Shunning the Light

I just finished my first year of grad school in counseling psychology. Half-way through the year I was given my first patient. This is because my school only wants to screw up people with amateurish counseling who have no choice but to go along.

So anyway, working with him was very hard. We would dwell on the bad parts of his life, and all his problems, and mostly why everyone else in his life had failed him. But whenever I tried to give him a complement, or tell him how courageous he was being for facing his problems, or show him how he was improving, he would brush me off. He couldn’t take the good stuff, only the bad.

I am sure you know someone just like that. Most likely you see a lot of yourself in this person. It is very hard for almost everyone to take complements. We are afraid they are insincere, that the person complementing us is just humoring us and telling us what we want to hear. We are uncomfortable with any attention on us, and get especially flustered when we are surprised, and we are almost always surprised by good words. We don’t expect it and don’t like it. It is like suddenly someone put a spotlight on us and says “You are a good person. Now talk while everyone stares at you.”

We are afraid that if we accept a compliment it means that we are committing to make this compliment true. If someone told you that you are a very good piano player, but you didn’t think you were, you would somehow try to let them know that this wasn’t true. You would be afraid of the expectations of having to be a good piano player when you are afraid that you aren’t up to that standard. You would be afraid that people would know you aren’t that good and hate you for pretending you were.

Most of all, we are ambivalent with success. We love it and hate it. We move toward it, but then hide from it. We feel can approach it but never possess it. Why don’t we become great? We are afraid of our own greatness and what it would do to us. Greatness will change us, and we don’t really like change. So we say we want to become more like God, or become a better husband, or a better student, but we also do things that sabotage our efforts. George Weinberg, in his book The Heart of Psychotherapy calls this “shunning the light”. We avoid the light because we fear what it will do to us. We are more comfortable in our own sinfulness and problems, and are much more comfortable in the mundane and trivial. Is change possible? Only if we allow ourselves to see and love the goodness and potential inside of us and to allow others to see the goodness in us, as well.