How To Be Better At Receiving Compliments

I’m very good at receiving praise. When someone compliments me by calling me pretty, I don’t get bashful or try to affect false modesty or attempt to deflect the praise. Recently at SEAcamp, we were playing the game Hot Seat where we went around in a circle asking each other spicy question which must be answered as honestly as possible. Every single time the question, “Who do you think the hottest person in camp is?” was asked, it would ineluctably be qualified with the caveat “besides Vynn of course.”

Compliments are easy to take when they match the person’s view of themselves. Compliments are hard to receive when your view of me doesn’t match my view of myself and this implicit disagreement between my self view and your view of my self is made manifest through a compliment.

So, why is receiving compliments hard? Compliments are embarrassing when they contradict your view of yourself. Even if the compliment is true, those with psychological blocks will find it almost painful to receive them. This happens when your view of yourself is loadbearing and is serving some kind of psychological purpose other than truth that prevents you from tracking reality honestly.

My normal response to compliments is not to get embarrassed or to shy away but to receive the compliment as if it were obviously true. This is because people’s views of me do not surprise nor disagree with my view of myself. But I wasn’t always like this. There was a time when I didn’t believe that I was beautiful. I saw compliments of my appearance as a superficial nicety. “They’re just being polite when they say that. They don’t truly believe I’m pretty.”

One of the reasons I was not able to believe in my own attractiveness was because of a fear of envy. In my formative years as an adolescent, I was envied perniciously by a caretaker who also was my source of financial and physical security.

When I went to live with my gay uncle and his partner, I was about the same age as him when he met his now husband. His partner was as senior to him as my uncle was to me. Not to make it sound too much like a Cinderella story, but my uncle envied me for my beauty and youth. This was something I could scarcely broach let alone admit at the time because of how incestuous this dynamic felt; but at the same time, I also felt a deep sense of indebtedness to him for taking me under his wing and caring for me when I first moved to England.

Complex emotions aside, as a result of his envy, I grew afraid that any acknowledgment of my beauty would legitimate his envy of me and the behaviour that followed. So, as a result of my fear of being envied, I would eschew any notion that I was pretty. I felt that in order to avert the envy, I would need to deny how attractive I was. Perish the thought! It naturally led to much awkwardness around compliments of my appearance.

Now you must be wondering, how did I eventually overcome this psychological block? During another camp held in the Black Forest, I and some other camp attendees took MDMA for the very first time. MDMA, for those of you who don’t know, is a substance that forces you to face the truth of whatever feeling you’ve been suppressing. A person at camp described the experience as one suffused with love and courage. And I was certainly bursting with both! At the same time, so were the other campers. One person in particular, an introvert who was too shy to speak to me before partaking in the fire worked up the courage to say, with trembling in her voice, that I was one of the most beautiful people she’s ever seen. It finally hit me. She said those words not out of politeness, not in envy, but out of fear. At that point, I had no choice but to accept the truth.

I realized at that moment that with beauty comes power and with power comes responsibility. If I didn’t, I could not control nor be accountable for the intimidation that my beauty strikes in people. These truths are not neutral. They are not like the truths of science. These truths elevate the self. Learning about these facts comes with commitments. And if you are not ready for the commitments that these truths entail, then your subconscious will shield your conscious mind from accepting these facts about yourself in order to avoid their implicit obligations.

To sum up, I had trouble accepting compliments because I had psychological blocks: the main blocks being the formative wound of being envied as well as not wanting to be responsible for the intimidation others have towards me. Just as the other pieces of information that are divulged to oneself during the Hot Seat, the knowledge that one is privileged in some way—be it having beauty, strength, or intelligence—entails certain obligations to act a certain way. Therefore, the easiest way to learn how to accept compliments from others is to become aware of how others perceive you and to either assent or dissent to the implicit responsibilities that come from these accepting these normative facts about yourself. In other words, if you are beautiful, you must own it completely.