Short YouTube commentary by Peter Szabo explaining why affirmations/visualization often fail: many people have conflicting subconscious memories (e.g., childhood remarks or traumas) that contradict new positive statements, producing self-sabotage. Szabo advises continuing affirmations but first resolving those underlying memories—he recommends a method called “memory flipping” and points viewers to links for the technique.
Chapters
This is why affirmations don't work for most people. Think about it as stacking rocks right on the left side Here you're trying to do affirmations, visualization, incantations, all these fancy things, and maybe you notice a little bit of a change, like our thinking process is starting to change. Maybe you start taking different actions, but ultimately sooner or later you take two steps forward, three steps back, right? Self sabotage kicks in and you go back to your old normal. Why is that? Right? Why do so many people experience this internal conflict, self sabotage, whatever you want to call it. And it has to do with this big rock to the right. It's called conflicting memories, right? Saying this hypothetical example, there's a child and when they're young in school, the teacher tells them like, hey, you're bad at math, right? Or kids laugh at them or something like that happens, that is perceived as traumatic by the child and they internalize it. They create this whole belief that they're stupid, they're just not good at math. They believe it, they repeat it, and soon enough it almost starts being like a self fulfilling prophecy. Like they start failing tests, getting bad grades, and they're just not good at math, right? And they go throughout the rest of their life thinking that, believing that. And therefore it's kind of justifying the reasons that they're getting now. Maybe later in life they get into self help and personal development, right? They find out about auto suggestion and affirmations. Visualization is, try to use it and they see a little bit of a change, but they never, you know, the change never lasts and it's never fast and it feels very problematic. And then there's that little thought in the back of their head like, I don't believe it, this is BS, etc. Etc. And that is why it doesn't work, because you have conflicting data in the subconscious mind. You have conflicting memories that say all these affirmations and things you're doing, they're nice and. But I have all this proof of the opposite, right? And the brain cannot believe two conflicting things at once. So that's, that's really the root cause. Now some people do law of attraction, affirmations, visualization, and it works for them. But it's a very small percentage of people because they didn't have the blocks there in the first place. They didn't have these conflicting pieces of data in their minds right? Now the funny paradox is people typically want what they don't have, they desire what they lack. So more often than not there are blocks there in the first place, right? That's why you're struggling in that area of life, because maybe there was some trauma around it, or maybe you observed your parents, primary caregivers, your environment, and you learned some not so optimal ways to cope or not so optimal habits. Now they're causing the havoc, and now you try to change it, but it's really hard if you still got those memories and that are holding you in their grip. So this is a quick video just to explain what's going on there. And bottom line, if you want to change, you need to look at it both ways. Think about it as like installing new data, creating these new synthetic memories and experiences. Because if you think about it like, what are affirmations and visualization in the first place, right? They say when you visualize something vividly enough, the brain and. And the nervous system literally cannot tell the difference between from what's imagined and what's real. That's when you imagine biting into like a juicy lemon, you literally start salivating, right? Because your brain, nervous system starts to think it's real. Same thing happens here. So that's why it's starting to change your personality a little bit and your thought process and how you feel and how you act on an unconscious basis. But again, if you have all these conflicting memories and it'll make your job so much harder. So my piece of advice is, do the affirmations, do the visualization. But unless you first resolve and deal with these underlying conflicts, these memories, it's never really going to work. So try to deal with that first. And the technique, obviously, that I would recommend is memory flipping. So check out the links below and I'll tell you more about it. This is Peter Szabo. Take care and have fun.
