Michael

So I spent some time recently re-reading ‘Born only Once: The mir­a­cle of affir­ma­tion’ by Con­rad Baars, and I think I real­ized why his advice to sim­ply be open to being affirmed isn’t work­ing for me.

I think he didn’t go far enough with his the­ory of affir­ma­tion, as he only presents 2 options, either affirmed, or not affirmed (or some­where in between, but really, its just 0 or 1.)

I think he missed a –1 that belongs on that con­tin­uüm, which would mean or rep­re­sent some­one being ‘Denied’ to use his own terminology.

I cer­tainly feel that not only am I totally not affirmed, but I’m so far in the neg­a­tive, that any attempts at affirm­ing me are futile, until I some­how break free of these sources of con­stant denial.

I think the fact that I’m so emo­tion­ally and men­tally damaged/paralyzed that I don’t gen­er­ate pos­i­tive emo­tional responses is evi­dence that there’s a neg­a­tive affir­ma­tion scale, or denial scale.

I guess to expand on that a bit, for any­one who I haven’t shared this with (or hasn’t already fig­ured it out on their own), I don’t gen­er­ate pos­i­tive emo­tional responses/reactions. For exam­ple, com­pli­ments are lit­er­ally lost on me, so much so that while I ratio­nally reg­is­ter that some­body is say­ing some­thing nice about me, I will usu­ally reg­is­ter a neg­a­tive emotional/mental response. Its even worse when they’re being crit­i­cal, espe­cially with so-called ‘con­struc­tive criticism.’

And I think this behav­ior, that I’m totally self-denying, is a result of being stuck in the neg­a­tive end of the affir­ma­tion con­tin­uüm for all of my life. Hon­estly, from day 1 of my mem­ory, I think the peo­ple who had most con­trol over my affirmation/denial did every­thing they could (prob­a­bly unknow­ingly and for what they thought were all the right rea­sons) to deny me, because they them­selves were unaf­firmed (if not denied) indi­vid­u­als, couldn’t ever pos­si­bly affirm me.

So now I just sit here, par­a­lyzed, with nowhere to go in life as long as I’m under the influ­ence of these sources of con­tin­u­ing denial. I know that I even­tu­ally need ther­apy, but when I always have to return home to a per­pet­ual source of denial, will it even help? I need ther­apy before I can even be a can­di­date for reg­u­lar ther­apy, wow, that makes me feel good about myself.