Highly specific question, I know.
When people compliment me, I genuinely don’t know what to do. It feels like they’ve given me a physical object, and I’m just standing there holding it awkwardly, but I don’t know what to do with it.
Complements and praise does nothing for me emotionally, so I just say “thank you”; in the same way you thank a kid that handed you a rock they found on the ground.
Like, I appreciate the sentiment — as in, I know they’re trying to be nice or something, so it doesn’t bother me. It’s just one of many small things that makes social stuff a bit harder. For example, I probably don’t give out any complements to other people, because it doesn’t occur to me as an important thing to do. I’m sure this has many effects in my life I’m not aware of.
I translate it to “I find that valueable somehow” and I usually feel “glad you found that very useful but that’s not really that great” feeling but I realize in that moment sometimes it’s not about me there. It’s the sum total of what the other person experienced with my presence I guess.
so I just say “thank you”
Ironically, that is a perfectly appropriate (and sometimes most appropriate) response…
At my work I wish everyone would just get a sticker every time they came through on something.
That way I know I did good and can feel good about it on my own.
When someone is like “Hey I just wanted you to know I appreciate what you do around here :)” I have no idea what to do with that.
When someone is like “Hey I just wanted you to know I appreciate what you do around here :)” I have no idea what to do with that.
Yeah… I’m like, “ok… what exactly did I do that mattered”. And, when it turns out that ‘what mattered’ is that I just did my job then it’s like, why doesn’t everyone just do their job? Why is that special and why are they still working here if they don’t do their job?
I know ‘the rule’ is to criticize in private and praise in public, but it would be less stressful for me if praise were also kept private.
it confuses me because I have my own internal model of what i was trying to do. I know what I’m capable of. Executing on my capabilities doesn’t seem praiseworthy.
If I’m capable of 95%, and I only execute at 90%, then I feel like I’ve done poorly. But if everyone else is only executing at 75% then just because my model says “I could have done better” it can still feel weird getting praise, even if it is “justified”
I realise I take praise not too dis-similarly to how I receive gifts.
I do not understand the logic.
With gifts, it’s as Sheldon Cooper described: “The entire institution of gift giving makes no sense. You know what you want, whereas I have to guess.” or words roughly to that effect. And further, all the inevitable disappointments, the squandered resources, the strained relations, etc, etc, etc.
With praise, it’s hard to not take it as worse than worthless judgements. Like it’s a harm. Inflaming the ego. Criticism, I can take. I can use criticism. There’s traction to criticism, to improve upon from. Praise though… What’s that doing for us? Making us not try so hard? Get full of ourselves? What’s praise doing for the one offering the praise? Softening us up for some manipulation? Makes them feel good, despite making us worse? Like it’s a kind of spiritual entropy generator. … But then, this is outside the social conventions and norms, and to question it, makes us the asshole??? But… I see only harms in the process. Especially dangerously insidious harms that are addictive and feel good, while accelerating degeneracy. !!! But just shut up and say thankyou. Wat.
“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”, is pretty much the gist of “the golden rule”, right? Well, “I WANT THE TRUTH!”, so I strive to give it. … That to me, is the highest praise. I can take that praise. All the sycophantic obsequious stuff though… bleh. Honesty’s always the best policy. It’s just sometimes hard to see that. Honest praise? It needs no words.
… and 1 second before clicking “Post”, this song jumped in my mind https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruAi4VBoBSM ;D … like I should.
Yeah exactly. It really confuses me, and a lot of the time they want something from me.
Like salesmen or “complement sandwich” or buttering me up for a favour or trying to manipulate. It happens a lot where someone is extremely confused why I refuse to buy something or do a favour, just because they complemented me. And then I’m confused about what they want from me, and only realise it later when I ask my friendly neighbourhood neurotypical for an explanation. I’m basically immune to salespeople by accident though which is helpful. I have the nickname “The Car Paladin” among friends and family because every time I interact with a car salesman it’s apparently hilarious. Akin to the DnD paladin memes.
