Intervention tidbit #11: Compliments

What would cause someone to feel bad, in a most inscrutable way, upon receiving a compliment? A lot of people get a strange negative sensation when they are complimented or appreciated. In fact, I do. And I believe the reason is always the same. The reason is not a thought, such as "I don't deserve it." "Don't deserve" is the mental misattribution to a feeling, not a belief or a fact, and is born in each individual's life history. What is the feeling behind "don't deserve"?

We are one with our childhood heart injuries, which in some way could be considered fatal, the end of something precious and essential. (I cannot find the quote, but I believe Alice Miller wrote that a therapist ‘needs to know what it is like to have been killed in child­hood.’) But many layers of time have grown over these injuries. Thought and distance have covered our irre­coverable losses. The pain that is revisited, that our present resonates with when we are complimented, could be described: "It's too late. I was not appre­ciated, loved, when I needed it, and I've been floating above grief since then. And now in your words you've shown me the intolerable “what should have been.” The fundamental expla­nation is that the deprived “inner” child is still present and needs her mother or father to appreciate her, not you.

Almost all of us could fall a thousand miles inside ourselves if we allowed that negative feeling to be there, to engulf us. But then we'd need our parent there, the perfect mother, and we'd need all the time in the world to weep in her arms. The feeling would be the utterly unique fusion of bereavement and hope, and we wouldn't know which would be present at the end of it. We wouldn't know until it happened.

(This is why therapy is so "cognitive" today.)