When someone gives you a compliment and you deflect it—“Oh, I’m not really that good”—you’re doing two things: telling the giver they’re a liar, and refusing to receive the very thing you’re starving for. Eventually people stop offering.
But if you receive a compliment somatically—letting it land in your body rather than deflecting with your mind—something interesting happens. It feels weird, uncomfortable, even ticklish. That discomfort is the compliment challenging the part of you that believes “I’m not enough.”
“It really literally destroys this egoic part of you that says hey I’m limited, I’m not good enough. And you actually can’t believe it anymore if you let that feeling all the way through you.”
The emotion that arises when you truly receive a compliment is evidence of transformation happening. The ego structure that maintained unworthiness is being dismantled. Like someone who was eating but never digesting—finally letting nourishment in satisfies the hunger at its root.
Related Concepts
- We push away the approval we seek
- Pleasure signals safety
- The ego resists change in either direction
- Receiving compliments requires the vulnerability we’ve been avoiding
- The expansiveness underneath resistance to love is overwhelming and amazing