Scripting · “You Assign the Meaning”
I Deserve Love
Install a chosen positive belief about love and self-worth by writing the affirmation repeatedly while logging the mind’s objections in a ‘response column,’ then re-aiming the affirmation to dissolve the surfaced resistance.
Ray’s I-Deserve-Love method: Pick one present-tense worth/love affirmation (“I deserve love”). Handwrite it down the left of the page; in a right-hand response column write the first thought that fires back each time. The recurring rebuttals are your real beliefs — craft new affirmations aimed straight at them and keep writing until the responses soften toward agreement. Self-love first. Don’t force belief; answer the resistance.
What it is
In I Deserve Love (1976), Sondra Ray took the affirmation — a deliberately repeated positive statement — and aimed it squarely at the areas most people find hardest to believe about themselves: love, lovability, self-worth, and intimacy. The method is overwhelmingly written.
You pick a positive statement (her signature one is simply “I deserve love”), write it out by hand many times, and after each line write down the first thought that fires back in a parallel “response column.” Those responses are the negatives keeping the belief out; the practice is to keep writing the affirmation against them until they soften.
Ray’s framing is that “loving relationships begin with self-love” — so the work starts not with another person but with re-impressing one’s own deservingness. This is the consumer-facing, do-it-at-the-kitchen-table version of the affirmation discipline she taught inside Rebirthing and the Loving Relationships Training.
The Method
- Choose one affirmation aimed at worth/love. Short, first-person, present-tense, positive: “I deserve love,” “I am lovable exactly as I am,” “It is safe for me to be loved.” Ray supplies tested ones and shows how to adapt them to your own goal.
- Write it repeatedly — by hand. Down the left side of the page, write the affirmation line after line. The handwriting and repetition (The Inner Creates the Outer) are part of the re-impression.
- Keep a response column. To the right of each line, immediately write the first thought you had in reaction — the doubt, sarcasm, memory, or feeling (“no I don’t,” “who do you think you are,” a tightening in the chest). Don’t censor it; the response is the data.
- Read the responses as your real beliefs. The right column reveals the specific negatives blocking the affirmation. Patterns repeat — that recurring rebuttal is what’s actually running.
- Re-aim the affirmation to meet the resistance. When a response keeps recurring, craft a new affirmation that speaks to it directly (if the response is “love always leaves,” affirm “I am safe to keep the love I receive”). Then write the new one against its own responses.
- Use the other senses too. Ray’s wider practice also says affirmations aloud, on cards, recorded, or to a partner — but the written two-column pass is the engine for finding and clearing the objections.
- Continue for weeks. Worth-beliefs are old; the responses shift gradually from resistance toward neutrality or agreement. That shift is the result you are after. (Sourcing note: the written affirmation practice aimed at self-worth/love, the “I deserve love” affirmation, and the response/two-column technique are documented Ray methods from I Deserve Love and her Rebirthing/LRT teaching; short phrases attributed, faithful paraphrase.)
Source & Lineage
Sondra Ray wrote I Deserve Love (1976). The affirmation discipline descends from New Thought and Coué’s autosuggestion.
The two-column / response technique is the Rebirthing contribution she shared with Leonard Orr. Distinct from Orr’s personal-lie work: Orr’s version is a diagnostic, clinical method — first hunt the single governing “personal lie,” then dissolve it, framed around birth imprint and run with breathwork.
Ray’s I Deserve Love is gentler, narrower, and consumer-facing: a chosen worth/love affirmation written daily, the response column used to clear the way to feeling deserving, with self-love as the explicit aim rather than excavating a core wound.
Orr diagnoses; Ray installs deservingness. (And distinct from rote repetition, which never logs the rebuttal.)
Common refinements
Treating the response column as failure. The rebuttals are the work, not a sign it isn’t working. Write them.
- Affirming too big too fast. “I am wildly loved by everyone” against deep unworthiness just amplifies the rebuttal. Aim at the direction of deserving; let it build.
- Typing instead of handwriting / doing it once. The slow handwritten repetition over weeks is part of the method.
- Skipping the re-aiming step. Logging objections without crafting new affirmations to meet them leaves the resistance intact.
- Expecting it to fix a relationship by itself. It re-patterns your sense of worth; it is not a tool to change another person.