Are you good at accepting compliments?

If what you give me, strokewise, drops through my veneers into the firm raw authentic part of me then I'll probably feel a mixture of elation and sadness... a joy of being seen, heard, recognised.... suffused with a grief misted around all those times when, as a child, I was not seen heard and recognised and would have loved to have been....

If, on the other hand, you deliver what Eric Berne referred to as a  'marshmallow stroke', namely a load of old inauthentic bollocks, then this will bounce off me like water off taut clingfilm and I will reply by devastating you with either sarcasm or a Stepford-like confrontation according to whim and mood.

If I say to Tam 'you are fab' or words to that effect, she tells me off for sloppy judgemental compliments.....she wants to know exactly what she has done that I want to give her the compliment in the first place...I used to get annoyed at this....you're my partner and I'll fucking well call you fab if I wanna, you know all my reasons for doing so and this is us at the kitchen table not an unpacking therapy session goddammitt!!!!!........although gradually I am coming round to resonating with her mindful means of communicating (she is active in the NVC scene hereabouts)...and when she delivers a positive stroke, I am accordingly inclined towards that elated/grief reaction.

And this is why I don't give blanket strokes to all you wonderful gaians out there.....oops, performative contradiction....I would want to say why I think you are 'all' wonderful and that would mean blogging out a biblesworth of justification inclusive of disqualifiers for those whom I do not consider wonderful..call me obsessive but I don't believe myself to be so...

WHUP....ouch...'scuse me....my chair just got sucked up my bottom.....

Jon x