In our home I'm usually the one in charge of smoothies. Green ones, if I can help it.
So one morning, when one of my children beat me to it and handed me a glass of something bright red and said, simply, "Dad, this is for you," it was unusual. And what struck me wasn't the smoothie. It was that I took it with no resistance at all. No "oh, you shouldn't have." No reaching to make one back. Just a warm "thank you," and the pleasure of being given something by someone who loved me.
That's when it hit me. There was a time I couldn't have done that.
I used to be closed to receiving. Gifts made me uncomfortable. Compliments never felt right. In restaurants I'd fight to pay for everyone at the table, and I found it very hard to let anyone pay for me. I'd have called that generosity. It took me years to see what it really was.
Why is it hard to accept compliments?
It's hard to accept compliments because receiving clashes with an identity built around giving, coping or not needing anything. Somewhere early, you concluded that being on the receiving end was unsafe, undeserved or a debt. So praise, gifts and help trigger a small alarm. Deflecting isn't modesty. It's a survival identity keeping an old rule in place.
The good news is that rules like that can come off, and receiving can become as natural as giving already is.
What happens inside when someone praises me?
Watch it closely next time and you'll probably see it.
Someone says, that was brilliant, or you look wonderful, or thank you so much for everything. And before the words have even landed, something in you moves to get rid of them. Oh, it was nothing. It was the team really. This old thing? A little laugh. A quick change of subject. A compliment straight back to them.
There's often a physical sensation too. Heat in the face. A squirm. A wish that the moment would end. For some people it's stronger, almost like being exposed. The kinder the words, the more intense it gets.
That's the tell. A compliment is harmless. If it produces something close to an alarm, the alarm is about something else, something much older than the person being kind to you right now.
Where does the discomfort come from?
From a costume that was never allowed to need anything.
Somewhere along the way you were handed a set of costumes to get through. One of the commonest is the strong one, who never gets to need anything. Another is the giver, the one who looks after everyone. Maybe you grew up in a home where there wasn't much to go round, emotionally or otherwise, and you learned to make yourself useful rather than make demands. Maybe praise came rarely, and when it came it was followed by higher expectations. Maybe being given something always seemed to come with strings.
Out of that, a rule formed. Something like: it's safer to give than to take. Or: if I receive, I'll owe. Or, at its deepest: I'm not the kind of person things are for.
That's a survival identity, and it's an admirable one. It makes wonderful friends, parents and colleagues. It's also exhausting, and it has a cost most givers never add up.
What does it cost to only ever give?
More than you'd think, and not only to you.
Most of us were raised to be good at giving, and many of us mastered it. It's a real virtue. But in order to have balance in a life, you have to be good at receiving too. When you can only give, relationships become one-way streets. The people who love you are never allowed to love you back in any way you'll accept. They offer, you deflect, and a little of their warmth bounces off every time.
Over years, that does two things. It quietly wears out the giver, who's running on an output with no input. And it leaves the people around them feeling faintly shut out. They can't get close, because closeness goes both ways, and the giver has locked one of the ways.
There's often a people pleaser somewhere in this picture too, and if that's familiar, how to stop people pleasing will show you the connection.
Why do I say I want more, and then push it away?
This is the part that puzzles people most. So many of us wish for more in life: more love, more recognition, more abundance. And yet, the moment life hands us something, we cringe and hand it back.
Think about what that communicates. To the people around you, and to life itself, it says: not for me, not ready, no room. You can't fill a cup you keep turning upside down. The wish and the deflection are pulling in opposite directions, and the deflection, being older and faster, usually wins.
For high achievers especially, receiving praise can feel dangerous for another reason: if you accept that you did well, the next failure will fall further. That's one of the engines behind imposter syndrome.
How can I practise receiving?
Try this the very next time something comes your way. A compliment, a coffee someone buys you, an offer of help. It takes about five seconds.
When it arrives, don't respond straight away. Take one breath first. In that breath, notice what your body wants to do. Deflect? Return it? Explain it away? Just notice the pull.
Then say two words only: thank you. Nothing after them. No "but." No compliment back. No explanation of why it wasn't really that good.
And then, this is the important part, let it land. Let yourself feel the words or the gift for a few seconds, the way you'd let sun land on your face. Notice how that feels. Strange, probably. A bit exposed. Perhaps, underneath, something quite warm.
That's receiving. It's a skill most givers never practised, and it's never too late to start. The more often you do it, the less the alarm fires, and the more you discover that nothing bad happens when you let someone be kind to you.
What changes when you can receive?
Life feels kinder, because you're finally letting it be.
Since I became open to receiving, life has been extraordinarily kind to me, and I feel more blessed than I can easily say. I don't think life changed as much as my willingness to let it in. I still love giving, perhaps more than ever. But giving from a full cup is a different thing from giving because you daren't hold out your hands.
There was a time I couldn't have read a kind review about my work without explaining it away. Today there are close to a hundred reviews of the work on Google, averaging 4.9 stars, and I can read them and simply feel grateful. You can see some of what people have shared on our stories page.
If you'd like to see which survival identities make receiving so hard for you, I built a free quiz for exactly that: Who Did You Become to Survive? It takes about ninety seconds, twenty-one questions.
So, what are you better at, giving or receiving? Whichever one needs practice, practise that one for a while. And if you've mostly been a giver, remember: you can still give, even more, as long as you're willing to receive too.
Robert Simic, guiding the remembering.