Why is it so much harder to believe a compliment than a criticism?
I used to believe that the difference between how we “hear” a compliment and a criticism was something we learned. I believed that we were taught to believe that pride was a sin and humility was a virtue. I believed that this training was at the root of how differently we take a compliment – which we discard in order to remain humble, and take criticism to heart for the same reason.
I think I’ve changed my mind, though. I think that the primal difference is that a compliment doesn’t engage the survival instinct and a criticism does.
Consider this; criticism, even positive criticism threatens the ego. It challenges the way we have behaved and calls into question whether the actions we have taken were appropriate.
We are creatures with an instinctive drive to survive and to defend our survival. We battle in our minds as we seek to justify to ourselves how we really weren’t wrong. It is important for us not to be wrong because we are social animals whose ancestral survival depended on being accepted by a group. This instinct remains with us and thus we seek to “fit in.” This “fitting in” often requires social manipulation as we attempt to control the opinions our peers have of us in order to convince them that we are enough like the group to be allowed to remain. In short, we are trying to convince everyone that we are “right” so that they won’t kick us out into the night.
Conversely; compliments affirm our actions and so do not engage this primal, survival instinct. We hear them, acknowledge them with our rational mind while our ego – recognizing that the compliment contains no threat – waits for the next threat to arise.
Compliments don’t call up a visceral response of nearly the same magnitude as a criticism because, quite simply, the compliment isn’t scary.
This looks like a broken system, right? It looks like we are designed to be dragged down until we have no faith in ourselves and depend wholly on the good graces of others.
Well, the system is broken, but it isn’t the fault of our ego.
It is my opinion that our spirits resonate with compliments. Compliments affirm our sovereignty over our experience and thus reinforce the truth that we are divine beings who are here to experience our choices.
This resonance from our spirit is designed to be more than enough to compensate for the fact that the ego jumps on the criticism bandwagon. Our spirit is, after all, the divine intelligence that empowers our body and motivates our existence.
The system is broken because most of us don’t pay that much attention to what our spirit has to say. We ignore its promptings – our intuition – and seek to live in a world where everything that exists can be proven. We do this, again, to be safe. It is safe to “fit in,” and our spirit has no desire to fit in because it recognizes that fitting in is just an experience – as is being an outcast. Thus, since our spirit might encourage us to do things that others might disapprove of, we teach ourselves to ignore it.
Let me rephrase that for emphasis; we have taught ourselves to ignore our spirits. In my opinion, that is why it is so much harder to believe a compliment than a criticism.