What do you do when someone offers you a compliment? How are you with praise, appreciation and expressions of pride? I hope you are able to receive these offers of love and validation with grace, taking them into your heart so they nourish and replenish your spirit. But I suspect that, for many of you, it’s not so simple. You may feel a little embarrassed and bat them away: ‘Oh, that’s nice of you, but anyone could have done it.’

You may even squirm, finding praise deeply uncomfortable. I have some clients who actually wince when I say something nice to them! This confused me for a long time, until we addressed the problem directly and I began to understand why it’s so hard for some of us to take in the good. Here are two of the things my clients taught me about why compliments and praise can evoke such negative reactions.

It jars with a critical sense of self

Sadly, many of my clients have a highly negative sense of self. They think they are somehow defective, dislikeable or in some other way uniquely weird, different or lesser beings. This has been hard-wired into their brains through repetition, over many years. They have spent so long thinking critically and negatively about themselves that these ways of thinking have developed quick, direct neural pathways – this makes it habitual and all too easy to think they are stupid, weak or pathetic. Heartbreaking but true.

So when I tell them how proud I am of them for managing a tough homework task like standing up to their verbally abusive boss, or finally saying no to their boundary-disrespecting family, I am offering them what’s known as a ‘corrective emotional experience’ – something unfamiliar and the opposite of what they are used to. Because many of my clients were never praised or lifted up as children. They were attacked, shot down and invalidated, over and over again. So parts of them learned to believe these unkind, untrue messages, until those parts held beliefs that they were stupid, weak or pathetic.

For these people, my offer of love and respect has nowhere to land. It doesn’t compute in their brains. So I have to find more creative ways of offering it, perhaps titrating my level of warmth and validation so it is just enough, just the right amount and can sneak through their defences, allowing just a little warmth or the unfamiliar sense of being seen and accepted for who they are, which they so badly need but struggle to take in.

trauma makes them suspicious

People who experience a great deal of trauma in their childhoods develop protective parts of themselves which are hypervigilant, wary and mistrustful. They have good reason to be this way – caregivers hurt, abused and betrayed them, so it was highly adaptive to be mistrustful around these people. I always say that if you are growing up in a dangerous, hurtful, threatening environment, it’s a great idea to be mistrustful. Thank god for those protective parts, because they probably kept my clients as safe as they could have been, despite the verbal, emotional and sometimes physical grenades that were lobbed at them on a daily basis.

Unfortunately, these parts can also make my work tricky, because developing ‘earned secure attachment’ is a key healing ingredient in therapy. It’s also a fundamental part of the integrative trauma therapy approach I have developed, because all the research shows that the relationship between therapist and client is the most important part of any effective therapy. These protectors make connecting with my clients tricky, so a lot of patient, painstaking work is necessary to help them see that I have no intention of hurting or taking advantage of them, like their caregivers did.

The brilliant Dr Janina Fisher, a trailblazer in the trauma-therapy field, once said that if you have been profoundly hurt by those closest to you, all the things we therapists think are helpful – trust, connection, feeling either positive or negative emotions, focusing on your breath or becoming mindful of somatic symptoms – feel threatening and unsafe. So when I tell someone, ‘I know you worry that everyone finds you weird and annoying. But you seem like a really nice, kind person to me,’ those protectors scent danger and can get spiky, dismissive or shutdown in return. I’m trying to offer an – honest, heartfelt – corrective emotional experience and it makes them angry, passive-aggressive or dissociated and numb. Not ideal.

The practice: Taking in treasure

Another thing I learned from my clients is a practice I developed to help with this very problem. It’s called The Treasure Chest and you can listen to it on Insight Timer by clicking the button below. This offers a concrete strategy to help you stop pushing away praise, compliments or other good things that come your way. Because these are little pieces of treasure. A kind word or warm comment can be deeply healing, if you learn to take them in.

An accumulation of these small offerings of kindness will, in time, help those protective parts relax. And whether you are at the milder or more severe end of the trauma spectrum, learning to tell a different story about yourself is crucial. How does it serve you to tell that critical, self-denigrating narrative, over and over? Far better to make the story of you something kind, compassionate and understanding. And taking in these little pieces of treasure will help you do that, because other people – especially those who know and love you – see the real you. Flawed and messy, like all humans, but also unique and wonderful, in so many ways.

I hope the practice helps – my clients seem to love it, so I very much hope you do too.

Love,

Dan ❤️

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