‘Positive affirmations and my life’
When I was about seven or eight years old, I asked my Mother why scary books are scary, if they aren’t actually true. She told me that we convince ourselves that what we are reading is true, at least for the characters we are reading about, and so we react as if it is happening to us.
Naturally, I thought this was ridiculous. Something is true or not, right? I mean I loved reading stories like The Black Stallion but I also knew they were not true. They were just fun. As you can perhaps discern, I was a serious child.
That night I decided to try this ridiculousness out for myself and prove that it was not true. I would have yelled “FOR SCIENCE!” before bedtime, had I known of such a phrase back then. I pulled the blankets up over my head and imagined a terrible creature was next to my bed. I visualized him in detail: he was a desiccated corpse with sharp teeth and — I kid you not — wearing a rotting tux and top hat (no, I don’t know why this was a necessary piece, it has bothered adult-me for years). He was right there next to the bed. He was leaning over me. His rotten, skeletal hand was reaching out…
Cue the screaming for my parents, who ran into the room no lie my father had his pistol in hand, I have no idea what the hell they thought was happening. I told them it was a nightmare, they believed me, I slept with the light on that night.
When people roll roll their eyes and shrug, saying, “What’s the point of repeating something you know isn’t true?” I think of this pivotal moment from my childhood.
The irony is that I dismissed it for a long time. I was one of those people who snidely derided the idea that a positive mentality was something I could learn. What kind of absurd new-agey woo-woo was that, anyway? I had lived through some trauma, some hard knocks, poverty, being fat, hurricanes…the list goes on. Life sucked and I knew it sucked. I felt empowered by my misery. I had fucking earned it. Happiness and optimism and good luck was for other people, and I was better off being a “realist” who knew the “truth” about my life. Brains don’t change, everyone knew that.
I’m skipping a long backstory here (you’re welcome) but it started back in the early aughts when I stumbled over the then-new psychological theory of learned optimism. For fifteen years I watched the study of learned optimism and wholeheartedness and vulnerability and even neuroscience change profoundly. In that time, I realized something important, something I had actually proven for myself at the age of seven:
Brains DO change.
Are we just the victims of circumstance and time? Or can we influence the changes that occurs to our gray matter? As it happens, the answer to both questions seems to be “yes” (barring physical/chemical problems, such as injury or clinical depression).
Like learning to play an instrument or speak a different language, the key is practice. No one wakes up one day deciding they are going to sit down and spontaneously and without any former training, bang out some Chopin on a grand piano. However, if you actually are a pianist, you can visualize playing the piece perfectly and it will provably improve your performance of it. Athletes have been clued into this kind of “mental practice” for years. Similarly, telling yourself over and over that you play the piece poorly and you suck as a musician will definitely adversely affect the outcome.
What it all means is that we do influence how our brains function. Positive affirmations are not magic spells, they will not miraculously make you thin or wealthy or successful. What they do, though, is “prime the pump” for positive action. When the time comes to make a decision between working out or plugging into Netflix, it’s less a choice between action than between the belief that you are intrinsically athletic and enjoy working out, or that you are lazy and hate working out.
So I think about that night 40 years ago when I convinced myself there was a monster in the room with me. I consciously decided that I was going to imagine a monster and try to make myself believe it existed, and I did just that.
If I can believe in monsters, then I can damn sure learn to believe in myself.
My dear friend JenS left this one for me; she’s seen me through a variety of major life changes over the last decade, good and bad, and one of those changes has been how I think about and use positive affirmations.
