"affirm themselves" is correct and commonly used in written English.
It means to assert or reinforce one's beliefs or values. Example: In order to empower and uplift the marginalized community, it is important for individuals to come together and affirm themselves through activism and advocacy.
Here the terror is an end in itself and those who use it to express and affirm themselves become addicted to it.
Even more, perhaps, because women with serious psychological or physical health issues – such as obesity, as well as anorexia and bulimia – are drawn to yoga to affirm themselves, regardless of their "looks" or how they might feel about their bodies.
In this case, development assistance represents the means for smaller countries to affirm themselves as members of the international community.
These forces affirm themselves, and thereby differentiate themselves first, and only secondarily consider that from which they have differentiated themselves.
And thus, I'm qualified to take you on a journey". I think people who want to lead should endeavor to bounce their existing perception of themselves up against as many obstacles as possible to confirm or affirm themselves.
The obvious consequence of these rules is that, with the only exception of insolubilia, which are called false not because they signify the false, but because they affirm themselves to be false or not to be true, all the other kinds of proposition are true if and only if what they signify is true, and false if and only if what they signify is false (ibidem, p. 64).
There's no doubting that Harvard, Cambridge, Stanford, Yale and Oxford have affirmed themselves as world class universities but, yet again, they find themselves falling in MIT's vast technological shadow.
Aboriginal descent became a matter of pride, and by the early 21st century the number affirming themselves to be Aboriginal was some half million.
When we asked the participants what percentage of their working hours they'd be willing to devote to learning about their rival's plan, we found that managers who had affirmed themselves were willing to allocate about 60% more time than those who had not affirmed themselves.
And this task of self-authoring becomes, for Nietzsche, a tremendous spiritual displacement, entirely atheistic of course, but one which tasks the individual with designing and affirming themselves with no reference to others.
The report describes an undergraduate social scene in which women feel pressed to conform to powerful social norms that are often at odds with their personal educational development and with affirming themselves as strong and distinctive people.
