I thought it was fear. I thought my well-established habit of seeking perfection and approval was the culprit. I thought it was polite. I thought it was correct.
Ya see the very natural progression of this narrative would be to flip and say in very solemn italics “I thought wrong”. It feels so natural I almost wrote it. However, that’s kinda the point of auto-ethnography isn’t it? Just because it feels natural or normal doesn’t mean it is.
So anyway, ha ha hopefully my melodramatic intro interested you enough to stick around. Is this technically a “report”? Yes. Am I stretching the limits of the phrase “any medium” referenced in the auto-ethnography report section of our syllabus? Most likely.
Buckle up. We’re going for a ride through the depths of my mind to figure out why I am incapable of accepting praise I don’t feel is deserved.
Hello and welcome to Sarah’s Brain. I’m sorry about the mess.
For as long as I can remember, I have not been able to receive compliments. I don’t mean that I’m rude about it, but I have always brushed it off unless I feel I deserve it. This can be seen as humble or modest, but it actually has caused a gap in my self esteem. I want to research why I feel this way.
In true research form, I will not just be citing a few articles and tying it all up in a lovely essay. This is the first of several in depth analyses of what began this way of thinking and what cultivated it. Today I’m focusing on where I learned this way of thinking– if it is learned. I haven’t even thought about whether or not someone can be born predisposed to reject praise. I titled this page “Our First Teachers” in reference to our parents.
No screaming here!
Our guardians are the first people we learn from. We look to them for guidance. What I didn’t realize is that we’re also learning from them in our earliest moments. A really insightful article from Psychology Today outlines this perfectly. In the article, Dr. Lisa Firestone, Ph. D., explains that we are extremely in-tune to our parents emotions when we’re young because we “depend on them for survival”. When I read this, I think of all of my interactions with children. I have had the immense pleasure of working with children of all ages for a variety of jobs I’ve had. I also have a plethora of young cousins– all aging no less than 10 years younger than me. With all of this experience, I know firsthand how important every reaction is. For instance, when a child trips over their feet and falls, it is imperative that you don’t overreact and fret that they have done irreversible damage. Calmly assessing the situation while giving a reassuring “Oh my! That wasn’t supposed to happen!” and a smile while picking them up and continuing like usual makes a world of a difference in not only their immediate reaction but reactions after that incident. A child sees that you aren’t worried, so they trust there isn’t anything to freak out about! I’m embarrassed to think that I knew this but didn’t associate it to all of the the communications between parent to child. This is where we dig a little deeper.
Some of my first memories are of my mom talking about her weight. I don’t know if y’all remember the old Yoplait commercials, but basically they would show all of these thin women taking a spoonful of it and then at the end it would show a tape measure tighten around a Yoplait container. This had to have been in circulation when I was less than 8. I won’t go into how this commercial itself could have had long lasting negative effects on me( I mean how do I still remember it so vividly?? also here’s an overview of the other ads that missed the mark from them). However, I had seen it on the TV, and called to my mom who was in the kitchen, “Mommy! You need to eat yogurt! See?”
Now, I know what you may be thinking. No wonder her mom has crap self esteem– she cAlleD hEr fAt!! But here’s the thing, Negative Nancies, where in the heck did a kindergartner get that idea? At that age,no one understands the complex societal standards of beauty. I wasn’t thinking along the lines of “to be pretty is to be skinny so Mah ya gotta eat this special thing”. I had clearly observed or overheard my mom talking about losing weight or calling herself fat and just absorbed that into my Rolodex. Did she mean to instill this concept into my pea-brain? Not at all. I bet she doesn’t even realize it to this day. That doesn’t negate the impact it had, though.
So to recap, I grew up with a mother who didn’t view herself as anything positive, and would scoff at anything that suggested otherwise. This, along with a few other factors we’ll most likely discuss in the future, was a factor in the development of my limited self esteem. I don’t like this idea though. I mean, my parents were always loving to me. My mom was pretty consistent in letting me know she thought I was beautiful. Did I just inherit some flaw? An error in my genetic code that made me cringe at praise? What is the deal? These questions, my friends, mean it’s high time for further research. Get your shovels, we’re digging again.
Dr. Firestone does it again! (Don’t worry, we’ll discuss other resources, too)
After further reading, her article also discusses a “critical inner voice”. I was unaware of this, so I looked it up in the AUM Library Database to see if there was any extensive research on it. Yes sir! In a book called “Conquer Your Inner Voice”, it says:
This voice begins when as young children we internalize parental messages, particularly negative ones, creating a psychological base which many of us do not progress beyond to find a more realistic and rational self-view.
Lord, Douglas. “Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice: A Revolutionary Program to End Negative Self-Talk and Live Free from Imagined Limitations.” Library Journal, no. 15, 2002, p. 80. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsglr&AN=edsgcl.92524379&site=eds-live.
BINGO. It’s like I knew, but I didn’t. Anyway, I want to highlight the ending of that quote:
many of us do not progress beyond to find a more realistic and rational self-view.
SO Basically, We absorb a filter that we get to keep with us for the rest of our lives but we never return to it and reprogram to match current feelings. Sucks, am I right?
Something else that interested me is that I was talking about this with a friend, we found we both had this “issue”. Both of us had mothers who were loving and positive to us, but less uplifting when referring to themselves. On the other side of this, another friend of mine has the opposite experience. She grew up with a mother figure who was very much invested in her appearance and greatly appreciated compliments. In turn, Brianna is a very confident person who thrives on attention and praise. I’m not attempting to answer a deeply complex and expansive theory of inheriting self esteem. I am simply using the information I’m gathering to attempt to understand why I have come to have the mindset I do. This is just the first step of my “journey” or whatever you’d like to call it.
TL;DR So in my overall quest to discover why I cannot accept compliments, today’s focus was where I got the self esteem that is a factor of my predicament. My next reports will dive into questions like:
- Who else could have influenced this? (maybe other relatives? peers?)
- Could experiences have made it worse? (a breakup, a fight, etc.)
- Am I just in my head?
and most importantly:
Can I fix it?
Signing off with a serious laundry list of introspective questions,
xx Sarah
Brave and Bold 