Positive Affirmations Can Help Counterprogram The Brain
To counteract negative messages received in childhood, we have to do conscious work of counterprogramming. One of the best ways is to find our own positive affirmations.
Positive affirmations have been shown to have enormous therapeutic power. When the brain has suffered emotional damage, using these phrases helps to reprogram it. If, in addition, we achieve that these affirmations are as personal as possible and that the person feels them as theirs, the beneficial effect multiplies exponentially.
They are not a substitute for therapy, but they can be a very valuable complement to continue working, at home, on the ideas seen in the session.
Throughout childhood, children receive thousands of messages that configure their brain. When these messages are negative or harmful, they disturb the way they perceive the world.
As adults, children who have grown up with this type of harmful messages, have assumed these automatisms of the past. In any situation that reminds them of their childhood programming, without taking into account that their current circumstances may be very different, they will react exactly the same as in their childhood.
Both in therapy and in daily life, the use of positive affirmations centered on the person and their particular circumstances, help to heal and reverse the damages of the past.
How positive phrases work
We can see this process with two brief examples of people I worked with in therapy.
- “Live in fear”
Mercedes was programmed, from her childhood, to live in fear. For her mother, everything was dangerous, she only saw the negative or risky side of what her daughter was doing. Little Mercedes heard thousands of times that “everything is dangerous”, “the world is dangerous”.
Working in therapy, she understood that it is normal to feel fear when there are dangerous situations, but that you do not have to be afraid of everything. There are good things in life that can be enjoyed without fear.
His new positive phrase to reprogram himself was: “fear is fine, in its proper measure.”
- “I am not good for studying”
Another example might be Pedro, who grew up continually hearing negative messages about his clumsiness and inability to study. It is true that he got poor grades in science subjects, but what really interested him was art. In fact, he spent all his class hours drawing in his books and notebooks.
Throughout his therapy, Pedro resumed his love of drawing and comics and opened a blog and an Instagram account where he posted the stories he created. In a very short time, he began to have great success and to receive work assignments.
His positive affirmation for work was: “You don’t have to be good at everything. I focus on those things that I am good at ”.
Discover your own positive affirmations
The work to find the most suitable positive affirmations for you, consists of comparing the harmful ideas that you carry from the past with your current reality and analyzing them from an adult point of view. Were the elders really right in what they told you? Could they be exaggerating? Did they have their own shortcomings that prevented them from seeing reality?
With the information you get, you can build the new ideas to reprogram your brain. The task that remains, now, is to repeat these phrases, over and over again, for days or weeks, to reinforce this new thought.
Keep in mind that you are compensating for many years of negative thinking and that changes do not happen overnight. Remember that the more you repeat your positive affirmations, the more weight they will have in rebalancing the scales and the more quickly they will become the new path your thinking takes.
