Positive Affirmation: Healing or Hogwash?

[Emergent, RN]

I'm still recovering from an accident and I'm told by my doctor and therapist that my maximum obtainable recovery will be 80%. Yet a colleague is into visualization and positive affirmation, and tells me that I need to visualize perfect recovery.

Yet, as I struggle to accept the reality of a permanent limitation, I find that visualizing 100% recovery is depressing. I seem to emotionally do better when I work on acceptance. I'm not giving up, but want to be realistic too.

Does positive affirmation work? It feels similar to the fruitless prayers we said during my husband's final illness. Isn't it better to strive for acceptance?

[Whispera, MSN, RN]

If you don't have at least some confidence that it can work, it can't work.

I know someone who had lung cancer. She visualized her cancer as a tree. She visualized herself chopping the tree down and digging out the roots, and disposing of it all. She did this lots and lots. Her cancer went into remission...

[jadelpn, LPN, EMT-B]

You can accept what you can do and see presently. No sense getting yourself in a place where you are getting bummed out every day. It is what it is at present. But when you are 100% of your 80%, what can you try to increase function?

Along with that, you can visualize taking a tiny step forward, that you control, that may help you to see possibility.

Make sure your PT/OT people are ones that you like, that are positive, upbeat, invested in your function.

Your 80% may be someone else's 100%. In other words, 80% is subjective. And variable. So to look at subjective data may not be conducive to your highest functional level.

Wishing you nothing but the best!

[That Guy, BSN, RN, EMT-B]

Are you an optimist a pessimist or a realist. Thats how I see all of that working. You set your limitations and your goals based on how you perceive everything else in life. If i knew I would never get back to my old ways, I wouldn't tell myself I would and let myself down when I couldn't. Different strokes for different folks I guess.