For When You Hate Absolutely Everything About Yourself and The World

MendMaker Exercise: Session written and explained by your coach Claire Anstey

Flip How You Feel

Session Length: 3-minute read then 30 minutes for the exercise. Please note the exercise takes as long as needed to process and transform thoughts but you can come back to your notes as desired.

Note from Claire Anstey: This MendMaker Exercise is your beacon through the storm of self-hatred and despair. I’ve been there, drowning in negativity, where everything about myself and the world seemed utterly loathsome. But here’s what I learned: those feelings, rooted in past hurts or future fears, don't define our present reality. By writing down these negative thoughts and actively challenging them, we can shift our perspective. I did this; I changed my inner narrative from criticism to affirmation, and it was revolutionary. It’s more than a quick fix; it’s a profound transformation of your thought process, fostering a journey from self-doubt to self-love, empowering you to see and believe in the positive truths of your life.

MendMaker Exercise

When we have been rejected it hurts and raises all kinds of self-doubt. If they do not want you, why will anyone else want you? That little bit of self-esteem you did have is utterly ripped to shreds by our own self-talk.

We doubt ourselves and we doubt our ability to ever have a relationship again. Our thoughts seem entirely believable and convincing. The more we believe them the more it hurts and the lower we fall into a well of destruction. But these thoughts are not factual. Our imagination runs riot and we create issues in the future that haven’t even happened, we elaborate on the past and make up our own version of actual events. The past is over and the future hasn’t happened yet so both serve no purpose to us  when we look at them with fear, sadness and regret. Our fears and our upset are all figments of our imagination. Some of the pain and emotions you feel right now are related to thoughts about situations and events that actually haven’t happened. They are made up, they are pretend and so are the emotions you feel about them.

When we realise that these thoughts are not real the pain will go away. It disappears as quickly as it arrived and we will feel a lightness and clearing within our mind.

So how do we stop these destructive thoughts and how do we make our imagination behave?

The key is focusing on the here and now, releasing your thoughts of yesterday and trusting that the future will be better.

MendMaker: Past, Present, Future.

Write down and list all your negative thoughts, bleed yourself dry of them. It is important that you write down every single one down that you have in your head at this moment.

Then go through your list and with a blue pen ring the ones that talk of the past, ring the ones that talk of the future in red and green ring the ones that you believe talk about the here and now.

Go through this list until every negative thought on your page has been ringed, past, future or now with its appropriate colour.

Take a look over all the sentences highlighted with your blue pen. They are in the past. You do not exist in this moment anymore. It has past and the past has gone. Yes certain things have happened in the past and we can’t deny that but it is the past and this is about focusing you on you’re here and now not the images that you have re created in your head. Scribble each sentence out until you have coloured completely over it. As you do this know that it is just a thought and thoughts can be changed. The past is gone.

We all seem to love a drama at times and maybe the amount of red on your page with signify how much drama you love in your life. This stuff hasn’t actually happened, it has never existed and is all your own creation. It is time to de-create this list of future nightmares by scribbling them out and destroying the thought of their existence. As your scribble over each sentence know and say ‘this doesn’t exist. It is not true and it is not real. It is gone or something similar. It adds to the moment and the words spoken out loud enable you to believe it from deeper within. You may sound like a white witch whilst you are doing it though so just find a safe space where you will not be interrupted or over heard.

Now you may not have any negative thoughts about the here and now and there may not be any green rings on your page and that’s ok. If you do that’s ok too and this is what we are going to do with them. You are going to take each negative thought and turn it into a positive affirmation. You are going to do this with each one and by affirming the good thoughts you will lose the bad ones. If you truly believe that this thought and emotion is a fact about you and your life in the here and now we are going to repeat the positive version of it over and over until that becomes a fact instead.

Examples

I am fat and ugly - I am beautiful and perfect just the way I am

No one wants me – I am loved and surrounded by people who love me

See how it works? Simply just reverse the negative to a positive statement. When we repeat something over and over we start to believe it and it manifests in our life. An affirmation is the deliberate use of a statement we want to create in our life. It is time to use these positive affirmations to change our current thoughts, emotions and beliefs about our existence.