Why we struggle to accept compliments

Someone asked me recently, 

“How do I accept compliments 

without getting shy or immediately deflecting?”

She told me that whenever someone says something nice to her, she almost panics a little. She either downplays it, brushes past it, or rushes to give a compliment back—which she admits usually feels awkward and forced.

And then she said something really interesting: 

It’s easy for her to compliment a stranger’s appearance, but complimenting someone’s personality feels strangely vulnerable.

That last part stayed with me.

There’s a difference between saying, “I like your jacket,” and telling someone you admire the way they handled a difficult situation, or the kind of energy they bring into a room. 

The second kind of compliment asks you to slow down and acknowledge that you’ve actually seen something meaningful in another person. And most people don’t feel seen on that level very often.

So when someone offers that kind of compliment, they’re taking a small emotional risk, even if it doesn’t look dramatic from the outside.

What’s interesting is how quickly many of us try to escape that moment when the roles are reversed.

The second someone says something kind about us, our mind starts negotiating with it: 

They’re just being polite. They don’t really mean it. I’m not actually that impressive. Almost automatically, we minimize, joke, or redirect attention somewhere else. 

Anything to move past the discomfort of being the focus of genuine appreciation.

I once heard a simple example of this. 

A man told his girlfriend, sincerely, 

“You look really beautiful tonight,” and 

she laughed and called him a dork. 

She probably meant it affectionately, but the moment collapsed. 

What could have been a moment of genuine connection disappeared before it had a chance to land. 

He had offered appreciation, and there was nowhere for it to go.

Awkwardness isn’t built into the moment itself. 

A compliment only becomes uncomfortable when both people try to move away from it at the same time. If one person offers kindness and the other simply receives it, nothing strange is happening. 

It’s just a human exchange.

In a way, receiving a compliment is an act of generosity. 

The person giving it may have gathered a bit of courage to say something sincere. 

When we dismiss it, we unintentionally make that vulnerability go unrewarded, or even punished. 

When we accept it calmly—“Thank you, that means a lot”—we dance with it, and in doing so complete the moment.

Our difficulty with compliments often points to something deeper. 

When I spoke with Humble the Poet a few years ago, he shared an idea that resonated with me: 

 

Many of us grow up believing love and approval have to be earned. So when someone appreciates us without us having to prove anything first, it can feel unfamiliar, and we don’t always let it in.

He suggested trying something simple: 

Stand in front of a mirror and compliment yourself . . . not your appearance, but something about who you are. For many people, that feels unexpectedly uncomfortable. And that discomfort is revealing. It shows where acceptance hasn’t fully settled yet.

Like most emotional skills, receiving compliments becomes easier through repetition (which could simply mean sitting in the discomfort of it when that discomfort arises, instead of reacting in your usual ways). 

You don’t need the perfect response. 

You don’t need to balance the moment by saying something equally meaningful back. 

You just need to let the compliment exist without arguing with it. 

Pause for a moment. 

Let it land, and try a new response on for size.

Sometimes connection is nothing more complicated than allowing yourself to be seen, and staying there long enough to receive it.

Matthew Hussey

Many people struggle to take a compliment. 

It doesn’t matter if the compliment comes from a loved one, a stranger, or a trusted source, like a therapist. The struggle goes much deeper than manners, modesty, or cultural norms.

I’m talking about the inability to accept what therapists call positive affect. The issue for some is about feeling, deep down, that you don’t deserve it, that you can’t believe it, that as a person you are not worthy, and that you can’t allow or take in the experience of feeling good about yourself, or even believing someone else feels good about you either.

1. Why do some people find it so psychologically painful to take compliments? 
2. Why is the ability to accept compliments so important? 
3. What needs to happen to allow a person to truly take a compliment to heart and let it nourish them?

To be able to truly hear a compliment depends on 

being able to see good in one’s self. 

But unfortunately for some, deeply painful past relationships interfere with their ability to accept or see the good in themselves. 

Even so, with careful work, people can learn to understand their personal barriers, bring compassion to themselves, and learn to respond to compliments in more positive ways.

Why is it important to be able to take compliments? 

When given without any ulterior motives, compliments feed the best parts of ourselves. 

Seeing and knowing the good in one’s self is essential to overcoming self-defeating activities, and to living a life more in sync with what is personally meaningful.

In a healthy relationship, compliments show that two people can recognize and enjoy the special unique individual that each person is. The ability to say thank you or smile when receiving a compliment shows that your heart is open to who you are – you are able to take in those moments when someone sees the best in you — and you see it too!

What Interferes With the Ability to Accept Compliments?

Deep down we all want love and recognition – to be understood, to be important, to matter to someone else, and to care about a loved one the same way. 

But for those who survive abuse or neglect, especially during childhood, the experience of trauma raises deep doubts about self-worth, and often fuels an engulfing shame.

Abuse or neglect forces the survivor to make a terrible choice to survive: 

How to make sense of danger, isolating disconnection and hurt brought by people who are supposed to be safe?

If the abusers are central to a child’s life, they can’t be wrong. 

The loyalty to parents and meaningful people that children internalize is huge! 

Children often protect the abusive caregivers out of loyalty, believing in them and therefore believing that the abuse is fitting and warranted! The abused or neglected person comes to think he or she must deserve the mistreatment.

The struggle to manage so much despair and distress often gives rise to a harsh inner critic whose judgments are vital to explain — and tolerate — why things must be as they are

Receiving a compliment can be deeply triggering, especially for trauma survivors. 

It can touch off a great deal of anxiety and fear. 

1. Does the compliment come with strings? 
2. Does the person giving the compliment want something? 
3. Are there hidden motives? 
4. Is this just the first step down that awful path toward more mistreatment and abuse?

