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Why Your Brain Doesn’t Let You Believe the Compliments You Receive
Sometimes it’s hard to accept the good about yourself.
I have a real issue. When people say nice things about me, I don’t believe them.
It doesn’t matter if it’s about how I look, a recent accomplishment, an idea I had, or even just on cookies I baked. When people compliment me, I think they’re lying or trying to manipulate me somehow, or that they mean well but don’t recognize that what I’ve done is actually not that good.
When someone says to me, “Wow, your dress looks amazing today!” I deflect. I’ll say, “Oh thanks — I don’t know, I guess I like it. It’s easy to be active in it, which is the most important thing!
Cue the classic: “Thanks, it has pockets!”
My brain will dwell instead on the time someone told me my dress sense was terrible.
This might sound familiar to some of you — the ability to overlook fifty positive comments in favor of the one negative one that someone said to you, once, ten years ago.
It’s so easy to believe in, linger on, eternally reflect on the negative even when it’s overwhelmingly outweighed by the positive. Why does that happen? Why do so many of us struggle to believe good things about ourselves?
Science tells us it’s a loop.
There are three factors happening here, feeding into one another endlessly to make it hard to accept compliments: low self-esteem, cognitive dissonance, and high expectations.
It goes like this: you don’t think much of yourself, for whatever reason. Maybe it’s imposter syndrome, where you don’t truly believe you belong. Maybe you’ve only been valued for one aspect for most of your life, like being smart, so it’s impossible to see your worth in others, like being a good listener. Maybe you’re continually comparing yourself to others and coming up short in your own estimation.
Either way, you have low self-esteem. So when someone compliments you, this jars with the truth you hold about yourself. It’s uncomfortable for your mind, because you’re faced with two prospects: one, you’re wrong about yourself, or two, they’re lying. You can’t simultaneously…
