It seems you have no place for affirmations.  One of my new affirmations is "My Higher Self knows I am always wanted"! 

I still feel they help.

I think affirmations can "help" too.  They just don't cure.   I have no problem with any temporary aids, such as painkillers, strengthening exercises, prayers, or just plain encouragement.  I have enormous respect for the human struggle and I am always in favor of comforting and reassuring ourselves of God’s love and presence.  I just don't like to assign methodology a power it doesn’t have.

Affirmations can do certain things—such as encourage, comfort and reassure.  This can make the going easier.  Given how tough the going gets, there is lots of room for encouragement.  But affirmations operate at the level of mood and feeling.  At very best they change our psychological viewpoint of ourselves and the world.  But the psychological level is not the fundamental level of our person.  It’s one of the “upper layers” we could say, that includes our personality.  We think that if we can just get this part in order, then we can get on to the “deeper” stuff.  But the problem is the psychological self is perpetual in its crisis and demand for attention.  There is always something we need “to be working on.”  Like housecleaning, we never get done.  

However, there is another level that is more fundamental, that needs to be addressed.  When we address this level, both the psychological and the physical levels are healed as well, and within this healing all our hurts and history are resolved.  So, the more time and effort dedicated to this fundamental level, the less time we will have to dedicate to reassuring ourselves.

Regarding your affirmation itself:  “My Higher Self knows I am always wanted!”

I have no doubts that your "Higher Self" is clear about the fact that you are always wanted—and clear about everything else as well!  As is my Higher Self and everyone else’s Higher Self.  The problem is: How can we get this information "down" to our "lower self?"  How can we get the lower self to know what the Higher Self knows?  Why aren’t they in better touch?  In this case, yes—my Higher Self knows I am wanted.  But my lower self thinks I’m a lousy worm.  How do we get the lower self to listen up, maybe even to shut up?  It's the lower self that is the problem, no?  The lower self who, although grossly misinformed about almost everything, seems to be running the show--or at least a lot of it! 

If affirmations could actually change the lower self, we would all be changed by now, rather than (at best) simply feel better about ourselves.  In fact, with the amount of positive affirmation going on in America , we should have radically regenerated the entire world!   What a happy thought!  However, it would sometimes seem as if just the opposite is going on.   This is because there is something about affirmation that falls short.  If we ask our affirmations to do what they cannot do we will be continually disappointed and blame them for their “inefficiency.”  We might even think that the problem is with “this” affirmation or the next, and find ourselves shopping for new ones.

The solution to the disparity between the Higher Self and the lower self is not a psychological solution.  It is a spiritual one.  Affirmations are not spiritual.  They are psychological.  If we confuse the two, we will find ourselves stuck—or at best, perpetually getting better psychologically, while still feeling something fundamental, at our very root, is lacking or out of place.  Our longing for “peace”--our hunger for Truth and Spirit--has never been fully satisfied by affirmation.  The cure for this fundamental hunger is Spirit itself.

In the meantime, we should ask ourselves a very important question: When we are affirming any given truth, who is confirming what to whom?  Who is talking?  And to whom is this “someone” talking?   

These questions, sincerely considered, will take each of us to the heart of the matter and begin to open the way to a genuine freedom that does not need to be affirmed by the mind, because it abides perpetually.

If you have a question you would like Susan to address, that you think would be of interest to other site visitors, please use our Q&A form or write to BeyondSelfHelp@aol.com. Questions of a more personal or specific nature can be discussed privately with Susan through her counseling work.