It can be very hard for a person with a history of trauma to internalize a compliment, even from someone they trust, because it comes from another world — a place they don’t understand – where someone sees something wonderful about them. This conflicts with the part of them that holds the internal view that they don’t matter, that they are worthless. It doesn’t seem possible that they could experience good feelings for themselves, because that doesn’t fit with the way they have learned to see themselves.

How Can the Inner Critic Begin to Heal?

Dr. Kristin Neff, author of the book Self-Compassion, 

advocates for greater understanding and use of self-compassion to calm self-criticism, and promote mental, physical, and emotional health.

When we are self-critical, she explains, our stress level goes up. 

This “floods our system with adrenaline and cortisol. 

And it’s a double whammy because when we criticize ourselves, we are both the attacker and the attacked. This type of chronic stress can eventually lead to anxiety and depression, undermining our physical and emotional wellbeing.”

She reminds us that our inner critic is actually trying to help. 

This is such an important concept! 

Inner critics are usually protective guardians trying to keep us safe. 

“We can be kind and compassionate to this part of ourselves, because at some level it has our best interests at heart,” Neff tells us. “And believe it or not, by giving compassion to our inner critic, we are moving out of the threat defense system and into our other safety system.”

The healing process involves bringing compassion to the inner critic with a desire to understand it, a genuine curiosity.

A Framework for Therapists to Understand and Treat Self-Criticism: 

The IFS Model

Other researchers and therapists have observed the power of compassion to help people find healing and self-acceptance. Dr. Richard Schwartz found that when he helped clients “approach their own worst, most hated feelings and desires with open minds and hearts,” their harsh self-critics became gentler, and they began to function more like helpers and collaborators in the work of healing.

Dr. Schwartz recognized the inner voices of shame, criticism, hopelessness, and pessimism as a system of “internal interactions,” or a “family” of emotional parts. He developed the Internal Family Systems – or IFS model — to help understand and work with people who experience turmoil between these inner parts or states of mind.

The IFS model also provides a very helpful framework to understand the genuine self; 

“everyone is at their core a Self containing many crucial leadership qualities such as perspective, confidence, compassion, and acceptance,” Schwartz explains. “Working with hundreds of clients for more than two decades, some of whom were severely abused and show severe symptoms, has convinced me that everyone has this healthy and healing Self despite the fact that many people initially have very little access to it. ”

The IFS model is a framework to help people see and manage their inner critic, inner pessimist, and other parts, so they can connect with the ‘core self.’ It is a way for therapists and their clients to see how their protective “parts are forced into extreme roles by external circumstances and, once it seems safe, they gladly transform into valuable family members.”

EMDR and Positive Affect Tolerance Protocol

Another therapeutic style or model is Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, or EMDR. There is even a particular protocol in EMDR called the positive affect tolerance protocol.

Developed by Andrew Leeds, it is a protocol for therapists trained in EMDR to help those who struggle to accept positive feelings or beliefs about themselves. It is especially helpful for many survivors of childhood trauma who learned to suppress or avoid positive emotional states to cope with neglect or abuse.

The Importance of the Trauma-Informed Approach

Trauma-informed therapy is an indispensable approach for all therapy. 

It is so important when working with clients who struggle with compliments and self-worth. 

The approach focuses on the underlying reasons why the person is unable to take in the compliment. There is a reason why the compliment is so painful. 

In trauma-informed care, therapists need to sit with clients and their discomfort to safely begin to look at it and help clients learn to ride out the feeling; like a wave – it will pass.

The work begins after we have built a relationship with the client that allows the person to feel safe and accepted for who they are, right where they are in life. 

The client knows that I’m not going to judge them; that I’m really present with them. 

I’m not half-hearing them and formulating my grocery list. 

I’m fully there with them walking this journey of healing.

Working on Accepting Compliments in Therapy

Once the person feels safe that they can be heard and not judged, the work can begin to address their issues, including trauma, inability to receive positive affect or compliments and understand how their parts developed in an amazingly creative way to keep them safe in childhood.

So we might start with, “I like your shoes.” 

Later I might comment on something that the client did well: 

“Wow, you did a really good job at this.” 

And for my clients who cringe, I might suggest, 

“Just see if you can hold it, my feelings, for three seconds.”

We work slowly, noticing where they feel the discomfort in their body, noticing what it feels like to hear a compliment from a person they trust, and also noticing the compassion for them, from me, the person giving the compliment.

It takes a great deal of work to process how the trauma in their life has stolen their ability to believe in their own worth. After a client begins to see the self that was in the protective custody of shame and pain, the work on compliments can begin. The pleasure of accepting a compliment may be brief, if it happens at all. But once we find a way to ask the inner protective part (the part that works to avoid hurt) to step aside, we can become more open to recognizing, enjoying, and sharing who we are.

Therapists can use a number of approaches to help people feel safe enough to open up to their core self and let others appreciate it too.

How Compliments Help in Healing Trauma, and Making Healthy Connections

Being able to know and accept your core self, and allow the compliments of others, is so important to healthy relationships. It is a way of deepening a loving bond with your partner, and can also support the process of healing from trauma.

“Love is the continual search for a basic, secure connection with someone else. Through this bond, partners in love become emotionally dependent on each other for nurturing, soothing, and protection, ” 

says Dr. Sue Johnson, clinical psychologist and author of several books and studies on attachment.

When a trauma survivor rejects a loved one’s compliments, the partner can become hurt and confused. 

Working in relationship with a trauma survivor means knowing how helpful it is to see this difficulty, and not to give up: 

“Well you don’t have to believe it, but I will for both of us right now.”

The ability to accept compliments does more than feed healthy relationships. 

It is also important to developing self-confidence and an awareness of how to enjoy life and take good care of yourself.

No matter how difficult it may seem, there is always hope that self-compassion and self-knowledge can play a larger role in the course of your life and relationships. 

By learning to manage painfully self-limiting beliefs with compassion, you can open yourself to the joy of simply being more fully present with yourself and others, and feeling more fully self-led and alive.

