by Jim Herbert
I’d like to invite you into a moment in my life that repeats itself over and over again. I believe it is a moment that many other men have experienced, in fact if I had to guess, I’d say it is a moment that at some point finds all men, even if they have never put words to it.
It’s that moment when someone offers you a genuine compliment. Maybe it’s a colleague who tells you that your work made a real difference for them. Perhaps it’s a friend who says that they don’t know what they would do without you in their life. Or what if it was your partner looking across the table and telling you that you are a good man.
You hear the words, start to feel them in your body, and then all of a sudden something inside you immediately moves to deflect the praise. It’s like a built-in recoil and defense mechanism.
At that point, the parts inside of you that are uncomfortable with the praise rush to the job. Your Inner Comedian Part might laugh it off or make a sarcastic remark. Or perhaps your Smoke and Mirrors Part redirects the credit to someone else. If you’re like me, sometimes my Lack of Self-Worth Part says something self deprecating that shrinks the moment before it can fully land in all its glory. The mechanism varies from man to man, but the result is almost always the same. Acknowledgment knocks at the door and you turn it away before it can come inside.
What makes this particularly interesting is that most of the men I know who deflect acknowledgment most reliably are also the men who feel its absence most acutely. Men want to be seen, or rather they need to be seen, in the deep and legitimate way that all human beings need to be witnessed and valued, and yet when the seeing actually arrives, something in so many men refuses to receive it.
I want to remind every single one of you out there who has ever felt this way even just a little bit that this is not a character flaw: It is a wound wearing the disguise of humility.
For most men, the roots of this pattern go deep. We are raised in a culture that tells us needing acknowledgment is weakness, that a real man doesn’t require validation, that self sufficiency means having no visible needs at all. So we learn to perform in our lives while not needing acknowledgement while privately we are starving for it. Many of us become experts at the appearance of not caring whether our work is recognized, whether our effort is noticed, whether the people we love actually see us. Underneath that performance, the hunger for genuine recognition quietly shapes almost every decision we make and can often fester into a simmering brew of resentment that can poison you long before any one else has a sip of the potion.
Add to that the early experiences many of us carry such as fathers who withheld praise as a form of motivation, environments where vulnerability was punished, moments when we reached for acknowledgment and were met with ridicule or indifference, and the deflection begins to make perfect sense. If letting any sense of praise land on us has historically led to disappointment or shame, the nervous system learns to intercept it before it can do any damage. Our deflection of praise isn’t a rejection mechanism, but rather an internally wired self protection mechanism.
I know this pattern from the inside.
I have spent more time than I can calculate doing the work of understanding myself in therapy, men’s circles, spiritual apprenticeships, and the slow excavation of fifty years of buried material. I have written publicly and vulnerably about things that most men never say out loud, and still, when someone tells me that something I wrote changed something in them, or that my presence in their life has mattered, my default instinct inside my body is almost always to minimize it or redirect it, without having to actually receive what is being offered.
I have been working on this for years and it is still a work in progress, but many days now I actually am able to use one of my current favorite phrases:
Acknowledgement received with gratitude
In the work we do in this MenLiving community, we often explore the four archetypes of mature masculinity — the King, the Warrior, the Magician, and the Lover. Each one of these four represents a dimension of what it means to be a fully realized man. The King is the archetype of blessing, of recognition, of the capacity to see others clearly and say out loud what is true and good about them. A man in his King energy can look another person in the eye and offer genuine acknowledgment without reservation or embarrassment.
Here is something that often gets overlooked in conversations about the King though: the King must also be able to bless himself.
That blessing of self is not from ego, nor does it come from arrogance, but rather from the same clear-eyed, generous, truth-telling capacity that he brings to blessing others. A King who can see the worth in every man in his kingdom but refuses to acknowledge his own is not actually operating from his true King energy. The King who only blesses others is operating from a wound that has learned to hide behind the appearance of selflessness, which in turn is not selfless at all, is it?
When a man cannot receive acknowledgement gracefully, he is not only depriving himself, but he is also depriving the person trying to offer it of the experience of being received. There is a particular kind of gift in allowing someone to give to you. When you deflect every compliment, every expression of gratitude, every moment of genuine recognition, you are quietly communicating to the people who love you that their seeing of you doesn’t count and that their offering isn’t good enough to be accepted. The door to your inner kingdom is closed and locked away, even when those who admire and respect you knock with the best of intentions.
At MenLiving we often talk about how men model behavior and what it does to help change the world for the better or the worse.
I have a daughter. She is eight years old and she is watching everything I do with the intensity that children bring to the project of learning how to be human. Emma watches how I receive her drawings, her hugs, her declarations of love, the moments when she says something that catches me off guard and makes me realize she sees me more clearly than I sometimes see myself. She is learning from me, right now, whether acknowledgment is something to be received openly or deflected reflexively.
If I want her to grow up able to receive love without flinching, I have to practice receiving it without flinching. If I want her to know that her worth is not conditional or precarious or something she has to earn by making herself smaller, I have to model what it looks like to stand in your own worth without apology.
The King blesses his children by letting them see him be blessed, so here is what I want to offer to the men reading this, not as someone who has figured it out, but as someone who is genuinely in the work of it.
The next time someone offers you genuine acknowledgment, try something different. Resist that temptation to immediately deflect and try staying in the moment for one breath longer than is comfortable. Try saying thank you and meaning it, without the joke, without the redirect, without the self deprecating exit ramp. It might feel a bit strange at first, but that strangeness is important information because it is telling you exactly where the work is for you. I can promise you that the blessing is not going to stop being true just because you let yourself receive it.
In a community where every single one of us has come in with a desire to see, be seen, or both, think of what a difference we can make when all of our Kings work together.
