Why Do We Need to Say It In the Positive?

It is common knowledge in the personal self-help arena to craft your affirmations in the positive. But why? Well thanks to a friend of mine, I had the opportunity to understand this better and I want to share it with you because it can be a really powerful understanding of how change is created, or isn’t.

One day I wrote an experimental script. It was short, sweet and about money that was owed but not arriving. The subject, my friend, was thinking about this a lot and a great deal of resentment was building, as you can imagine. The experiment was to see what would happen if the script just stated the obvious, the money was not coming and would not come. Would a script that just stated the obvious allow the listener to let it go? Would it miraculously bring the money to them faster? Like, I said, it was an experiment and it yielded a better understanding of language and the mind, as we shall see. For the purposes of this article, let’s examine just one of those sentences. ‘You won’t see that check arriving in your mailbox today.”

Well my friend was listening to this recording and their brilliant mind immediately sees vivid pictures of guess what… a check arriving in the mailbox. Wait, what? And this held true for all the other statements, they saw the opposite of the intention of the statement. Is this some kind of crazy magic? Well, no, it isn’t. It is how the different parts of the mind work and let’s explore that.

There is a part of the mind that processes words, their individual meanings, their meanings in a sentence and the meanings of the sentences within the larger context of the story they are in. We are all familiar with how words can take on different meanings based on how they are used together within a larger whole. The analytical part of the mind holds on to each word as it continues on to the next, reserving the final meaning until it understands the context. Once a contextual meaning is derived the analytical mind lets that go and moves onto the next batch of words. I bet if you think back or just be more aware the next time you are reading something, you can detect the mind pausing until the context is understood and then the release. We convey this ‘packeting of context’ in our writing with punctuation and our minds are trained to create the meanings of the words using the punctuation as a guide to packeting the information.

You can also notice how a paragraph works the same way to packet or contextualize information, right? A paragraph is also, or should be if we still remembered our essay writing days, a packet of information that all goes together to form a context around the sentences. The sentences in a paragraph should all be related to a larger meaning that refines the meanings of the individual words, allowing all possible meanings to collapse into a single meaning. If we still remember to write in that way, that is. And to speak in that way.

That is exactly how hypnotic scripts work, they are run on sentences that just keep going with only loose packeting taking place. So, your mind goes on a long pause waiting for the paragraph to end so it can packet the information and finalize the meanings of the words. But then it doesn’t end, and doesn’t end and just keeps going even when you think it is going to end, it doesn’t, it just keeps going and going and… you get the idea. Think of the last time you listened to someone who likes to just keep talking and talking, and how your mind started to wander, your eyes glazed over and in a flash you realized that you just lost a few minutes of time as you went elsewhere. That’s hypnosis.

So what is really happening in the background is your analytical mind is trying to create pictures based on the words. Your mind is trying to collect all the words, organize them and relate them in order to build a picture. Once a picture is formed, the mind accepts that as a good representation and then moves on to build the next picture. Think about this in reverse, try to describe a picture. Say, you have a photo of a dog playing catch. Just those words give you a picture, but your picture and my picture, while both based on the same words, are likely to be very different. If you were to create a more detailed description, you might include what kind of dog it is, what they are playing catch with, the colors, the scenery and more. With all those words, you and I might have pictures that are a closer match.

Now that you have reviewed the workings of the analytical speech processing part of the mind with me, let’s turn our attention to a more subconscious mind, the visual image processing center. For my purposes, I am going to relate the visual image processing with our more subconscious parts of the mind for the simple reason that as young children that is how we start out. We see the world before we describe it with words. Our ability to understand the world around us is through our senses, not our ability to understand words. When we begin to teach children to read and write, we use pictures to associate the words with the images. When we fall asleep at night and begin to dream, we dream in images. Our visual imagery system is more at the core of our minds work than word-based language. We also use this visualization faculty to ‘speak’ to the subconscious mind to influence our beliefs and automated routines.