Robyn E. Brickel

Books

Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself (book) by Kristin Neff

Self-Therapy with Your Inner Critic: Transforming Self-Criticism into Self-Confidence by Jay Earley, PhD and Bonnie Weiss, LCSW (I love this book! – very readable)

Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love by Sue Johnson

Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships by Sue Johnson

Websites

Internal Family Systems: The Center for Leadership, a website about the IFS model

Self-Compassion, about Dr. Kristin Neff’s research and findings about the value of self-compassion

Dr. Sue Johnson: Creating Connections, on the attachment bond and books and other resources for therapists.

When your old friendships don’t feel the same

 

“I think I’ve outgrown 

a few of my best friends.”

They weren’t bad people. They’d done nothing wrong. They’d been in her life for over a decade. 

But Sophie told me she no longer felt joy when she was with them. She had found herself showing up out of obligation—because they’d been friends for so long, and “that’s what you do.” 

Yet she sits there the whole time thinking, I don’t even want to be here.

One friend in particular leaves her emotionally drained. 

This friend asks how Sophie’s doing, but before Sophie has even finished answering, the conversation swings back around to the friend’s own life every single time. 

Sophie walks away feeling unseen.

So I asked her: 

“Imagine you met this person today at a coffee shop. 

You exchanged numbers, hung out a few times—and every interaction felt exactly like this. 

Would you keep making plans?”

She didn’t hesitate. “I’d see them less.”

 

And there it was. 

The only reason she isn’t doing that now is because of the story: 

“We met 10 years ago and we’ve been through so much.”

The history of the relationship was overshadowing the reality of it.

What makes this especially hard is that when we start pulling back from an old friendship, we’re not just creating distance from another person—we’re creating distance from a former version of ourselves.

That friendship represents who we were when we met them, what we valued then, and the life we were living at the time.

Letting go (even gently!) can feel like abandoning that version of you. 

And at the same time, it creates empty space—space that hasn’t yet been filled with new people, new routines, or a new sense of belonging.

Newness means uncertainty. 

It means walking into rooms where you don’t quite know your place yet. 

It’s like being the new kid at school again.

So we cling to the familiar (even while complaining about it), because familiar feels safe. The guilt keeps us locked in place, because pulling away feels like admitting something has changed. 

And for many of us, fully accepting that we’ve changed—that we’re moving in a different direction, that our needs are different now—is the scariest part of all.

 

My advice to Sophie wasn’t to sever. 

This person isn’t toxic or abusive. 

They’re simply someone she no longer enjoys spending time with in the same way. 

And that’s sad. It deserves compassion. We may even feel some grief. But it doesn’t require a dramatic confrontation or a definitive ending.

 

I told her that what it requires is a gentle shift in where you invest your time:

• Start investing in the people and environments that actually fill your tank. 

• Seek out conversations that feel mutual. 

• Spend time where you feel lighter afterward instead of heavier. 

And from that place—when your emotional world feels nourished—you may find you can still show up for this old friend occasionally without resentment (while accepting that they still likely won’t dedicate much of the conversation to you!)

I’ve known people like this. 

They never ask me a single question about myself. 

It’s essentially a one-person show from beginning to end. 

And sometimes I genuinely enjoy it, because I’ve missed them. 

But I don’t confuse it with a deep connection. 

I engage with them in small doses, because the majority of my time and energy is reserved for the people who truly nourish me.

And if the day comes when a friend like that asks you, 

“Why don’t we see each other as much anymore?”

you may well choose to be honest about what you struggle with when you’re together. 

Or if it feels like saying that would hurt them unnecessarily, you could instead say, 

“My life is more divided between different people and things I have going on than it used to be. Even though my time is more limited, I still care about you and I love it when we get to spend some time together.” 

 

If you’re in Sophie’s position right now, consider this: 

Evolving is not a betrayal. 

Growth naturally reshapes our relationships. 

Some deepen, some fade, and some change form entirely. 

None of that means the past wasn’t real or meaningful. 

It simply means you’re allowing your present life to organically reflect who you are now.

 

You’re not erasing your old life. 

You’re making space for the new, and for the person you’re becoming. 

If that transition comes with some initial guilt, uncertainty, or even grief, that’s OK. 

Celebrate the fact that you’re not a ruthless person who doesn’t care at all about history . . . just don’t become a prisoner to it. 

And keep in mind that what feels new and unfamiliar today will one day feel like home all over again. 

What’s one relationship in your life that leaves you feeling lighter afterward? 

Matthew Hussey

Addicted to Suffering

Do you know someone who is addicted to suffering? 

Perhaps it’s a family member or a close friend. Their patterns are unmistakable. 

You need only ask them how they’re doing on a random Tuesday, and within 60 seconds you will hear about all of the ways their life is hard right now. There will be a familiar tone, and a story they’ve been telling for years, only today you’re getting the “Friday in October 2025” chapter.

For the record, this doesn’t mean they’re being unpleasant, or that these people enter every room they walk into like Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh. They may be perfectly loving, even enjoyable, to be around. But what you know for sure is that what will come out of their mouth is some version of how hard life is right now.

Therefore, our biggest frustration, especially when we love these people, is with how much happier we know they could be if they stopped seeing everything through the lens of suffering.

It was humbling, then, for me to realize how guilty I am of this very same thing. I began to notice how many times a week, when someone asked me how I was doing, I gave a cursory “I’m good” before diving into my real answer: how relentlessly busy I was, how hurried I felt, how there always seemed to be too much to do, how tired I was, how I was waiting for life to get easier.

 And of course, I always enjoyed (and sometimes still do), sharing that moment of consensus with the person in front of me when we both nod our heads and agree that “It’s always something with life, isn’t it?”

It’s become painfully clear to me how addicted I’ve been to this kind of rhetoric. It’s also become abundantly clear to me, with every extra year on this earth, that it really always is something when it comes to life. There is always a new project that threatens to throw our life out of balance and into possible burnout. There always is a new sad thing waiting for us around the corner: a new grief, a new disappointment, a new hardship.

