Science of Hypnosis – Deeper Dive FAQ
What if I don’t like affirmations? What is WRONG with Affirmations? Why Does Affirmations Suck? Am I Doing Something Wrong? Why do I Hate Affirmations?
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Affirmations deserve a lecture on its own because the theories and practices are well developed already. It’s usually one of the first techniques we learn with self-help programs. It is something that can be done wrong, though, so we should be careful to take the time to find out:
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What affirmations are.
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How it should be worded.
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What its components should be
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How it should be used.
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But even if we do all of that, and don’t simply grab the first affirmation we google, so many of us still find it awkward to use. We sometimes even develop stronger dislikes for it, bordering on hating it.
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Well, you don’t have to use affirmations. In fact, I don’t either because I have found that I personally don’t have a need for it. You may be different, and may find affirmations that work for you. So don’t give up on it, ok? Just do your homework properly.
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This brief discussion is for those of us who want to incorporate affirmations into our self-hypnosis or imagination exercises.
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In the discussions of the language of the subconscious mind, I explained that your subconscious mind can be programmed with a thought, when you bypass the critical faculty of the mind. Which you achieve (the bypassing bit) when you use your imagination correctly.
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Now, an affirmation is a thought or collection of thoughts that are structured into a sentence. So using your imagination, you can program your subconscious mind with the use of an affirmation.
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But here’s the missing piece, I believe, when we first start to use affirmations:
We don’t utilize our imagination in the right way, for the affirmation to have meaning. And I mean, meaning in the sense that the positive thought or thoughts aren’t “translated”
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from the language of the conscious mind
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to the language of the subconscious mind.
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I also explained that you know that you bypass that critical faculty of your mind when your imagination conjures up thoughts and feelings, because once you experience a feeling just from thinking about something, it means your subconscious mind made its associations and served up the said feeling to your body and conscious mind for processing.
So on the one hand, getting an awkward feeling when you use an affirmation that is perhaps wrong for you, indicates to you that your subconscious mind acted on the incoming stimuli from your conscious mind, i.e. your thoughts about that affirmation.
But why would that be an uncomfortable feeling? Why will it be awkward? Why would we dislike affirmations so much?
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It is because the affirmation that you use is not exactly aligned with your self-beliefs and your view of the world and yourself in the world. The result is, that affirmation, instead, triggers a negative thought, which you unknowingly translate in your imagination to something negative as well. And what does your subconscious do? It makes associations and goes through your memory banks for a memory or perceptions or anything remotely linked to that thought, which, of course, would be negative, and serves that up.
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So congratulations, you have been hypnotizing yourself with these affirmations all along, although counterproductively. Instead of it having positive impacts in your life and your self-beliefs, it made you dislike the exercise.
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What if you don’t like affirmations but you want to incorporate it into your routine?
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Do your homework, by finding out what you can about affirmations and the rules for setting affirmations.
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Then do a little more homework and think long and hard about what that idea from that affirmation would mean to you.
I previously used the example of a silly affirmation like “I am beautiful”. Literally, that is not true. But, I am beautiful in some way, other than superficially. So if I can imagine what that silly affirmation may mean to me, I can translate that idea into something that I can imagine myself:
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feel like
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do
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and be.
And if I can imagine all of that when I think about that affirmation, I would instead give my subconscious mind something positive to work with.
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Next FAQ: Can Self-Hypnosis be Used For <Fill-the-Blank>?
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