One of our great needs is to feel what are called social supplies, including real appreciation. I’m routinely struck by the ways in which people seem stingy with appreciation. And yet, when they give it, they experience it as a great gift for themselves too. So if they’re withholding it, yes, they’re withholding it from others. But mainly they’re withholding it from themselves, the blessing, the joy, the relaxing in the body, the clear seeing of appreciating what’s actually worthy of appreciation. I don’t mean flattery or puffing people up. I mean appreciating effort, appreciating sincerity, appreciating good intent, appreciating the good intentions that are underneath unskillful actions.
Turn it around. Don’t you want to feel appreciated? Deep down inside, I think a lot of us have an ache in our heart, as a result of a lifetime of injustice that we’ve received, in which we have been insufficiently appreciated. This is not fuel for ego. My experience and observation is that when people internalize feeling appreciated, they’re less egoic, because now they’ve got that supply inside and don’t need to work others or get caught up in trying to impress others. They feel good enough already.
Very often we get psychologically vulnerable to taking things personally because we’re carrying a lot of narcissistic injury. You might recall the myth of Narcissus, a good-looking young man who got so infatuated with his own reflection that he kept staring at it and eventually starved to death. That’s an extreme version of narcissism. But there’s also what psychology calls healthy narcissistic supply, joining, mirroring, cherishing, prizing, valuing, appreciating. We’re big social primates. We really need that.
We can also recognize ourselves, extremely important, and factually recognize good qualities in ourselves, things that we appreciate in others, that we can also appreciate in ourselves, because that’s only fair. Sometimes people get caught up really fixating on the one kind of external appreciation. They’re gonna die on that hill. That’s the hill they’re going to die on. They’re gonna keep trying to get blood from that stone. They’re going to keep playing that slot machine over and over again for the one time it might pay off to get that external supply. That’s not wise.
But meanwhile, even if sometimes people are in real circumstances where the appreciation coming to them from the world is a very thin soup, we do what we can. Maybe we communicate with others, maybe we find other rivers, where the logs of appreciation are more common. But meanwhile we can still recognize and appreciate ourselves, and then slow down, and feel it, and really, really, really take it in.
