When affirmations backfire

The use of affirmations has become an inseparable part of quite a few practices of training and therapy.

From my understanding, using affirmations can sometimes have real value, but when it’s used in an imprecise way, it can create the opposite effect from what we intended.

I’m not writing this as a post against affirmations (personally, in my own work, I don’t use them), but as an attempt to be more accurate about when and why they work, and when they start working against us.

In this post I’ll try to look at the inner processes that happen when we use intentional inner statements, especially when we use them in a way that isn’t quite right.

When we use these inner statements, in most cases it’s because we want to change something we don’t like in ourselves, or as a way to change a situation that’s happening in our lives.

The basic idea behind affirmations, usually, is that by saying what we want to happen, we can create an inner state that will take us out of that inner or outer place that feels not good for us, and create a new reality.

For example, people with low self-worth sometimes repeat sentences like:

I have high self-worth, I am worthy, I have value in any situation, etc.

And not rarely they will also put daily reminders near the bed, on the fridge, or in fixed places, so they can come back to it again and again.

I’ll try to look at this through the lens of Focusing and mindfulness, which are the fields I’m working with.

I’ll use insecurity as an example, but basically this can apply to any inner belief that’s rooted in us. (In classical Buddhist language, a conditioning like this is called samskara.)

When we have a place of insecurity, there is usually a stream of thoughts, and also bodily sensations that characterize that place.

Most of the time, if we don’t practice meditation or don’t really know mindfulness processes, there will also be identification with the inner experience, and a belief that we truly are like that, that this is who we are.

At that point, the limiting view gets embedded in the system (body and mind), and sometimes very directly in the nervous system.

The experience feels familiar and normal, because it’s a conditioning that gets triggered again and again when situations from the outside activate it. Sometimes it sits there for years, and sometimes for as long as we can remember. It becomes a very familiar feeling, something that’s taken as part of who we are.

Here’s an interesting point: we can choose affirmations that sound right and healthy, and still they feel like something foreign.

On the level of words and the inner story, it can sound great. But on the level of bodily feeling, and on the level of deeper conditioning, something inside still doesn’t settle with it.

And then, when we repeat again and again something that still isn’t truly connected to the experience, sometimes the part that doesn’t believe it starts to rise more and more strongly.

It can come up both as thoughts and as bodily sensations. In Focusing terms, the felt sense of worthlessness becomes more and more present, and it tends to express itself through the sensory layer, the emotional layer, and the mental layer.

In Buddhist language, you can see here a process called papañca, a mental proliferation that sometimes also takes on a somatic expression, and takes up more and more inner space.

And sometimes, the more we say I have value, I’m worthy, the part that resists it will rise more into awareness and express itself more strongly. The attempt to push something out ends up bringing it back, sometimes even with growing intensity.

This process becomes sharper especially when we try to push away and erase the part we don’t want to meet, and focus only on the place we want to develop.

What we try to ignore tends to return, sometimes with more force.

An inner struggle against parts of ourselves, even when the intention is good, often creates more suffering.

Through somatic-awareness-based methods like Focusing and mindfulness, there are tools to work with what arises from within and is present in our experience. Tools that are based on listening to the part that feels worthless, on making gentle contact with it, sometimes with the understanding that it’s only trying to protect us.

And out of that contact, sometimes something shifts, and a carrying forward happens, a movement forward that comes from within, not from pasting a sentence on top from the outside.

Also in Buddhism, the guidance is to work with what is there and understand it through deep seeing, not to try to manufacture an alternative reality. I think that here, both the therapeutic approach of Focusing and the classical Buddhist approach see it in a similar way.

I believe we can move forward from the place we are actually in. Repeating sentences, even if they are beautiful and true, doesn’t always create change by itself, if the body and the lived experience are still somewhere else.