Affirm the Positive

A little more about positive daily affirmations, since I’m on a roll...
Back on my Changing the Voices entry, someone asked me how long it takes to start believing the good stuff. Unfortunately, the only answer is, “It takes as long as it takes.” I guess it’s different for everyone. I honestly can’t tell anyone how to proceed with their own healing, I can only share what is happening with me. I’ve been at it nearly a year, and I’m still only kind of in the middle of it all. There are areas where my confidence is high and areas that are still very low, and even areas that change from day to day. There are days where I feel pretty good about how I look and then the next day I’m fighting the Big Ugly Voice again.

Recovery is entirely cyclical, not linear.

Here’s another example from the past, and how I thought about the world a year ago, in Journal Entry #8:

Day two of therapy today. We talked about positive daily affirmations, in an effort to counter the nasty voice inside my head. I have trouble valuing myself, feeling like I'm worth anything. Two areas to think about, where I rated myself the lowest:

• I give myself permission to shine.
• I deserve the good things in life as much as anybody else.

I know what I'm afraid of - that anything I have or anything I do that's good will get taken away from me. I guess that's what sent me into such a tailspin when [something happened] last year. It seemed to be proof that I was right all along, that anything good would be taken away. I didn't deserve him after all and now I was going to lose him. I think it broke something inside of me that was already pretty fragile.

I've just got to find my way back to that place I was before. My confidence was high and I didn't hate myself so much. I felt love, I felt like a good person. Being fat hurt, but it seemed like I was finally in control of that.

Daily positive affirmations:

I think that I deserve this pain, but I don't.

I deserve good things as much as anyone else.

I give myself permission to shine.

(6/3/2011)

Over time, I’ve released the idea that the good things in my life will always get taken away. That’s an old idea that gave a lot of power over my life to another person. But I’m still working on the permission to shine thing. That’s part of the reason I’m here, blogging my feelings all out loud; I crave attention, but I don’t think that I deserve it.
Honestly, they aren’t kidding when they call therapy “work.”