"They'd only brush it off"

You may have tried once. You said something good to your partner and they said "don't be daft" and changed the subject. You told a friend her garden was the best on the road and she listed three things wrong with it. The brush-off is real, and it's discouraging, and after a few of them the drawer looks like the polite option. Why hand somebody a good thought they're only going to bat away.

Denise Marigold, John Holmes and Michael Ross published three studies in 2007 on exactly the people who bat compliments away, partners with low self-esteem. Those people, they note, doubt their value to their partner and tend to resist positive feedback from them, and that resistance is bad for the relationship and had been hard to shift. In their studies they tried something small. They asked people to describe a recent compliment from their partner in terms of what it meant and why it mattered, rather than just what was said. The people with low self-esteem who did that felt as good about the compliment, about themselves and about the relationship as people with high self-esteem did, and the effect was still there two weeks later.

Two things follow, and I'll separate the finding from my reading. The finding is that the brush-off isn't the compliment failing to land. It's the compliment landing on someone who doesn't yet trust it, and the mistrust can be worked with. My reading is about what that means for you. First, the brush-off is not a reason to stop. If anything, the person who says "don't be daft" is the person who has been given the fewest good thoughts to work with, and needs more of them, not fewer. Second, the detail does the work. "Your garden's lovely" can be brushed off because it's a verdict. "The way you've got the roses going up that wall" is harder to argue with, because it's a fact about roses.

And if you want to borrow the researchers' move, you can. After the brush-off, ask a question. "What made you think to ask the teacher that?" That makes them describe the thing, and describing it is what turned the compliment from noise into something the low self-esteem partners could hold. You're not pushing the compliment on them. You're giving them a minute with it.

The brush-off tells you something about them and nothing about whether to say it. Say it, add the detail, and let them wave. The wave isn't the landing. The landing is whatever's happening underneath, and the research says it's happening.