The compliment you cannot hold
Someone tells you that you handled something beautifully. Your partner, your colleague, a friend who has known you for years. And before the sentence has even finished, you are already shaking your head. "It was nothing." "Anyone would have done it." "I just got lucky." You say these things so fast they feel like reflexes, because they are. You were never taught to receive praise. You were taught, by years of silence or criticism or conditional approval, that claiming credit was arrogance and that good things said about you were probably mistakes waiting to be corrected. So now, in adulthood, when someone offers you a word of affirmation, your nervous system does what it learned to do: it returns it to sender.
