It may sound as if this manual is asking you to replace troublesome thinking with positive statements to yourself -- positive rather than negative thinking. This is true, but . . .
Making positive statements to yourself and repeating them is called affirmation. Here are some sample affirmations: "I am worthwhile, no matter what I have done, I am OK. Everyday I am getting better and better in every way. I am content to be me." And so on. Get the picture?
Affirmations work for some people, some of the time, and sometimes they make things worse. Suppose that I believe that I am a scumbag. Suppose I practise the following affirmation: "I am worthwhile. I am worthwhile. I am worthwhile. I am worthwhile." The idea here is to have thoughts in my head that will shape my emotional energies in a positive manner. But, do I sincerely believe them? Not necessarily. In fact, I just might generate stress and eventual discouragement as this affirmation collides with my entrenched faulty beliefs.
Affirmations will not necessarily convince me that my faulty belief is as loony as a penguin with a Gucci bag. Clearly understanding the untruth of a faulty belief is the thing we are after, not more mindless repetition.
At the risk of being repetitious, I am going to re-state the good news. Past events, such as incidents of sexual victimization, are the occasions in which traumatic thinking gets started. The continuation of those patterns of self-injury are the cause of emotional distress in the present. Sexual victimization is not the only source of self-defeating beliefs and thinking, but it does act as a kind of mental poultice, activating and strengthening much of the mental pollution that is already present. These patterns of thinking are then applied to the whole range of experiences of your life.
These self-sabotaging mental processes are not written in stone and you can free yourself from them. There is a way out. The way out does not depend on the external events of your life, be they good or bad in your assessment. The way out is in re-thinking and upgrading the obsolete positions that you have taken about yourself and your life.