And the same is true for everyone else. Realizing this is its own kind of antidote to our addiction to our own suffering.

 

In Judith Herman’s seminal work Trauma and Recovery, she describes the three stages of recovery for trauma survivors. 

The last of the three stages is “Reconnection,” whereby we start to rebuild our life, relationships, and identity beyond the trauma. One survivor, Sylvia Fraser, recognized that her trauma had disconnected her from others:

“My main regret is excessive self-involvement. Too often I was sleepwalking through other people’s lives.”

Herman goes on to point out:

“The survivor must be ready to relinquish the ‘specialness’ of her identity. Only at this point can she contemplate her story as one among many and envision her particular tragedy within the embrace of the human condition.”

She calls this achieving “commonality” with others: the final hallmark of someone who has recovered from their trauma.

 

Of course, it’s necessary that all of us first feel safe, seen, and understood for what we’ve been through before we look to reduce the “specialness” of our own pains. 

This is what the first two stages of recovery are for: “Safety” (feeling safe again in our body and surroundings), and “Remembrance and Mourning” (learning to make sense of what happened and grieve what was lost).

 

But having confronted the past, if we still feel ourselves addicted to our suffering in the present, as I realized I was, seeing our suffering in a wider context can be an essential tool in unburdening ourselves.

Talking to people about our suffering isn’t enough. Really connecting with the suffering that is all around us, all of the time, offers us an opportunity to truly be with other people instead of sleepwalking through their (and our) lives in the haze of our own discontent. But beyond that, it gives us enough perspective to step back from it all, and decide what role we want to play in that collective suffering.

Will we continuously remind everyone of the load, or courageously and generously rise above it?

Matthew Hussey

Beating yourself up today?

Ryanniel Masucol

Today I went back on my word. 

Not to anyone else, but to myself. 

I told myself I wasn’t going to do something, and then after several months of successfully not doing it, I did it again.

I trust you’ve had your own version of this many times in your life. Maybe even lately. Eating sugar or carbs when you told yourself you wouldn’t . . . texting someone you know you shouldn’t . . .

If you’re anything like me, the natural and instinctive tendency you’ve always had in these moments is to judge and berate yourself for your weakness. 

Add to that telling yourself a catastrophic story: 

I’ve ruined all the progress I worked so hard for . . . and your shame just compounds.

You tell yourself you now have to start over, and it’ll be days, weeks, or months before you’re allowed to feel proud of yourself again.

I’ve been this harsh with myself over my shortcomings ever since I was a child. 

It’s made me as unhappy as any habit I’ve ever had. 

Actually, more so, because this habit is an amplifier for all other mistakes. 

If I eat badly when I said I wouldn’t, that’s one thing, but if I then tear myself apart for having done it, I feel 10 times worse.

I’ve never needed a shaming drill sergeant in my life; I already have one inside my head. 

Conversely, whenever I’ve had more loving voices around me, I have blossomed. 

I perform much better through kindness. 

Perhaps you’ve had the same insight about yourself.

This insight made me prioritize my ability to develop a more compassionate internal voice over the years, and that has changed my life. I can promise you that if you learn to develop a compassionate internal voice of your own, it will change your entire experience of your life. This isn’t touchy-feely stuff—it’s practical, and it’s something you can learn.

One of the most important ways I achieved this was by having people on the outside model for me the kind of kindness I needed to give myself on the inside. 

I’ve been lucky to have some world-class teachers in this department.

The formula is simple: 

I’ve shared with them things I’m beating myself up over, and they have modeled for me the things I should be saying to myself, in a tone I wasn’t used to using with myself. 

This isn’t a one-and-done thing. 

 

No hard thing is ever achieved in a single conversation. 

It requires daily repetition. 

But because of that repetition, my own internal voice now reflects the much more loving voices I’ve had on the outside. What a gift.

Not everyone is so fortunate. 

Many of us are surrounded by shaming or judgmental family members, friends, or partners. 

Most don’t have access to the kinds of outside voices.

Me: Today I broke a streak on something I promised myself I would stop doing, and I’m mad at myself for being weak. It’s made me hate myself today.

Matthew: I hear you, and I know how heavy that can feel. Breaking a streak, especially one tied to something you’ve been working hard to overcome, can feel like a betrayal of yourself. 

But let me tell you something important: 

This one moment doesn’t define you, and it doesn’t erase all the progress you’ve made.

We often treat ourselves with such harshness in these moments, as if one slip-up means we’re weak or incapable. But the truth is, growth isn’t linear. It’s messy, with setbacks and challenges along the way. What matters most is how you respond now. Forgive yourself for being human. This is a stumble, not a fall. 

Instead of focusing on the streak you broke, focus on the fact that you had a streak. That means you’ve been showing up for yourself, trying, and making progress. That’s strength. And today is just one day. You can start again tomorrow.

What’s one small, kind thing you can do right now to remind yourself that you’re worth the effort? It doesn’t have to be big—just something that helps you reconnect with the part of you that’s trying. You’re not weak. You’re human, and you’re still in this.

 

Me: What do you mean by “you’re still in this”?

Matthew: When I say, “you’re still in this,” I mean that despite how you’re feeling right now, you haven’t given up. You’re still showing up, even if it feels messy or imperfect. The fact that you’re reflecting on this, even reaching out, shows that you care about your growth and want to move forward. That’s resilience. It’s proof that this moment doesn’t define you—it’s just a part of the process. 

Does that make sense?

 

I know it can feel like we’ll never be confident if we haven’t figured it all out by now, but 

I’m telling you, confidence is a muscle that can be built.

