On People's Behaviors : Compliment and Gratitude

This made the first blog post on 2023 and it’s not entirely related to books, but yeah, I’m asking a book recommendation by the end of this blog post. I only made this blog post to save what I’m currently thinking. It might be useful for the future me when she came across this one.

So, recently I’ve been thinking about compliments and gratitude. Those two are powerful and most people encourage us to implement compliment and gratitude into our lives. Honestly I wasn’t a compliment and gratitude person when it comes to relationship with other people. I only secretly complimented or felt grateful for other people, never said them out loud. I think it’s because how I was raised, you know, Asian family (no, not all of Asian family, but some of them, and my family was part of the uncomfortable one). Nobody taught me these powerful stuff, nobody said thanks to me when I helped them, or said great to my 100% score at school. So I grew up not knowing that doing good things is good and it deserves good words too. I learned about compliment and gratitude at school, and I excelled at these subjects, but I almost never said it to my family members. I don’t really remember why but the vibes and the situation used to discourage me to do it.

It’s until I was older and having my own friend group, I could finally practiced what I've learned at school to about gratitude and compliments to other people. It felt so weird at first, but it’s so good to let these feelings known.

Then I met a new type of people who react differently to “thank you” words and compliment. When I say “thank you” or praise them for their dress or compliment how clean the room is, they turn it into criticism towards me. Yes, they’re way older than me. For example : I said thank you for helping me with some stuff, then this person said that I need to learn more about this and this and never give up, and it turned into a whole lecture about motivation and stuff. I said thank you because I felt grateful and I didn’t expect a reply from the other person. So it shocked me.

The other time I said the floor was clean and asked what kind of product they use. They turned it into another criticism that I was lazy to clean my own floor to not know what kind of technique or product to clean it well, and it turned into another lecture about battling the laziness. I tried other topics and word combination but the reactions were always similar, most of the time it’s related to God and religion topics. Sometimes I feel disappointed, sad or annoyed, the other time I wonder how creative a human brain can be when it comes to giving lecture to other people about their weakness or negative traits.

Dude. Have you ever met this kind of person? And if you are the one into psychological learning, I need to understand what drive these people to make these reactions and what thing I need to do the best when they started their lecture.

For now, I stop complimenting or saying thank you to people who gave these kind of reactions and I minimalize the conversation with them. I stop it because I don’t want to hurt myself, I don’t do it from hate, but fears I think. I read it somewhere that when you criticize people, you project your own fears or discontentment of yourself towards others, so I don’t know, I think it bothers me to know that these people remember their hate or fears about themselves through gratitude and compliments from other people including me.

I met several book characters who share similar traits or experience similar things to me and I can deeply relate to them, such as Keiko from Convenience Store Woman, Morrigan from Nevermoor series, Sophie from Keeper of the Lost Cities series and Ove from A Man Called Ove. For now, I haven’t met a character who experienced what I’ve experienced in this blog post, or a book with a character who reacted differently to compliment and gratitude similar to paragraph above. I think if something like this is made into a book means someone has already figured this out and used it as their book theme, so I want to learn about it from a book too.

So, this is it, the short public diary slash book recs request. If you find this blog post and you know the answer for my questions or the book I need to read, don’t hesitate to comment below. I don’t bite.