On Mantra Therapy
Some of my Affirmations
I devised a new technique to anchor my understanding of who I was in Maya’s estimation, because through so much cold treatment, it was easy to forget why I was holding on to that partnership in the first place. What I arrived at was a sort of mantra inviting myself to remember the moments when she’d broken through new comfort zones, new cherry-pops for her, and with me by her side, made me feel special.
Then the relationship went wrong.
After the discard I tried writing an anti-mantra — a technique that is actually recommended in the literature to depedestal and demote them, courtesy of their disrespectful acts. This didn’t negate the first mantra. It’s just that my first mantra worked so well to keep my delusionally obsessed with her. The anti-mantra served in order to protect myself from my instincts to run to her saying “she just must not be thinking straight”. I needed to untie myself from the tragic fact that she was indeed thinking straight ‘for her’, but wasn’t thinking well compared to better adjusted folks.
The idea behind a mantra combats the sad truth that the mind travels like the wind but the spirit like a camel, meaning we can fly across the desert of understanding something new cognitively by the end of a day, but we can’t traverse the hot, undulating sands of truly believing that same thing in a way that resonates with our soul — an unconscious information processing, rather than conscious.
If we couple a reality with a conclusion and perhaps even a takeaway feeling, this is used as a bookmark for that moment and sensory feeling that we can quickly revisit, as murky as time and circumstance has tried to make it since.
Like a flame-retardant chemical seeping into upholstery, it takes time for fear-combating truths and skills to soak into the fabric of our minds. And so the mantra is a way to take what we read about how to for example look past people’s words and actions and understand their patterns and the theory. It works by writing the event, the takeaway and the link between them: “Remember when X happened? That’s the day I learnt Y because Z.”
Mantra therapy expedites the reduction of the gap between explicit cognition (what someone can endorse as true when asked) and implicit belief structures (what drives affect, perception, and automatic behaviour i.e. under load).
In Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, patients might keep thought records and their accompanying alternative statements. Repetition occurs after the brighter alternative beliefs have been made credible through discussion and testing.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy uses repetition to defuse from thoughts, leaning into distressing worries or truths until they lose semantic grip.
Compassion-Focused Therapy has clients practice compassionate self-statements, but the key mechanism is affective conditioning — pairing the phrase with tone, imagery, and physiological regulation to engage the soothing system. Without that embodied component, repetition alone is usually inert.
Pure verbal repetition rarely generates that mismatch which invites recoding under newer conditions. It’s more effective when paired with experience, relational moments and callbacks to when the truths were inescapably apparent they were alive in the body, like when we finish a gym leg day and feel the rush of accomplishment and aliveness and vow to use that to combat talking ourselves out of doing the same exercises this time next week.
In a well-cited study by Japanese psychologist Akihiko Masuda, participants repeatedly said a negative self-referential word (e.g. “I’m a failure”) rapidly to see if it gained weight. Repeating the negative epithet actually caused it to lose its distressing impact. Studies on mantra therapy specifically are yet to happen.
