If you’ve read personal development literature, you’re probably familiar with the idea of affirmations.  When we say an affirmation, we affirm some positive quality we have—examples would include saying “I am lovable,” “I am powerful,” “I am charismatic,” and so on.  The idea is to convince our unconscious minds to adopt these beliefs, and ultimately change the way we behave in the world so we find the business successes, relationships and so on that we’re looking for.

For some people, affirmations seem to “work”—that is, when they say affirmations, they feel a comforting warmth inside, and perhaps they even start to notice benefits in their lives in the long run.  Others have a different experience—anger, disgust, apathy or some other “negative emotion” arises when they say affirmations, and they quickly become cynical about the idea.  This is the kind of experience that often leads people to think that affirmations “don’t work.”

In this article, I’m going to talk about the reasons we may find ourselves “rejecting” the affirmations we use, how that can actually give us valuable information about ourselves, and how we can reframe our affirmations in that situation to find the encouragement and empowerment we’re looking for.

My Shift In Perspective

A while back, when I’d say an affirmation, I’d often have the rejection experience I described.  Instead of feeling an inner warmth, I’d feel my shoulders tightening up, and sometimes a little nausea.  It’s as if an inner voice disagreed with, and even mocked, what I was saying.  This reaction initially had me give up on affirmations, concluding they were useless.  But I found a new perspective when I started reading books that combined ideas from psychology and spirituality, most notably the works of spiritual teacher A.H. Almaas.

The perspective I came to was that each of us, in our deepest essence, has all the sorts of qualities we tend to mention in our affirmations.  We’re naturally loving, strong, compassionate, joyful and so on.  So when we say affirmations, we’re merely acknowledging qualities we already have, and that we share with all of humanity.  However, early in our lives, we get into the habit of repressing and forgetting these traits.  The reason is that other people do not “mirror” them back to us—they don’t recognize or appreciate these qualities.

For example, if as kids we like to jump and dance around, but our parents keep telling us to shut up and sit down, they are not mirroring our natural joyfulness—instead, they’re criticizing it.  Because we want our parents’ love and support, we learn to shut off our spontaneous joy and go around acting serious and somber.  Eventually, we lose consciousness of the fact that we were ever joyful to begin with.  Unconsciously, however, part of us stays angry about our caregivers’ failure to mirror our essence.  We develop what psychologist Heinz Kohut called narcissistic rage.

Our narcissistic rage stays with us into our adult lives, and gets triggered whenever someone in the world fails to acknowledge our essential qualities.  If our parents were domineering and controlling toward us, and failed to mirror our will, for instance, we’re likely to feel enraged when someone later in life fails to do so as well—perhaps the boss curtly telling us what to do at work, as if our time and what we want don’t matter.

Why Affirmations Can Bring Up Anger

My sense is that saying affirmations can trigger our narcissistic rage as well.  Saying “I love myself,” for instance, may remind us of moments where our caregivers didn’t show us love—where our essential quality of love, in other words, was not mirrored—and our anger about those early moments may arise.  Saying “I am strong” may bring up memories of times when we felt pushed around or bullied.  Thus, rather than giving us a rush of inner warmth or the positive feelings we’re expecting, affirmations can have us feel angry, cynical or despondent.

On the plus side, when we find ourselves rejecting or reacting negatively to an affirmation, we learn more about the places where we have an unmet need to be mirrored—a need to have someone acknowledge and appreciate one of our essential qualities.  If rage arises when we say “I am lovable,” for example, that rage points us to our need for others to see that we’re lovable beings.

One incredible thing I’ve found is that, when I discover this kind of unmet need within myself, I actually have the power to work toward meeting it.  When I simply acknowledge the need, or admit it exists, I can feel the need being fulfilled, and I can feel a warmth in my body where I may have felt irritation or discomfort before.  If I admit I need others to acknowledge my compassion, for instance, I start to feel my need for acknowledgment healing in that moment, and any rage I may have felt at not being acknowledged subsiding.

Reframing Our Affirmations To Acknowledge Our Needs

I encourage you to try this if you’ve had trouble with affirmations in the past.  If you notice an affirmation that has you feel irritated, disgusted, or something similar, try just saying aloud that you need to be seen as having the quality you’re affirming.  For instance, if you said the affirmation “I am powerful,” and you felt your body rejecting that idea, try saying out loud “I need my power to be seen,” or “I need people to acknowledge my power.”  You may notice, when you do this, that the pain of the need for others to mirror your power weakens somewhat.

You may also notice, as you continue doing this exercise, that the angry, resistant reactions that tend to arise in other areas of your life start to become less intense.  For example, maybe you normally feel angry when you think about a person in your life—perhaps a parent, loved one, friend, or someone else—because you feel like they don’t see or acknowledge some important part of you.  When you recognize your own ability to meet that need from within yourself, and begin to fulfill it, your rage at people who don’t meet your needs begins to subside.

To help ourselves in this way, we need to learn to accept the feelings of rage, despair and resistance that can come up when we say affirmations.  Rather than turning away from the practice because it doesn’t make us feel how we want, we need to stay curious about what our negative reactions are telling us regarding the places we can do our own healing.

Successfully doing this exercise also requires us to accept the possibility that we have unmet needs.  At first glance, many of us might balk at this idea, because we believe it’s weak and contemptible to admit our needs—even if the only person we’re admitting them to is ourselves.  We need to cultivate a faith that the first step in fulfilling our needs is acknowledging they exist, and breathing through the intense feelings that recognizing them can produce in our bodies.  If we can find this faith within ourselves, affirmations—though they seem simple—can be a deeply transformative exercise.

So if you’ve tried affirmations before, but they haven’t seemed to “work” for one reason or another, I encourage you to give them another try and see if you can notice, without judgment, how you feel when you affirm your positive qualities, and explore what those feelings can teach you about yourself and your opportunities to heal and grow.

Related posts:

1. Inner Productivity, Part Two: Reuniting “Work” And “Life”
2. Don’t Wait To Do Your “Real Work,” Part II: Finding Real Security
3. Is There Such A Thing As “Boring” Work?
4. Why Worry Doesn’t Work
5. Book Review: The Dark Side of the Light Chasers, by Debbie Ford