The Bunk of Positive Affirmations

Imagine that you own a home, and after being gone for a few weeks on vacation, you come home to find that several walls have mold growing on them. It doesn’t matter how much, but there’s mold. Would you just grab some paint and paint over that mold?

That’s the analogy to start with for thinking about positive affirmations. Positive affirmations can be just like putting a cover coat over all those negative thoughts or ideas that you continue to have.

If you leave the paint long enough, the paint will wear off and the mold will continue to grow again. You can take it another direction and every year lay over a new coat of paint. But you know what – that mold is STILL there. It’s still growing and affecting the environment and sooner or later it’s going to have a real effect.

You can do the same with positive affirmations. Use them for a while and then forget and the old patterns come back. Or keep practicing and adding new ones. But you know what – those old thoughts are STILL there.  They are still under the surface, and just like instincts, sooner or later they will come back out in a moment of stress or tiredness or pressure.

Let me back up a little – I’ve NOT saying positive affirmations, or any similar behavioral change is not effective or useful. They can be incredibly useful and empowering. What I want to you to understand is that unless you clean up and address the underlying state of affairs – the mold in the paint analogy – the old stuff is still there, and will come back.

What do I mean by underlying state of affairs? I’m talking about beliefs, patterns, values, ideals, promises, rules that you have committed to throughout your life. In all likelihood you have consciously forgotten most of these. They are still part of your memory and your body awareness. Here’s an example – think of that time in third grade when you were embarrassed in front of your classmates and you swore you’d never do anything to look stupid again. Maybe you didn’t say it out loud, but somewhere in your being you said it. And it stuck, it became part of your bodily and cellular makeup.

Now I hate computer analogies, but think of those beliefs or rules, etc., like a virus on your computer. It can be fairly innocuous, but it’s still there. You’d never knowingly leave a virus on your computer. I’m also sure you’d never knowingly keep around a rule for yourself that is like that mold. The clue here is knowingly – you don’t consciously know you are following those rules.

Still, if you are using positive affirmations, you have a desire for your life to be different in some way, even better. The question is, how much does it matter to you? Finding and addressing those rules, promises, values, etc takes courage. Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes it’s hard. And it takes time.

So how do you address those beliefs, ideas, patterns, and more? There are many ways and any deeper discussion is way beyond this article, but here are some techniques, clues and ideas to research and look into. Natural Linguistic Processing (NLP), cellular memory and cellular healing (books: Biology or Belief, and Molecules of Emotion), Somatic Therapies including Hakomi, Cranial Sacral Therapy, The Journey, NeuroSculpting. An especially important idea is Forgiveness (book: Forgive for Good). There are many, many more, but these are the ones I’ve worked with and found to be especially effective.

Working with positive affirmations is good, but he question stands – how much does it really matter to you? The idea of courage, which has roots in the word for heart, is that courage is not the absence of fear, rather the knowing that something is more important (Ambrose Redmoon). What is it that’s important that you are willing to move towards?