by Ora North
Sometimes affirmations work. Sometimes they can help shift your thoughts into more productive ones. With deeper wounds, however, those affirmations could potentially make your negative thoughts and feelings worse.
If you have a very strong negative thought, one that’s been perpetuating its own negative cycle for years, you may find that using a positive affirmation that is so far from the truth will create an energetic dissonance that you can’t bridge. That dissonance sets you up to fail, and creates even more distance between where you really are now and where you want to go. It’s much harder to reach your destination if you’re lying to yourself about your starting point. That feeling of dissonance, of lying to yourself, is especially strong for empaths. Since empaths need validation for their feelings more than anything else, they need a different kind of affirmation. In the Do the Work section of this chapter, you’ll have the chance to use affirmations that will work better for your sensitive nature.
We are all one.
This one is especially tricky, since it’s very real on one level. The fact that we are all magically connected in one big web of existence is true. But we are also here as humans, and humans are as individual as they can come. We all have incredibly unique personalities, genes, upbringings, life experiences, and interests.
The “we are one” distortion is often used to dismiss the painful experience of the individual in favor of the larger, more enlightened experience. When this is done on such a large scale, it takes away the importance of individual storytelling and growth, which takes away the juiciness of personal evolution. This particular concept is also usually pretty guilty of sexism and racism.
It’s detrimental for an empath to have their individual experience taken away and lost within the idea of oneness. The empath needs to feel separate from the messiness of others before they can use oneness as a helpful spiritual ideal. On the flip side, it can also be detrimental for an empath to subscribe to oneness with others. Because empaths can feel the pain of others so easily, there’s the possibility that the empath could overlook the individual experience and story of the other person, bypassing their need for validation. While many people on earth have the primary spiritual mission of merging with others into oneness, empaths have already come with the inherent ability and compulsion to do that. In their case, their mission is first to be able to separate from everyone else and see themselves in their independence before striving for oneness. Empaths are always the first to experience the shadow side of oneness.
Emotions aren’t important, so ignore them and let them pass.
There are many who say you should be as neutral as possible about your emotions, to the point where it’s healthier to ignore them and focus on something else instead. They’ll say that emotions aren’t real. Or that you are not your emotions, so you shouldn’t give them attention. While awareness and neutrality are important energetic tools, and ones we’ll get into later, ignoring your feelings is certainly not the same as being neutral.
While you should let your emotions pass, since emotions are fluid and constantly changing, you should feel them first. Feel them like waves washing over you. Just because the wave will soon go away, doesn’t mean that the wave isn’t real and that it’s not having an effect on you.
Your reaction to other people is all about you and not them.
This is the “we are all just mirrors” distortion. It’s true that we often see things in other people that reflect where we’re at in our own journeys, but this isn’t always the case. There are those who will say that someone is being mean to you because they’re picking up on how you yourself are mean, so it’s really all about you and the other party can’t be held responsible.
This is a convenient way to blame the victim, and it can also be used in predatory ways for manipulative ends. Sometimes what you see in others is really just a reflection of yourself. Really though, sometimes someone being a jerk to you is really just because they’re a jerk. That doesn’t mean that you can’t find pieces of your reflection in everyone you meet, but to assume everyone is just a reflection of yourself (whether that reflection is flattering or not) breeds narcissism.
For an empath, there’s already enough difficulty figuring out whose energy is whose, so promoting the idea that we’re all just reflections will make sorting through life and finding independence even more challenging.
You create your own reality.
This is one that I fully believe in…to a point. It’s true that the power of your thoughts can completely alter your life in the best possible way, but you have to remember that you’re building a new reality in a world where a million other realities have already been created by others. This means that there’s a heavy cultural impact to manifestation.
For example, if you’re a straight white male, creating your own desired reality on top of a reality that is already built for you (patriarchal America) isn’t too much of a stretch. On the other hand, if you’re a queer black woman and a single mom, you are trying to create a reality which goes against the cultural realities that were built to prevent you from building your own, making it that much harder.
Racism and sexism are rampant in this distortion. When you’ve successfully created your own reality, it may be a result of pure magic, or it may be a result of privilege. And it’s most likely a combination.
Good vibes only!
“Don’t give any attention to the negative news, because then you’ll be feeding the negativity and making it worse. Focus on love and light instead. Good vibes only!”
This is a really convenient way to ignore reality and enable oppression. If you focus exclusively on the good, you are not helping innocent people who are hurting. That’s like seeing someone getting beat up in the street and thinking, I’m going to ignore this and focus on love and light for the world instead! Your focusing on the positive did not save that person. Your focusing on the positive did not change the mind of the person doing the beating. Tell me…what did you accomplish?
