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The Affirmation Paradox

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By Dr. Deb - FJN Family Columnist

When I tell abuse victims that one powerful tool for them to begin to heal is to say affirmations—positive statements about themselves to themselves—they either roll their eyeballs at me or they’re too polite to do that but they want to. As one person aptly put it, "Maybe you’re right that I need to say and hear positive things about myself because it’s been a long, long time since I did, but I just don’t believe them, so what will I gain from saying them?

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That is a great question because the very fact that they need to hear those positive things means they don’t believe them, so how can they say them with any sincerity at all? To this, there is an answer: Create an environment in which you do believe the statements and make them more dominant than the negative messages that the abuser planted in your head. It all makes sense once you understand the neurophysiology of the brain.

In his encyclopedic book on the brain, neurophysiologist John Nolte, M.D., explains that electrical signals in the brain take the path of least resistance. This means that those signals will travel today where they traveled yesterday. Why carve out new routes?

So, if your brain is used to thinking negative thoughts, it will keep thinking them simply because that is the familiar route for the electrical signals to take.

Nolte’s work shows what thousands of researchers have discovered, namely, that there is an elegant economy to brain function. It is much easier for the brain to "remember" and automatically utilize a path taken before than to treat each new event as new learning. So if an abuser says something nasty over and over, the reason why the victim comes to "believe" it is really just because her brain has economized: With the same circumstance and the predictable abusive comment, her neural circuits simply fire up and travel the expected path. In short, she’s been programmed.

Well, anyone programmed can be deprogrammed.

One potent device in that process is to remember and visualize times when the positive statements that you make to counteract the negative messages are actually true. For example, suppose an abuse victim, Laura, was told numerous times, "You’re a lousy mother." She has, unfortunately, come to doubt her mothering skills. An affirmation to counteract this could be "I am a good mother." Now, one way to make this real would be to think of 10 different occasions in which she was pleased with her mothering abilities. When I ask for this, former victims always start with, "I don’t know." This, in itself, is an example of that programming. Patience is the operative concept here, and I say, "Sure you can," and I wait for a while.

Sure enough, the examples start gushing forth. "Oh, yeah, just last week, I took my daughter to the store and told her she was behaving so well that I would give her a cookie when we got home." (A reward for desirable behavior constituted far better parenting in her mind than a punishment.) "There you go," I respond, "Now come up with another example."

In this manner, she can generate a list of 10 instances when she was quite satisfied with her parenting. Next, she is to visualize any one of these instances while saying the affirmation. When it’s time to again say it, she can pick another instance, and so on. At the moment she is thinking of those times when she was quite pleased with her parenting, that affirmation really is true and she can say it with the utmost sincerity. I’ve actually got eleven more ways to make those affirmations real and thereby rewire brains that have been negatively programmed for far too long.

Saying daily affirmations is a major step in the healing process. Deprogramming is a matter of rewiring the brain so that a new—and psychologically better—neural circuit becomes the familiar one. The process of changing the brain’s wiring takes effort, but once that groundwork has been done and the new route becomes automatic, you can start feeling good about yourself again.

Debby Schwartz Hirschorn, PhD. Is a Marriage & Family Therapist in Hollywood. Visit: DrDeb.com.

Posted by Dr. Deb - FJN Family Columnist on 07/13 at 01:45 PM • Hits: 117



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