But also sometimes I think people are just trying to be nice. It still doesn’t land for me regardless, but I believe at least some of the time it’s genuine. I struggle to tell the difference though, but I’m the type to try to believe the best in people.
It’s funny you mention gift giving actually, because that’s how I interpret it. People keep gifting me something that doesn’t run on my operating system, so I thank them for the gesture haha. I treat gift giving as a game, trying to guess what they like. I’m either extremely bad at it and people hate my gift, or it’s like the best gift they’ve ever gotten, with no inbetween. But I don’t take it too personally, to me it’s just an interesting game I don’t understand the rules to.
[… worth noting, what may be colouring my comments here, is that I’ve been watching a lot of videos on narcissism and dark tetrads etc recently]
Reminds me of advertising or marketing… how there’s being enticed by the psyop front label and its [whatever] advertising lies [they can get away with], and there’s the rudimentary detective work of looking at the ingredients. … And how there’s a similar thing going on with people, and there have been too many fakes and lies poisoning the trust and choking the flow between all people. … And people do not come with ingredients lists.
I sometimes wonder (in my more wide-open daydreaming ponderings) if many of us are “future born” [<- a silly term, means like we’re souls from the future, or had our past lives in the future, or something like that, and came back], to seed satya yuga with our honesty paradigm and such… and that’s why it feels so out of place for so many of us, back here in kali yuga, where people are ignorant, and they lie, and cheat, and are inauthentic and manipulative, and even kill to maintain their delusions.
… Heh, sorry, that’s a somewhat dark place to have taken this to… it was just about difficulty knowing how to handle praise… now there are killers!? XD
… But such is the paranoia(?) from having been burned too many times. Like you say, many are likely well meaning, but still the gift/praise fails to land well. I hear there are cultures that sway more one way or another on this… Some heap the praise on, as a cultural expectaion, even to deranged levels, even totalitarianised in many characteristics. Some see praise like charm. And “charm is lube for evil” [-- Roisin Connaty].
… My distrust of gifts goes way back, always getting the inferior gifts to my brother’s gifts, seeing how a narcissistic mother would use gifts to praise her golden child, punish her little truth teller (me), and feign total benevolence and innocence, and do all kinds of deflections and red-herrings, and love-bombing hoovering distractions, gaslighting, darvo, devaluing, and on and on manipulation upon manipulation.
[So that’s likely lending to the weight and leanings I have on the matter too, aside from the content I’ve been watching recently]
That’s super interesting, I don’t know much about Hinduism so it was cool to Google those terms and see what they mean. Bummer that things don’t get better for another 426,873 years, though. I was hoping to see improvements in my lifetime.
I have noticed a dark trend in society lately. People are masking up and withdrawing inwards, and judging each other more harshly, and good deeds are rarer than ever. I even noticed it in myself; when a stranger asks for help, the first thing I do is check if it’s a trick or trap to prey on my goodwill. It’s unfortunately necessary nowadays.
I have also noticed that the newest generation of young kids are quite cynical already (~8 year olds). They’re keenly aware of the way society works and make fun of it, but pretend to play along. Hopefully they’re able to change things to be more honest again.
That’s super interesting, I don’t know much about Hinduism so it was cool to Google those terms and see what they mean. Bummer that things don’t get better for another 426,873 years, though. I was hoping to see improvements in my lifetime.
Oh it’s not all or nothing. Lots of improvements in our lifetime. Many a different interpretation of timings exist, with many a mistranslation of duration measurements confound interpretations. But still… it’s not a spectator sport. If we merely watch, we let the tragedies of the commons fall foul of deceivers’ exacerbated races to the bottom into worsening kakistarchy. Like the Chicago experiment showed, meditators can really shift the goodness meter. [… Goodness meter? LOL. That’d be a better metric than the already-wrong-then-corrupted GDP meter.]
