Our inner narrative impacts our beliefs.
Our bodies are always listening to what we say about our Selves.
Would your body be friends with you, given what you say about yourself? We build trust (or destroy it) with what we say about ourselves because our relationship with ourselves is just like any relationship.
How we speak about ourselves can become a self-fulfilling prophecy because we create a confirmation bias to see ourselves through a specific lens. If you’ve been conditioned to see yourself as disorganized, when you forget to respond to an email, then it will trigger an automatic confirmation of evidence supporting self-judgement. When actually, you’re just a human with human limitations and finite executive function.
Affirmations are an important part of healing because we know placebo effect works; if we believe in it, the healing happens. The problem with affirmations is we have to believe them.
The problem with affirmations is fake it till you make it doesn’t work. Fake it till you make it can actually increase imposter syndrome and amplify the feeling that you’re duping everyone around you to believe you’re a good person when secretly you’re terrified of actually being a terrible person whose so manipulative they’ve made everyone around them believe you’re a good person. It happens to more of you than you think.
The problem with affirmations, is we have to have evidence to support the affirmation in order to believe it. If you’ve been told your whole life you’re good for nothing, suddenly saying you’re amazing can actually create more self doubt because it is such an antithesis to your engrained belief system. You actually need to have evidence to support the affirmation - because your brain/body system has so much evidence to the contrary.
You’ve internalized so much falsified evidence that you’re “not good enough” or “too much” or an even more confusing combination of the two. So if you’re going to believe an affirmation, we have to have evidence to counter your lifetime of evidence of lack.