Affirming Love

Your thoughts have the potential to create an emotional reaction in you. Tell yourself "I feel terrible," enough times and eventually you will feel terrible even when you don't say it to yourself. If you then tell yourself, "I feel great!" over time you will start to replace all the internalized feeling terrible statements with feeling great statements, and you will start to feel great!

Affirmations can change your reactions: How you feel about your own behavior, how you feel about another person's behavior.

This is a two fold process. Saying the affirmation creates an awareness of your reaction, as you have it, to a specific situation, reminding you how you want to react, then the same affirmation can actually change your reaction.

Have you ever had a person that acted in a certain way with you, or did something to you that you always reacted to in the same way? Perhaps it was someone close to you, that always got irrationally angry, and that made you freeze with fear. You wish you could stay calm and feel safe, but every time it happens, you get caught up in the emotions of the moment, ending up a frazzled mess. Something like, "When my boss gets mad, I remain calm," and "When my boss gets mad, I am safe," said enough times, will come to your mind when your boss gets mad, reminding you of the reaction you wish to have. At first you may still react the same way but you will be aware of how you are reacting. With time, the fear will subside, and even in the face of another person's anger you will stay calm. With affirmations that deal with stressful situations I also include one that includes remembering to breath: "When someone gets angry, I stay breathing."

Affirmations can change your beliefs, expectations and your perceptions: What you believe about yourself, other people or situations.

How you feel about yourself is the filter through which you view the world. Change the filter you view yourself and the world through and your beliefs, perceptions and expectations will change.

As an example, perhaps you have an experience with someone that is critical of you. You experience that person's behavior and perhaps your reaction, your thoughts, create a negative feeling inside; you get very hurt emotionally. If you continue to interact with this person, your continued interaction becomes a practice of feeling bad as a result of the person's behavior. That feeling, repeated enough times becomes a belief; you tend to notice people that interact with you in a negative way and ignore those that interact in a positive way, reinforcing your belief. Consciously or unconsciously you begin to expect people to act negatively with you.

It doesn't stop there. While you may expect people to act negatively with you, you still want to feel good. So you project outward, seeking validation in some way from other people; you look to others to affirm what you feel badly about. The problem is that because of your own belief, even if they try to validate you, your own internal dialog prevents them from ever really being able to make you feel better. You reject the messages from other people that contradict how you feel about yourself.

More important, in the areas we all feel insecure about, we end up seeking out people who are incapable of validating our feelings. So while it may seem you are meeting someone new who is more positive, at least on the surface, they will probably reveal themselves to be critical as well. This can happen over and over because your own beliefs prevent you from accepting anything different.

Affirmations such as, "I allow people that like me into my life," "I allow people to act in a loving way with me," or, "People like me," will begin to challenge the negative belief, and eventually replace the belief and feeling with new positive ones. Once the change in the belief has taken place, the filter your interactions are viewed though will change to a more positive one. You will stop expecting people to validate you and will start to notice more positive people in your life because you validate yourself first, and your own beliefs allow positive people into your life.