It’s especially important for empaths to understand the consequences of this distortion. Since empaths are so well-acquainted with the pain and suffering of humanity, encouraging this idea would be encouraging the suppression of half of their experience. Saying “Good vibes only!” to an empath is like saying, “Only half of you is allowed here!”
All these new age distortions employ spiritual bypassing, which encourages people to bypass their own pain and individual experiences, and results in a world full of people who pretend to be happy because they should, not because they are.
To be fair, most new age platitudes have the potential to be really life changing and powerful when used correctly. Most people miss the mark, though, especially at the beginning of their spiritual journeys. We’d like to think that these things are much easier than they are, which is completely understandable. How amazing would it be if it was just that simple and easy?
Using these platitudes is like jumping off a cliff. In theory, the potential for these concepts should make me fly when I jump. I’ve got magic on my side! I can fly! But my own personal pain manifests as heavy weights strapped to my ankles. Sure, creating my own reality can give me wings to fly, but unless I recognize and remove the weights that are strapped on to me, I’m going to fall. My wings are useless if they can’t carry my baggage.
The baggage that would keep us from flying includes the things we’d like to ignore in favor of the light: our childhood pain, our abuses, our victimhood, our unkind emotions. If we don’t realize the finer points and physics of spiritual cliff jumping, like the very real weight of our emotional baggage, flying is much less of a possibility.
What is the baggage that might keep you from flying? In the Do the Work section of this chapter, you’ll explore your own experience with these new age concepts and examine where you’ve gotten stuck.
Meet Your Shadows: Victims and Villains
To begin wo
rking with your shadow self, you need to know what it’s like and what it wants. To make it easier, when we first start examining the shadow, I like to split the shadow self into two roles: the victim and the villain.
The victim (or innocent) is made up of all the bad things that other people have done to you. The villain is made up of all the bad things that you have done to other people. They both have unique reactions to things, and they both want to rise up within you and act on their impulses. Between the two of them, they can make up most of the undesirable traits you have. By personifying your own victim and villain, you will connect to a source of secrets and knowledge that you didn’t have access to before.
Who is your victim? What do they look like? How old are they? What are their habits? What are the things they most often talk about? What have people done to you in your life to create this character? What about your villain? What kind of games does your villain like to play? What have you done to others in your life to create this character? When personifying your victim and villain, you’re revealing real characters that live inside of you.
When Rose was asked to personify her victim, she noticed that it was a much younger version of her. This younger version of herself always kept her head down and mumbled to herself softly. Rose was sexually abused at a fairly young age, and was conditioned into thinking she would always be in a place of powerlessness.
As a result, her victim tries to find situations in adulthood where she can willingly give up her power, especially sexually. Her family wasn’t there for her in times of emotional struggle, so her victim believes that no one will ever support her. This belief drives her to give up on relationships prematurely, because she believes they will never support her. Rose complains about her job constantly and how unfairly they treat her, because she was treated unfairly when she was younger and her victim wants to hold on to that. She’s able to find her victimhood in nearly every situation, because more than anything else, her victim wants to be seen. She wants attention and validation, and because she’s not receiving it in a positive, loving way, she acts out by finding opportunities to give her power away in a last-ditch effort for attention.
Rose’s villain, on the other hand, refuses to be a victim. She guards herself against situations where she might have to be emotionally vulnerable and cuts people out of her life harshly. When she feels slighted by someone, she chooses the path of spite and revenge. She enjoys seducing men she doesn’t even care for, just so she can feel her power over them. She revels in that power and manipulation, and she laughs at their loss of control.
The victim and villain may seem like complete opposites, but that’s usually how they reveal themselves. When it comes to self-growth and exploration, if you’ve found yourself in a contradiction, you’ve likely stumbled into truth. The victim and the villain feed and encourage one another. There is not one without the other. The villain usually becomes a villain after being a victim first. Your villain’s primary job is actually to prevent you from ever becoming that victim again. And your victim’s primary job is to get the attention they didn’t get before, by any means necessary, and to hold onto the purity and innocence they had right before the bad things happened to them.
You might see these examples and think, Those sound horrible! Who would want to be in touch with that? But this is where it gets really interesting. Think about your favorite television shows, movies, and books. Think about the innocents and the villains you get to know. Personally, my favorite kinds of stories are the ones where the villains can cross over into innocents occasionally, and the innocents can cross over into villains occasionally. When the villain constantly does evil things without any variety, it gets boring. When the innocent constantly does innocent things without any variety, it gets boring. It is so heartwarming and exciting when the villain shows some self-growth and does something kind, and at the same time, it’s so satisfying to see the innocent delve into their own villainous destructive tendencies. It’s more exciting because it more accurately portrays how people really are. It’s more exciting because that’s where we see character development and growth.