Matthew Hussey

Your heartbreak will get better

“One night I happened to come upon a documentary called Facing the Storm, about the buffalos in Montana. Robert Thomson of the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks discussed how buffalo run into the storm, thus minimizing how long they will be in it. They don’t ignore it, run from it, or just hope it will go away, which is what we often do when we want to avoid our storms of emotion. We don’t realize that by doing this we’re maximizing our time in the pain. The avoidance of grief will only prolong the pain of grief. Better to turn toward it and allow it to run its natural course, knowing that the pain will eventually pass, that one of these days we will find the love on the other side of pain.”

 ― David Kessler, Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief

 

Do you know why heartbreak hits us as hard as it does?

I found the answer in an interview with 

the world-leading expert on grief, 

David Kessler. 

It turns out, a lot of us are carrying around “unattended grief” that affects us in ways we don’t even realize. We often don’t give ourselves the space to fully feel what we need to in order to break free.

I sat down with David Kessler, the world’s foremost expert on grief, to talk about the subject of heartbreak and how to find happiness again after we have had our heart broken.

One of the things that became eminently clear, if it wasn’t clear to me before, was that heartbreak and grief are intertwined.

DAVID KESSLER

“People always want to know from me: 

‘Which grief is the worst? Is it this kind of death? Is it a divorce where they’re still rejecting you every day on this planet? Like, what’s the worst?’ 

And I always go, 

‘Yours. Your grief is always the worst. It’s always the worst. Forget everyone else’s. It’s just you.’”

MATTHEW HUSSEY

Grief, David said, is a change you didn’t want. And what is heartbreak but a change you didn’t want? When someone leaves us, when someone betrays us, when someone decides that they no longer want us, that is a change that we did not want.

And the result we typically call “heartbreak,” but that heartbreak is a kind of grief. 

It’s a grieving over a person we have lost that we’ll likely never have back again. It’s a grieving over a future that we thought we would live out but is no longer our reality. It’s the unwelcome arrival of a reality, a new future, that we did not plan to begin today and are probably not ready to start today.

But the heartbreak I wanted to talk with David about was not simply the heartbreak of a romantic partner who had left us, but heartbreak in general that can occur in all different forms in our life—because we can be heartbroken in love, we can be heartbroken in life. 

Heartbreak is a certainty of life and we are all going to experience it.

Now, when I was talking to David, something interesting happened. 

I was speaking to David on your behalf, but he said something at the beginning of the conversation that quickly brought me into the frame in a way I never expected.

David said something that, the moment he said it, I felt my own emotions coming up:

DAVID KESSLER

“We go into comparisons in our own minds. ‘Oh, my grief, my heartbreaks are not as much as theirs, or because of this time element, all that.’ And I always tell people, when you’re in your “comparing state,” you’re in your mind. And you don’t have a broken mind, you have a broken heart. And we have to go into our heart.”

MATTHEW HUSSEY

And of course, we do this sometimes, don’t we? We may have dated someone for a month, and when that person decides they don’t want us or ghosts us or it fizzles out, we may feel heartbroken but not feel entitled to feel heartbroken in the way that someone who has been dating someone for two years and it breaks up is heartbroken, or someone who’s been in a 30-year marriage and is now going through a divorce is heartbroken. But what David said is that this is all very logical reasoning; and it’s not your mind that is broken, it’s your heart.

And when David said that, I thought of my own heartbreak. Not a heartbreak in my romantic life, but some of the great heartbreaks of my life in general. I felt myself starting to tear up, and I actually tried to carry on as if nothing was happening in the middle of this conversation. I thought, “I don’t know if David can see right now that I’m getting upset, but I’m going to keep going because I want to . . . I have lots of questions I want to ask David and I don’t want to get derailed.

But David was happy enough to derail it for me:

DAVID KESSLER

“But I also want to say, what I saw on your face—and you and I don’t know each other that well yet, hopefully—there was something that hit inside of you, and I can tell you it’s a little unattended grief. And we all live with some unattended grief. I mean, right now, that sadness in your eye, there is something there and we all have it.

MATTHEW HUSSEY

And I then had to consider,  what grief I had not attended to in my own life. And I’d love to invite you now, with me, to think about what grief, what disappointments in life, what heartbreak in your life, have you not attended to?

And why don’t we attend to these things? 

You know, why is it that my instinct was to move on from that and not sit with it with David, but to speed right past it? It’s because the pain that’s behind it is so difficult to confront.

David said to me,

 “I am the only grief expert who has studied buffalo.” 

And you may think, 

“What do buffalo have to do with grief and heartbreak?” 

He said, 

“Well, buffalo, when they sense a storm coming, they start heading toward the storm because they know that by heading toward the storm, they will be in the storm for less time. The storm will be over for them faster.” 

But what we humans do is we constantly try to stay a few feet away from the storm. 

And by doing so, we remain in this storm’s orbit indefinitely.

And we have all sorts of mechanisms for keeping the storm a few feet away. 

1. We may numb ourselves, 
2. we may move on anytime the situation gets close, 
3. we may try to avoid any potential trigger for our heartbreak anytime it comes up, 
4. we may go to an emotion that’s more comfortable for us to go to.

I know that there have been certain situations in my life—and I’m not speaking past tense, I’m not talking about five years ago, I’m talking about right now—there are certain situations in my life that have been easier for me to be angry about. And one of the things that David said that floored me was: “Anger is a bodyguard for pain. 

And so I had to explore: 

What pain is underneath that anger? 

What pain is underneath your anger? 

Maybe if you think back to a relationship, that the way it ended or the betrayal you experienced, that thing that person did to you or made you feel—that anger it brought up for you that maybe stayed around for a long time, what was underneath that anger? 

Because I know what was underneath my anger—what is underneath my anger—is sadness. 

It’s that grief.

And I feel like there have been plenty of storms I’ve headed right into very bravely, and there are other storms in my life where it’s felt too scary to get close to that emotion. 

And as David put it, we have this fear that if we start crying about something, we’ll never stop, so we avoid it altogether.