I have noticed a dark trend in society lately. People are masking up and withdrawing inwards, and judging each other more harshly, and good deeds are rarer than ever. I even noticed it in myself; when a stranger asks for help, the first thing I do is check if it’s a trick or trap to prey on my goodwill. It’s unfortunately necessary nowadays.
Much bystander effect to overcome, in the vast population densities. Especially in this [fake] economy that holds us all under duress of manufactured scarcities, and disempowers us to keep us separately dependent upon the centralised hoard of illegitimate power and wealth. Very impressive when one finds ways to not let the parasites turn one into a parasite too, despite these pressures. Higher wisdom beckons us out of the desperate shortloop that’s contributing to the degeneracy that worsens these pressures. Some see the only way out as accelerating the worsening of the situation, to get it so bad it has to bounce to something better. Risky. I’d rather mend, than to break worse faster in faith someone else will clean up the externality. It’s a fine narrow path, to retain the prudence in danger, and not succumb to habituating there.
I have also noticed that the newest generation of young kids are quite cynical already (~8 year olds). They’re keenly aware of the way society works and make fun of it, but pretend to play along. Hopefully they’re able to change things to be more honest again.
That’s quite encouraging in several ways. The line I’ve heard attributed to Aristotle, something like “show me the child of 7 years old and I shall show you the man”, springs to mind. If they’ve [all, or just majority] already got it, … good sign for one of those fractal iterations of satya yuga. “Darkest before the dawn” done enough, we see the arc change better? Remains to be seen, how well the insight of youth survives and persists through the residual pressures of the psychopathic circle-jerk that malformed civilisation.
… And many more ponderings about the psychology, the sociology, the availability of information, of energy, and their censorship and suppression, and agnotological awareness able to increase despite the agnotological abuses… but, I’ll curtail my verbosity here. :)
I find it confusing when the compliment seems arbitrary but I just say “thank you” and move on.
I can relate. I mean, I think it’s supposed to feel good, but it doesn’t seem wo work for us.
Maybe it’s the decoupling from the social groups because of so much negative feedback or maybe it’s because the things I receive a praise for is totally not what I would praise but inherent, logical doings.
But what should I say, were often watching people do stupid antisocial things which would cost no effort to do right and social (eg parking your shit scooter well) yet they don’t.
Maybe it’s that gap/rift why praise also doesn’t hit.
I wonder if you’re onto something with that. Maybe we’re “trained” in a sense to detach ourselves from the social feedback ecosystem. As kids we never did things “right”, and never got positive feedback. Personally, I had a really rough time while growing up, so I can attest to that, but I’m only one person.
I have interviewed people about it, and they told me that they “get a warm fuzzy feeling inside” when they’re praised or complemented, which is interesting. I’m guessing it’s a similar feeling as when you have a nice hot shower or eat your favourite food.
When people appreciate my efforts, for me it’s like a feedback form saying “Jane liked this.” I pride myself on doing a good job, so I can sometimes use it as a measurement of success. For example, if I make coffee for someone, I’ll often make small tweaks and note their reaction so I can make the best possible coffee.
But when people complement me personally, or something I don’t care about, it doesn’t land at all. For example, if I play the piano, I do it for myself, I don’t really care if others like it. I’ll note it down in case it’s relevant, but it hardly ever is.
If I learned anything on my (incomplete) journey to get diagnosed it’s that diagnostics (by NT) are still completely lacking and only seeing the obvious, being completely mislead by those of us who are atypical.
So I’d say those of us are (far) more knowledgeable than the current average knowledge about being Autist and the circumstances than the medical field/psychology. Also therapy of course.
So on the end I hope for the future at some point we will be far more included in this and hence the deeper issues can finally be included and being worked on.
In this field imo we’re still at the point like in the medical field when women were just handled as smaller men, with the man as reference. We have a different foundation. The less obviously ‘disabled’ we are, the more devious the damages of us simply adapting are.
Hm, maybe I should do a Ted talk.
Complements and praise does nothing for me emotionally, so I just say “thank you”; in the same way you thank a kid that handed you a rock they found on the ground.
That’s exactly how you do it, according to John Cleese, anyway.