When we are processing language we are trying to convert it to imagery in whatever form that takes. Many people are very visual and easily see pictures and images when words are spoken or read. Some may imagine metaphors and graphical representations for non-pictorial information. For instance, I naturally create mental constructs in the form of diagrams, not exactly a picture but a mental image of how the information relates to one another. This tendency to convert words/information into images is why creating charts, graphs and diagrams of information, especially numerical data, is so powerful in aiding understanding of such non-pictorial information. Creating an image of information allows us to ‘get it’ across multiple aspects of the mind. We understand this and employ it in many ways. We know ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’, for instance. We know that a visual image can contain a lot of information in a neat little packet.

So, why state things in the positive, if our minds can hold onto the words until the contextual meaning is developed? We convert words to images, so why does it matter if I say, ‘my knee does not hurt anymore’ or ‘my knee is pain-free’ or ‘I walk with ease and comfort’? Now we can turn back to the experiment my very visual friend helped me with. For the first few days of listening to that recording, they saw that check arriving in the mailbox even though the sentence said they did not see that. The logical analysis of the words would lead us to imagine an empty mailbox or some other visual depiction of the check flying off or disappearing and so on.

Now when you are listening in a relaxed state you have turned down the analytical mind and are just allowing the information to flow in. Think of watching a movie or TV, you aren’t trying to analyze each word or sentence, the imagery is already present so you are just allowing information to flow in without much analysis. That is not to say there is no analysis, there is, but you are not trying to convert words into images. You are ‘talking’ more directly with the subconscious mind and science knows this. Experiments show that even just 60 seconds of watching TV will create alpha waves in the brain which is exactly what hypnotherapists do when putting someone into a relaxed, hypnotic state.

So when you are listening to a hypnotherapeutic recording while in a relaxed state your brain will just allow the information to flow right in, creating images without the analysis. For example, close your eyes and see a red bird. You can see or imagine a red bird pretty easily, right? Now, close your eyes and without thinking about it, see a non-red bird. That is more difficult, isn’t it? What exactly are you supposed to see? A brown bird, a blue one? What? Now your analytical mind is engaging and you are thinking about it. And that defeats the purpose, you are no longer speaking more directly with the subconscious mind. You are filtering and processing.

Let’s go back now to the check in the mailbox. If we look at the sentence you have two parts that can create images rather directly, ‘you won't see that’ and ‘check arriving in the mailbox’. Now, we can split this in different place but this split works well to help us understand the mechanics. For an image of ‘you won't see that’ we can easily imagine a person with their hands over their eyes or somehow looking in the wrong direction or just not able to see. For the part of the ‘check arriving in the mailbox’, we can easily imagine a check in the mailbox, or a check magically arriving in the mailbox and other creative options, but all are pretty easily imagined. So, this is how your mind works, when in a relaxed state where alpha waves are dominant, you will create simple images out of easily packeted information. The impact of context requires the analytical mind which is takes more time and is difficult to access when in a relaxed state.

So, the person listening to the recording for ‘you won’t see that check arriving in the mailbox’ will see a check arriving in the mailbox. They might also see some form of someone not being able to see but the two parts are not related to one another, that would require applying context. Interestingly, after a few days of repeated listening to the recording, my friend noticed a different effect, the check was not arriving in the mailbox anymore. The context had sunk in, so to speak. The analytical mind caught up and with repeated listening was now able to apply that context even in that relaxed state of mind.

Here now, is a conflict, the meaning of the script is now confused. Earlier in the listening period the subconscious mind understood the message as a check arriving and later on the check isn’t arriving, so which is it? What reality should the listener create? The purpose of a script for ‘my knee is not hurting anymore’ is negated by the language used. For it to work as intended, as written, it will require a longer period of use to undo the earlier effect and to lock in the intended effect. Not only that but the listener will detect that conflict and are very likely, even subconsciously driven, to cease listening so the intended effect is never realized.

The moral of the story… use positive language that both the analytical and visual aspects of the mind can agree upon. Avoid creating contextual meanings that conflict with the simple packeting of language. This is powerful stuff when applied to hypnotherapy but also to your daily life.

Practical Application Time!

Explore this concept for yourself...

1. How is your choice of words creating conflict with your intentions?

2. How is that playing out for you in your life?

3. How can you improve your outcomes by creating more alignment within your mind?