But in my life and what this conversation with David proved to me, was I want to go toward those storms, every single one of them that I have been avoiding. Because I’ve done a lot of healing with myself in the last few years and I’ve had the help of some amazing people, but I want to go further and I want to go into those storms that I’ve been ignoring or staying a few feet away from.

You may want to do the same, because the truth is none of these emotions can stick around forever if we actually head into the storm, if we act like the buffalo do, as David says. 

And allowing ourselves to feel these emotions—deeply feel them, engage with them—is a form of showing up for ourselves and tending to ourselves.

If we really feel our own sadness—the disappointment of what has happened to us in our lives—then we have an opportunity to be there for ourselves. We have an opportunity to exercise self-compassion, but we can’t exercise that compassion for things that we’re ignoring.

In order to have compassion for ourselves, we have to come to terms with the loss that we have experienced. And the loss might be something that came and went, or it might be the feeling of loss that comes with something we never had. The coming to terms with something that we never had and the pain of that—that self-compassion is a form of showing up for ourselves.

We live in a culture today that sort of demonizes the idea of feeling sorry for oneself, especially where I’m from in England. The idea of feeling sorry for yourself is about the worst thing you can do. But what we have to do is look at “feeling sorry for yourself” in a different light, as feeling for yourself, for what you have been through.

The only time that feeling sorry for yourself is a problem is when it goes hand in hand with a lack of accountability and ownership. If I spend my whole life feeling sorry for myself and I never do anything about it, that’s when we can waste our lives.

But what if feeling for yourself was doing something about it? 

What if feeling for yourself was the root to doing something about it? 

Haven’t you ever had a conversation with someone where they felt for you—they saw you and they understood you and they showed up for you in a certain way; and by doing that, it was healing for you. And from that place, you were more empowered, you were able to do more because you felt seen. That was a basis, a foundation, on which you could actually start to move again. 

Well, what if you could do that for yourself?

I know that in various parts of my life, for a long time, I never showed up for myself in that way.

One of the things David said was, he realized about himself: 

“No one ever abandoned me as badly as I abandoned myself.”

And how do we abandon ourselves? 

We abandon ourselves emotionally in all sorts of ways—by judging ourselves, shaming ourselves, constantly criticizing everything we do, telling ourselves we’re bad, telling ourselves we’re unworthy, not sticking up for ourselves. And like I’ve been saying, one of the ways we abandon ourselves is not recognizing our own pain, not actually sitting with our own pain and exploring it and showing up for ourselves and exercising compassion for ourselves in that department.

One of the things that struck me about my conversation with David was the voice that he spoke to me in. It was actually one of the things that made me most emotional was just his voice because there was such a kindness to his voice. It was so soft and loving and compassionate, and it was in such direct contrast to the kind of voice that I have used with myself so much in my life.

And just having the kind of voice that I want to get better at internally, externalized in the form of David, was . . . it modeled how self-kindness can feel, and that is a really beautiful thing.

DAVID KESSLER

“There’s a real you in there that’s so kind and loving, but oh my gosh, that’s the hardest voice to find, but that’s your voice. And so, that’s the voice you’ve got to keep turning up. And it’s scary to change and it’s scary to grow. But we know what staying the same feels like.”

MATTHEW HUSSEY

“Yeah, it’s scary because it’s a whole new way of being, and you don’t know how to move through the world like that yet.”

This, invites you to look at the areas where you have unattended grief, alongside being an invitation to head toward the storm, can also be an invitation to start to adopt a different, kinder, softer voice for yourself. 

Matthew Hussey

Dealing with loved ones who make you want to scream

 

How much time do we spend wishing people in our lives were different?

Friends, sisters, brothers, parents, sons, daughters . . . we all have someone who takes up a disproportionate amount of mental real estate because of the behaviors we don’t like and resentments we have.

 

1. Maybe they are selfish. 
2. Maybe they don’t call us as much as we would like just to check in, or only ever call us when they need something. 
3. Maybe we always end up picking up the check at lunch, or they get jealous any time something good happens to us. 
4. Or maybe it’s less about their negative traits, and more to do with the fact that we aren’t as close to them as we’d like to be—that in some key way, the relationship isn’t as we’d hoped. 

 

Often we bring our own baggage to these situations:

guilt and regret about the part we feel we had to play in why the relationship is hard, or why they are the person they are today; the ways we take it deeply personally that they are behaving the way they are toward us (despite how they may be doing the same to others!); resentment at all the ways they haven’t been there for us in the past.

We also bring our (often futile) aspirations for what we think the relationship could, or should, be like. This is often nothing more than a fantasy of what we wish it could be. 

All of this winds up being a way of not being present with the actual relationship we have with a person, or with who they are. The baggage we bring to the relationship is a form of living in the past; the idea we cling to of what it should be like is a way of living in some fantasy future. 

A lack of presence can make us spend so much time wishing they were someone else that we miss who they actually are. It keeps us stuck repeating a past dynamic, blind to the opportunity to begin a new chapter in the relationship today, starting from where we stand right now. 

The opposite of this is true presence in our relationships. 

• Presence occurs when we observe what is in the relationship or this person. 
• We accept who they are today, or who they have always been. 
• We accept the relationship that is actually possible with them. 

We no longer expect them to be a certain way, and we ditch the resentment that they are not that way. This is simply what is. 

From this place of acceptance, we are free to just love someone. Or at least to experience them as they are. 

The effect of this is an immediate kind of lightness. 

We have removed the weight of expectation, or the need for change. We are no longer prisoners to the old way of being in the relationship. Out of this can emerge a new relationship with this person—one with a new kind of beauty. 

This kind of presence might make the relationship better than it’s ever been, if for no other reason than the relationship benefits from a new, less heavy kind of energy, and less reactivity on our part. Even if it doesn’t get better, our acceptance removes the frustration and stress of expecting it to change. 

