Dear Karene:

I read all of your most recent post and this is my input:

You are very welcome and I am glad that you are choosing to express your thoughts and your feelings here. They are very important and I am honored that you share them. I agree with you, that it is also healthy for you to do so, to share your thoughts and feelings with a trustworthy individual, which I believe I am.

At this point, when a person does want to compliment you on your looks and succeed in delivery, that person must be very, very careful because your strong inclination is to seek negative in a comment made. If I was to tell you that you look so good having lost the weight that you have and wearing clothes you couldn’t wear before, I would have to be careful about these things:

* Be careful to not cause Karene to think I mean that she lost too much weight and is therefore anorexic and looking sickly.
* Be careful not to compliment her on a particle feature, like her eyes, or hair because then she will think that I meant that the features/ parts that I didn’t mention are ugly.

Be careful … be careful… and so, if I was to give you a sincere compliment on your looks, I would expect to see a worried look on your face, a displeasure as you process my compliment and extract from it negative things. So if I am to say a compliment, a one sentence compliment, I would have to continue with a whole page or two pages to let you know what I meant by that one sentence and what I didn’t mean.

And so it is possible that people who saw the distress on your face when they did compliment you are avoiding doing it now so to not cause you distress.

On the other hand, I don’t think this is what the guy at work is thinking. I think he was very rude to you, insulting your cooking and not following up his promises to you with action. And as far as I know, he never complimented you. So to me, he is a lost cause. Nothing good is to come from … looking for something good from him.

In the future, if you are close to a person, ask that person to not talk about how pretty some other woman is because it triggers you and causes you distress. If you told me that, I would respect it and accommodate you.

What do you think about my post here? Please let me know.

anita