“Overheard” this conversation on a Discord server I’m part of (whee, look at me learning new technology and finding communities without social media!*) this evening where the conversational participants were like eh, positive affirmations always sound so stupid to me, and I’m like OH HEY HI I CAN HELP WITH THIS I KNOW WHY.
* Dear brain, an excellent topic for a post next week is How & Why I Broke Up With Social Media, just flagging this FYI, m’kay?
It’s mind-changingly simple. Most positive affirmations sound dumb because they’re so blatantly untrue, they’re the equivalent of trying to gaslight yourself. And hey, cool, you might be the kind of person who can set fake deadlines for yourself and hit them, or the kind of person who can bribe yourself with a cookie once you’re done your work, but around here we’re all “this deadline is totally fake” and “I can have the cookie whenever I like, I made the rules so I can break them”.
Affirmations are supposed to be things your brain can believe. (And okay, a lot of negative affirmations are dumb and we still believe them, but that’s because: habit and it’s hard to just… gaslight yourself out of habit. “I think I’m terrible!” –> “No I don’t!” is a special kind of toxic positivity :P)
So the key to making affirmations work for you then is that they are only actually supposed to be one step up the chain from your negative affirmations. Like, going from “I’m terrible with money” to “I am a financial queen” obviously sounds silly because it’s not realistic on any level; if you’re bad at money you are by definition NOT a financial queen and no amount of gaslighting will make you so.
Going from “I’m terrible with money” to “I am capable of learning about money”, however, is a functional affirmation because it turns the negative positive but not in an unrealistic way – it’s just the next step, if that makes sense. It doesn’t try to convince you that your situation HAS magically changed, just that you’re CAPABLE of changing it. Which… you probably are. *hugs*.
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