirituality, but in doing so, it diluted it.
It offered only half the truth, the “love and light” half. A powerful half no doubt, but a dangerous one when taken alone because it encourages people to plaster positivity over psychological wounds.
In this state, visualisation becomes a performance rather than a transformation. The dissonance between the idea and the inner truth doesn’t magnetise your desire, it fractures YOU. Manifestation cannot work when it’s built on escape because escape is not creation, it is avoidance.
You cannot manifest what your unconscious does not feel safe receiving. When you want something because it makes you become whole, the path feels expansive, but when you want something to simply to fill a hole, the path contracts. When the motivation is impure (not morally, but psychologically) the universe doesn’t withhold; YOU do.
Carl Jung warned of this when he wrote:
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
Manifestation is not a technique. It’s a state. And no amount of positive visualisation can override a psyche anchored in fear.
Manifestation without shadow work is just fantasy.
The Paradox Resolution
What you resist may indeed persist.
But what you persist in wanting (without examining the motivations beneath it) will eventually resist you, because the psyche cannot move toward a goal that threatens its internal equilibrium.
Desire, in its pure form, is not about possession but about orientation. It is the quiet, steady turning of our inner compass toward what feels honest.
And perhaps that is how the paradox resolves itself: To want the thing not because it will complete you, validate you, or rescue you but because it reflects who you are becoming.
When you stop asking “How do I get what I want?” and start asking
“Who must I become so that what I want no longer feels out of reach?”
…then the thing you want no longer needs to resist you.
Because you are no longer resisting yourself.
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