@Mark: It was from a German magazine, so unfortunately I dont have the study.
(04-23-2011 03:08 AM)crazyhorse Wrote: I'm just very skeptical about that research in general. If you first talk positively to yourself, and afterwards you simply return to your old habbits of negative selftalk. how can you use that as evidence against positive selftalk?
The evidence was, that most of the probands with a low self esteem felt worse because of affirmations while the probands in the other group without affirmations felt better then them. Turning to negative selftalk is just the explanation for it, not the evidence.
This explanation goes hand in hand with the modern psychology. THe conventional psychology tried to change negative thoughts, as soon as they appear. This is excactly the aim of doing affirmations: the negative thought should be replaced through a positive one.
The modern psychology is not about changing the thought, but to accept it for what it is: just a thought. So e.g. if you feel powerless, you should not try to force ot change this feeling (with affirmations or whatsoever), since this makes overanalyze the thought, putting to much importance on it, and create negative thoughts: You start realizing, that no matter how often u do your affirmations, you still feel powerless, that you felt powerless most of the time in the last few years, that probably you will feel powerless in the future and for that never live up to your full potential and so on.
Now you created from a usual thought, which everybody has sometimes, a depessing feeling (that you always felt powerless and will probably always feel powerless).
Instead the modern psychology advices you to accept this, that AT THIS MOMENT you feel powerless. So what? You wont die from it. Maybe this feeling goes away in afew hours, maybe it wont. If it does not, tomorrow is another day.
So the focus of psychology,of what you think, changed to: how you deal with your thoughts.
By doing this you become kinda an inner observer, so everytime you have negative thoughts, you take the power from the away by not taking them important. Specially with fears this is very effective, since by accepting your fear just a thought you are accepting it NOT as the reality, but as some fiction in your head.
(04-23-2011 03:08 AM)crazyhorse Wrote: There's actually a very good book on the topic by Albert Ellis, called The Myth of Self Esteem, which argues that popular psychology is counterproductive when it encourages people to do affirmations on specific things like "I am an interesting person" because that statement is far too general to be true and we know it. Everybody can be boring from time to time. The point he makes is that you have to accept yourself as somebody with flaws, but put it in context. Like "yes, I was being boring there, but sometimes I am interesting"
I dont like this method, since itstill will question your thoughts and for that put too much importance on them: "yes, I was being boring there, but sometimes I am interesting. For example, hhmm, when was the last time i was interesting? I cant remember that someone every said that i am interesting ..."
