Last week, my neighbor complimented the garden I’ve been tending for months, and I immediately deflected with “Oh, it’s nothing special, the weather’s been doing all the work.” She looked puzzled, probably wondering why I couldn’t just say thank you. The truth is, at 73, I still struggle to accept kindness directed at me, and it all traces back to a childhood where praise was as rare as snow in July.

Growing up in a working-class family in the Midwest, affection was shown through actions, not words. My father, a postman who walked eight miles a day, showed love by never missing work, by putting food on the table, by fixing things before we even knew they were broken. But tell us we did something well? That wasn’t in his vocabulary. Good grades, helping with chores, taking care of my younger siblings – these weren’t celebrated, they were expected.

The invisible standard that ruled our house

In our house, there was an unspoken rule: doing things right was the baseline, not something worthy of recognition. When I brought home straight A’s, the response was a nod and maybe “Keep it up.” When I spent Saturday afternoons teaching my youngest sibling to ride a bike while my parents worked, no one said I was being a good sister. It was just what you did.

This created a peculiar dynamic where I was constantly striving for a bar that kept moving higher, chasing approval that never came. I became hyper-aware of mistakes because those got attention, while successes vanished into the everyday fabric of life. By the time I was a teenager, I’d developed an internal critic so sharp it could slice through any accomplishment and find the flaw.

The strange thing is, I don’t think my parents were trying to be harsh. They came from families where survival was the goal, not self-esteem. Their parents had lived through the Depression, and there wasn’t time or energy for patting kids on the back. You did what needed doing, and that was that.

How silence shaped my work life

When I started my career as a personnel assistant at a manufacturing firm, I brought this mindset with me. I worked longer hours than anyone asked, took on projects nobody wanted, and when my boss praised my initiative, I felt physically uncomfortable. My stomach would tighten, my face would flush, and I’d immediately minimize whatever I’d done. “Anyone would have handled it the same way,” became my reflexive response.

This discomfort with praise created some interesting patterns. I became incredibly self-sufficient because asking for help felt like admitting weakness. I developed a reputation for being reliable to a fault – the person who would get things done without fanfare or fuss. In my 32 years in HR, ending as Head of People at a mid-sized retail company, I probably deflected thousands of compliments and internalized just as many criticisms.

The irony wasn’t lost on me that I spent decades in a field focused on employee recognition and development while being unable to accept recognition myself. I became excellent at giving others the praise I couldn’t receive, perhaps because I knew how much it mattered, even if I couldn’t let it in.

The unexpected gifts of growing up without praise

But here’s what I’ve come to understand: growing up without praise gave me some unexpected strengths. I developed an internal compass that didn’t rely on external validation. When you can’t count on others to tell you you’re doing well, you learn to evaluate yourself. This made me incredibly resilient during tough times in my career when support was scarce.

I also became deeply observant. When words of affirmation are rare, you learn to read the subtle signs – the slight softening of my father’s shoulders when he saw I’d shoveled the walkway before he got home, the way my mother would make my favorite dinner after a particularly hard week at school. These quiet acknowledgments taught me that love doesn’t always announce itself.

This background made me surprisingly good at reading people in my HR career. I could spot the employee who needed encouragement but would be embarrassed by public recognition, or the manager whose harsh criticism came from their own fear of failure. Understanding the complex relationship people have with praise helped me create better workplace cultures, even if I struggled to participate in them fully myself.

Why kindness still makes me flinch

Even now, when someone pays me a genuine compliment, my first instinct is to deflect, minimize, or redirect the conversation. It’s like my nervous system was wired early on to treat praise as something suspicious, maybe even dangerous. What if I believe it and then disappoint? What if accepting it makes me seem arrogant?

Last month, my husband told me I’d handled a difficult situation with our adult daughter beautifully. Instead of saying thank you, I launched into all the ways I could have done better. He just shook his head and said, “One day, you’re going to learn to just take the compliment.” We’ve been married 48 years, and he’s still waiting.

The physical response is what surprises me most. My body literally rejects kindness – shoulders tensing, breath catching, an urge to move away from the moment. It’s as if praise is a hot potato I need to toss back before it burns me. This isn’t rational, and knowing that doesn’t make it stop.

Learning to receive (even if it’s uncomfortable)

In my 50s, I read a book that helped me understand my people-pleasing tendencies were connected to this praise-avoidant childhood. The author described how children who don’t receive regular affirmation often become adults who either desperately seek approval or completely reject it. I’d managed to do both – seeking it through perfect performance while being unable to accept it when offered.

These days, I’m practicing simply saying “thank you” when someone offers a compliment. It feels like swallowing sandpaper sometimes, but I do it anyway. I’ve learned that deflecting someone’s kindness can actually be insulting to them, as if I’m saying their judgment isn’t valid. So now, even when my neighbor compliments my garden, I try to just smile and accept it, even if every fiber of my being wants to list all the weeds I haven’t pulled yet.

What I wish I could tell my younger self

Looking back, I understand that my parents loved me in the only way they knew how. Their generation didn’t have books about building children’s self-esteem or podcasts about emotional intelligence. They had bills to pay and children to feed, and making sure we were good, responsible people was their way of preparing us for a world that wouldn’t coddle us.

But I sometimes wonder who I might have been if someone had told twelve-year-old me that I was doing a great job. Would I have spent less energy proving myself? Would I have taken more risks, knowing I had a cushion of confidence to fall back on? Or would I have lost the drive and determination that carried me through a successful career?

There’s no way to know, and at 73, I’ve made peace with the person that lack of praise shaped me to be. I’m still working on accepting compliments without flinching, and I probably always will be. But I’ve learned that our childhood experiences don’t have to be our permanent programming. They’re just our starting point, and we get to decide where we go from there.