There is, however, a giant caveat to all of this: 

Accepting the relationship as it is only works if we are willing to reset what we are giving to the relationship. 

Accepting people doesn’t work if you keep giving the same amount that’s making you feel resentful in the first place. 

Here’s a new rule: 

Don’t give an amount of time, energy, trust, or support to this person that will make you feel resentful if they stay the same as they are now. 

 

If you never reset your giving, you will always resent their staying the same. 

But, if you recalibrate what you give to this person, you will magically no longer need them to change at all. Then when you do give to them—at a level you’re entirely happy to do—it becomes possible to actually enjoy the giving again. 

This second part of the equation is the part that’s the most overlooked. 

You simply cannot “accept who they are,” while continuing to give the same amount as you used to back when you were expecting more from them, and hope to feel better. 

Remember, you always reserve the right to give more if the relationship changes in positive ways. 

But for now, if you want to feel better: 

1. Accept them as they are. 
2. Accept the relationship as it is. 
3. And reset the giving. 

Key Takeaways

1. The baggage we bring to the relationship is a form of living in the past; the idea we cling to of what it should be like is a way of living in a fantasy future. 

2. Presence occurs when we observe what is in the relationship or this person. We accept who they are today, or have always been. We accept the relationship that is actually possible with them.

3. Acceptance only works if we reset our giving. Don’t give an amount that will make you feel resentful. If you never reset your giving, you will always resent their staying the same.

What About You?

• Who’s been driving you crazy with a certain behavior for a long time? 
• Could you simply accept that this behavior might never change, and accept that a relationship (at whatever distance) IS possible with this person, while losing the expectation of what you’d like the relationship to be? 
• How might taking this pressure off of the relationship actually end up improving it? 
• In which ways do you need to reset the amount you are giving to the relationship in the meantime, and redraw the boundaries? 

Matthew Hussey

Starting Again

How quickly priorities can change. 

New year, new me! Lose 10 pounds! Find a job I can be more passionate about! Learn how to cook! The typical list goes on. Lists like this are made when we have the mental and emotional bandwidth to make them. This rarely extends to times of crises, where all of our faculties for problem-solving become trained on just getting through.

In just a couple of days, due to wildfires in Los Angeles, 30,000 people went from “new year, new me!” to new year, no home. Many people who built their homes themselves. People who raised families. Invested everything. All gone. 

Additional people were forced to evacuate and decide what to take with them. (For some context on the true magnitude of these fires, the burned area is 1.5 times larger than Paris, and nearly 2.75 times the size of Manhattan.)

A day into the fires, I spoke with a friend of mine who, along with his family, is now in a rental property, wondering where they will live this year. They have children whose schools have burned down, a community whose physical nucleus no longer exists, and have lost no small part of their life savings. Even if they were to return to their neighborhood, there’s no “neighborhood” to return to. 

He said to me: 

“It’s not just the homes. It’s hard to grasp, but the entire neighborhood where we have all lived is gone. The schools are gone. The shops. The markets. The library. The parks. There is nothing left. It doesn’t compute because we can only imagine a building or a house burning down. Not all of them.”

Audrey and I were among the lucky ones not forced to evacuate. Nonetheless, the fires came too close for comfort, and like so many others, we were placed on a “red flag warning,” and readied a bag in case we needed to go at a moment’s notice.

 It’s a nice idea that this moment is a clarifying one, forcing us to instinctively laser in on the things that really matter. Not for me. I didn’t know what to pack. My laptop comes with me everywhere anyway, as does my passport. Many inexpensive things that matter to me emotionally are sprinkled all over the house, so I really didn’t know which ones to take. Audrey wanted to take a little set of wooden penguins my mum bought for us, which was kind of funny (save the penguins!) I have a little pin from Disneyland Audrey bought me once, which has Disney’s Hercules on it and says “Go the distance,” but that comes with me everywhere too. 

So what to take? I really don’t know. 

Perhaps because I’ve had the experience of losing everything before, I’ve never let myself get too attached to the stuff I accumulate over time. (Though let’s be clear, I am attached to the many years of work it took to buy our home. I think people forget that when they say things like, “It’s only money.” It’s so flippant. 

For people who didn’t start with money, losing money isn’t just losing money—it’s losing all the time that was sacrificed to accumulate it in the first place. Time one cannot get back.)

 

As a brief aside, this friend of mine I spoke of above recently told me he and his brother were cleaning out their mum’s house after she passed. She had kept everything her whole life. And I mean everything. It had all felt so important to her. And it was. But to him? To his kids? Did they really need his and his brother’s baby teeth that she’d kept? Did anybody? Did they have a place for all the knickknacks, the furniture that meant something to her? 

They got rid of 95% of it. He joked to me that “no one in the future is going to decide they need to open a museum of my mother.” 

He’s right! And there’ll likely never be a museum dedicated to you or me either 100 years from now. Sorry. The stuff we accumulate will eventually just not matter. (Kind of liberating, no?)

 

Anyway, back to the fires. 

When we make our grand plans for the year, we rarely assume that a day later, we might be discussing such things. Our plans usually assume the year will remain typical. Often, when I plan out my days (though I’ve gotten better at this), my plans assume I will be operating at optimal efficiency, with zero unintended interruptions. I rarely have such days, and probably, neither do you.

In reality, there are always bumps in the road, challenges that divert us from our plans, and sometimes, whether literal or metaphorical, catastrophic wildfires. Sam Harris, who incidentally was one of those evacuated by the fires, once said: 

“If you think things can’t get any worse, that’s just a failure of imagination.”

This phrase has always been a kind of morbid comfort to me any time I find myself complaining about something I disapprove of, like a pulled hamstring, an overwhelmingly busy workweek, or a difficult relationship (no, not you, Audrey).

Well, that phrase was fully substantiated last week, by people whose imaginations could not have conceived of the extent of the damage that was done to their city and their life in the space of 48 hours and beyond. And yet, the phrase remains true. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to consider how things might have been worse, had people’s family members or pets been inside, which in some tragic instances, they were. 

