If every morning you repeat affirmations about money, write them down and picture the amount you want in your account, and yet nothing changes, you share that experience with a great many people. At first there is hope, sometimes even a small shift, and then everything goes back to how it was.
After a while it is easy to conclude that something is wrong with you: that you do not believe enough, that you are not visualising correctly, that you lack discipline. The systemic view offers a different explanation. The problem often lies not in the effort, but in where the affirmation is directed.
In her books, Dr Jelena Đorđević explains why positive thinking on its own rarely changes our relationship with money, and what happens when attention is turned inwards.
What ordinary affirmations really do
The book Codes of Consciousness describes a phase that many people go through at the beginning of their inner work. That is when books on the law of attraction come into our hands, such as The Secret or The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, and we begin to set goals: more money, the right job, a relationship. Every day we visualise, repeat positive affirmations and evoke pleasant emotions.
These practices are not without value. Visualisation and positive affirmations are, as the book puts it, good mental training that later serves the true practice of focused attention. Sometimes they even bring visible changes. Yet over time we notice that we still find ourselves in the same emotional and energetic relationships as before.
Why positive thinking does not reach the root
The explanation lies in conditioning. What we carry within us, from our personal and family history, shapes the people and situations we attract. An affirmation that changes only the surface of the personality does not touch the contents that lie deeper, in the family unconscious.
We cannot change anything in our lives until we change our conditioned inner structure. (from the book Codes of Consciousness)
That is why the book says that the psychology of so-called positive thinking “does not work”: we cannot manifest anything that we ourselves are not. When someone repeats sentences about wealth while carrying fear, insecurity or inherited guilt around money, the affirmation and the inner structure speak two different languages. Whatever lies deeper wins.
The book also describes people who spend years going through various seminars and therapies. At first the progress is intense, and then everything comes to a halt, even though they feel better after every session. Part of the burden goes, but the prevailing inner energy quickly evens it out.
Money in the family system
From a systemic perspective, money is not merely a means of payment. In the book Decoding the Soul it is described as an invisible force that shapes human relationships. Through money, a family passes on not only material values, but also emotional burdens, expectations, obligations and guilt.
Some of the dynamics around money that appear in constellations are:
- Property unjustly appropriated within the family, between brothers and sisters or between spouses.
- Ancestors who took part in seizing or losing property, which may leave descendants feeling that they do not deserve the money they earn.
- An imbalance of giving and receiving, which can show itself as difficulties in financial matters.
- Insecurity about income, which parents unconsciously pass on to their children.
The book Codes of Success links money with the feminine principle and the archetype of the mother, the source of fertility and abundance. Decoding the Soul adds that gratitude to our parents for life is the foundation of all receiving: if we do not value life itself, we will hardly be able to receive and value anything else that life offers us, including money.
What is different about Systemic Affirmations™
In constellations, Bert Hellinger used healing sentences, which he called magic formulas. From this work grew systemic self-exploration, a practice in which the individual sets in motion, on their own, processes similar to those the facilitator sets in motion in a constellation. Systemic Affirmations™ rest on this same foundation.
The key difference lies in direction. The book The Path of Knowledge explains that ordinary affirmations are turned outwards, towards the circumstances we want, while systemic ones are turned inwards and set processes in motion within ourselves, where change is truly possible. Instead of the sentence “I have a lot of money”, one says sentences such as “I wish to eliminate destructive concepts and beliefs about money” or “I wish to become aware of my life's mission”.
The books suggest saying each sentence aloud or thinking it silently, and staying with it for two to three minutes while following the sensations in the body. Whatever arises is not suppressed, but observed and released. Sincere intention and focus matter more than the exact words.
Codes of Success reminds us that we manifest into our lives only what is part of our unconscious contents. That is why work on abundance does not begin with the amount you want, but with the question of what, within you and within your family system, stands between you and money. Once that content is brought into awareness, your relationship with money can change from within, without force and without pretence.