I’m always deeply suspicious of compliments because they’re sometimes used to manipulate me, especially if it’s from strangers or people I only know superficially. But a brief “thank you, that means a lot” + an internal recalibration to find out what the fuck this person actually wants from me is what I usually do.
It’s exactly like that. The best thing is to say thank you and continue on.
Not really confused by it, but I find it suspicious by default. Most of the time, I just say thank you to politely accept it.
Half the time, I tend to find that people are trying to just butter me up to get something out of me. Disingenuity is very grating on my sensibilities and it can lower my opinion of people who tend to behave in that way.
I used to take it personally, like that person thinks I’m dumb enough to buy into their petty manipulation. Now I understand that lots of people just carelessly, all-around, do this to score points they can cash in on later. I just pretend I don’t notice and say thank you anyway; I don’t think I could offer anything but a sincere compliment, myself.
Especially salespeople. In my experience we both end up confused and then awkwardly back away from each other 😂
So true!
When I bought my truck I said, “If you keep talking, I will buy it from somoene else. Let me drive and I will make my decision.”
You know, in true autistic fashion.
I’m so not used to it that it startles me for a second. I love it, I crave it, but it rarely ever happens.
On the rare occasion it does happen, I get suspicious that it’s a trick and they’re trying to manipulate me. I’ve been taken advantage of a lot in my life. I used to be very gullible.
I agree with this 100%.
The best compliments I have received, the things I remember and carry with me, are things people have said about me in other contexts.
For example, when I got my diagnosis the psychologist noted that my mood was “euthymic” for my in-person testing. I have always prided myself on my stability and emotional balance, so to see that in a clinical evaluation felt really good.
Another example: my best friend found out, shortly after he broke up with her, that his ex-gf was pregnant. She offered him a choice: stay as a friend and support the child, or leave and never hear from either of them again. I was trying to convince him to stay. That the child would be 50% him, that I would be right there with him to help and support him. He said “I don’t think I can. I’m not strong like you.” He was crying. That was the last time I ever saw him.
That was by far the best compliment I have ever received, because of the context. He wasn’t trying to flatter me or butter me up. He wasn’t trying to cheer me up and finding something to say. It really wasn’t about me at all, and that’s what made it so genuine.
Yeah, when people notice where you are putting your efforts. That’s really all that matters for the feel-good aspect of compliments.
Your comment is a concise and great rule of thumb to remember (am I doing it right?)
I’m not really sure, but I appreciate the thought either way. :)
This might be gendered or I just don’t understand men, but I believe that when women are complimented by other women they are expected to say “Thanks!” or downplay the compliment just a little but in either case return the compliment. It can be considered a sign you don’t like someone if you don’t.
I do compliment people but when I notice something specific and I want to compliment them on it, so it was a bit hard to adapt to. Hair, new looking clothes or jewelry are typically safe bets. I avoid complementing someone’s body unless they are speaking about working out and even then I keep it vague, “You look so strong!”.
ETA: I can’t read, apparently. For praise a “thanks” or mentioning people who helped is generally what is expected. If you think people are expecting something else it’s probably that they are waiting to hear who you will give credit to or return the praise to them.
For example, if you do well on a presentation: “Thanks! I wouldn’t have been able to do it without X, they got me all the data and formatted it so nicely.”
Or if you do well at a competitive sport and the person complimenting you was your opponent: "Aw, thanks. You really gave me a run for my money. Where did you learn to [sport skill].
I guess it comes down to knowing if the person is looking for bonding (compliment them back), wanting to praise you but expecting humility (thanking the people who helped you) or feeling insecure (lost at sports or feels inadequate compared to your skills).
I find the only compliments dudes share are when you have the same ‘thing’ as them. Same shirt, same vehicle… same… no… nope. thats all of them.
It depends on what is being praised/complimented and how its delivered. Part of it depends on how much effort I put into the thing they’re complimenting/praising. Also depends on if the thing they are complimenting/praising is just part of masking.