This, however, is absolutely not something that is helpful to point out to someone who is newly traumatized by such a staggering loss: “At least you’re still alive!” This has been given a name—toxic positivity—and, sadly, too often it takes the place of listening to someone and connecting with them in their pain.

 

For those of us living in LA, there’s something deeply disconcerting about this whole thing—how damn out of control it makes us all feel now that we are educated on how, exactly, this kind of thing happened in the first place:

OK, so let me get this straight . . . it just needs to not rain for several months, be especially windy, and some fires need to start, and a firestorm could send flaming embers flying miles in every direction, starting fires at a scale no municipal firefighting service, no matter how well-funded, could possibly be equipped to handle? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm . . . right. So what you’re saying is, none of us have been safe this whole time, and there’s nothing you can tell us that “really” means we are safe here in the future? OK, got it.

This isn’t the kind of reassurance we like to have as human beings. 

It makes us feel out of control in a way that shakes us to our core. 

“What do you mean it could all just end at any moment? 

That can’t be right. We have self-driving cars but you can’t save my house from burning down?”

I believe that for many, the finger-pointing that occurs after a situation like this is a reflection of this shocking and unwelcome encounter with the feeling of being totally out of control.

 

In her 1992 book Trauma and Recovery, which synthesizes clinical and social insights into the aftermath of trauma on its victims, Judith L. Herman writes:

 

"To imagine one may have done better may be more tolerable than to face the reality of utter helplessness."

 

So what can we do in the face of utter helplessness, or total loss? 

Well, one thing I know is that in the times when I’ve experienced massive, seemingly intolerable setbacks in life, I survive by resetting my baseline. 

I adjust my starting point to where I actually am now, instead of where I thought I was before the cataclysm hit.

As an example, someone I know came to me for advice in a bitterly acrimonious divorce whereby in her 50s, she was losing half of her savings to a narcissistic husband, who had never worked, nor contributed to raising their children, but now demanded every penny he could get. She had to sell the house she loved to pay him what he demanded, move to a part of the city she didn’t want to live in, and face a future where she would no longer be able to retire when she’d hoped.

I told her that continuing to compare where she is now to where she thought she was financially before the divorce was a recipe for misery. 

Instead, she had to mentally reset her starting point to where she actually was today, and then build from there. Only then could she feel the satisfaction of making progress again. 

This wasn’t positive talk. It came from hard-won experience.

 

The second survival strategy in times like this is 

to remind ourselves that there are certain life-giving things that haven’t been taken away. 

Whether it’s the friends who love us, the community we’ve built, or simply the fact that we are still breathing and have the ability to go forward and make an impact in our own little way, we can remind ourselves of the profound things that remain with us, or within us.

 

But there is a simple, natural, and beautiful survival strategy I’m seeing all over LA right now. 

People are talking. 

This seems to be because we collectively have something non-trivial to talk about—a socially acceptable pain, a shared reference point of grief, sympathy, and worry.

Friends who haven’t spoken in months or years are reaching out to each other. 

For my part, it’s even reconnected me with friends I haven’t exchanged words with in years who live halfway across the world, but wanted to check in on me. 

But it’s not just friends. People in coffee shops are chatting who would normally keep to themselves. There’s something bizarrely cozy about it. Like we are all huddled together talking about this thing that’s happened. There seem to be fewer strangers around.

It makes me a little sad for everyday life when a natural disaster isn’t happening, because in many ways, there’s no less pain on those days. On any given day, we all walk around with our own localized, individualized, hidden sources of pain that sit right beneath the surface, begging for solace and connection. Most days, we neither feel entitled, nor courageous enough, to allow people access to these parts of ourselves. Others, feeling the same instincts, give us the impression of having none of these challenges of their own.

 

I just watched the Avicii documentary and was reminded of how even a world-famous DJ who appears to be on the top of the world can be on the brink of their own internal natural disaster without even the people closest to them realizing it. By the accounts of his friends, he seemed to be in good spirits on his way to an adventurous trip to Oman, where it would later be discovered he took his own life. 

Depression, trauma, anxiety, and fear can be just as devastating to our individual worlds as anything that happens on the outside.

 

In a call for support to his contact list this week, a friend of mine signed off an email by saying: 

“In LA, a lot of people need each other right now.”

He’s right. But isn’t that also true of everyone, all the time?

You don’t need to be in LA right now for this to be true in your life. 

Someone you know is going through a devastating heartbreak right now, whether you know about it or not. Someone is having anxiety about their health, or is experiencing a chronic pain they are afraid is never going to go away, or thinking about an ex they fear they will never get over, or questioning their worth, or feeling lonely and isolated in ways they’ll never admit on social media. Maybe that someone is you.

None of us should wait for the next natural disaster to talk to each other. 

Huddle up, and let’s talk.

Key Takeaways

1. In the times when I’ve experienced massive, seemingly intolerable setbacks in life, I survive by resetting my baseline. I adjust my starting point to where I actually am now, instead of where I thought I was before the cataclysm hit.

2. In times like these, we can remember that there are certain life-giving things that haven’t been taken away. Whether it’s the friends who love us, the community we’ve built, or simply the fact that we are still breathing and have the ability to go forward and make an impact in our own little way, we can remind ourselves of the profound things that remain with us, or within us.

3. Depression, trauma, anxiety, and fear can be just as devastating to our individual worlds as anything that happens on the outside.

4. None of us should wait for the next natural disaster to talk to each other. Huddle up, and let’s talk.

What About You?

Is there someone you can reach out to in your life to see how they’re doing? 

Those check-ins often mean more than we realize. 

And what of your own situation could you share with someone today that you might have normally kept to yourself?

You sharing it could not only help you receive more support, but also give someone the invitation they need to share more of themselves. 

Matthew Hussey