When you willingly look into your own shadow, your own victim gets to step up into empowerment, and you get to see that. Your own villain gets to expand into kindness, and you get to see that. Your own innocent self gets to descend into some interesting debauchery, and you get to see that too. In this way, it’s so much more fun to deal with all the different aspects of yourself, and your shadow makes this experience of life a million times more interesting.
The best part? When you get to know your victim and your villain, you can let them be a part of your life without destroying anything. You can still embody them at times.
For instance, I sometimes ask my partner to hold space for my victim self, and then I allow myself to react to the situation in my victim mentality. When I do this, I’m validating and acknowledging that my victim self is there. I’m expressing her thoughts (even if they are not thoughts I share normally), and because I express that as my victim, it doesn’t hurt my relationship with my partner. Once I allow myself to do this, I can then easily see how those are not thoughts I want to operate out of on a regular basis.
The same goes for my villain. My villain is a bit of an evil seductress born of past trauma, but if I’m with a safe intimate partner, I can allow her to come out and play for a little bit. This acknowledges and validates her existence, while also putting her in a safe place to express herself.
How can you express your victim and your villain in your own life? Where can you create some space for those pieces of yourself to come alive? If you have a partner or friend that you trust, maybe you can explore these concepts together so you can create a safe space for one another.
Now, we can’t play out every victim and villain reaction, because there’s no way to do that without hurting someone. In those cases, you can instead turn to creative expression: writing a song about your victim, writing a suspense novel about your villain, painting a picture of them, doing an interpretive dance. The options are endless. This exercise is, of course, a simplification of our shadows, but starting somewhere simple gets us in the habit of separating out energies and describing them accurately.
The more you can personify and validate the experiences of your victim and your villain, the more you will be able to integrate them into yourself. Having a positive relationship with your dark side ensures that your dark side won’t creep into every aspect of your life, silently and slowly ruining your relationships. The better you know yourself, the more control you have over the outcomes in your life. If you work with your dark side, you’ll have access to an unending well of creativity and healing, but if you ignore or repress your dark side, you will be blocked and unable to create the change in the world that you would like to create.
Do the Work
First, take a look at new age distortions in your own life. Then I’ll teach you a healthy way to witness, validate, and transform your pain.
New Age Distortions
In your journal, write down a few of the new age concepts that you’ve been exposed to that should have made you feel good but didn’t. After thinking about your shadow side and how important your darkness is, why do you think those concepts didn’t sit right with you?
Pain Alchemy Affirmations
One way to use positive thinking during your shadow work is to use pain alchemy affirmations instead of positive affirmations. Pain alchemy affirmations allow you to first witness and validate your pain, and then shift your pain toward the positive.
To craft a pain alchemy affirmation, you start with a statement that recognizes your pain. “I am hurt by .” This first sentence’s only job is to validate the fact that you feel pain and allow you to name it.
The next sentence of your pain alchemy affirmation begins with “I know that .” The purpose of this second sentence is to take that named pain and turn it toward your own in
ner wisdom, which only your pain could reveal. Sunshine and rainbows will not inform your inner wisdom; only the specific pain and shadow of that feeling can enlighten you to its wisdom.
Once you’ve written them, read them out loud. You will know if it’s the right affirmation for you, because when it hits that sweet spot of validation, you will feel an energetic “click” in your bones. You will feel its power.
Don’t worry if you don’t quite understand how these work. Practice with a few of your negative feelings. Follow the formula of first naming your pain and then turning that pain toward wisdom. They can be as simple and uncomplicated or as eloquent and long-winded as you’d like. The important part is how it feels when you read it out loud.
Here are some examples of crafting pain alchemy affirmations:
Crappy feeling: I’m bombarded by the negative feelings and the pain of others.
Pain alchemy affirmation: I am hurt by the pain and suffering of others. I know that this deep empathy gives me a fuller knowing of the spectrum of life on earth, allows me to be grateful for my own joy and the joy of others, and allows me to feel that joy just as deeply as the pain.
Crappy feeling: I feel unaccepted for my sensitivity.
Pain alchemy affirmation: I am hurt by the disapproval of my sensitivity. I know that my sensitivity is beautiful, and I do not need to change it. It is a vast network of delicate intuitive synapses that begin and end in my heart.
Crappy feeling: I’m terrified of being alone.
Pain alchemy affirmation: I am hurt and scared by the idea of being completely alone with myself. I know that to face this fear with courage, to sink into the wild isolation of independence, is to know myself better.
Crappy feeling: I keep ending up in abusive relationships with narcissists.
Pain alchemy affirmation: I am hurt by the pattern of abuse I have found myself in. I know that I am not confined to these patterns, and with honest self-work and self-love, I can break free of these karmic plays.
