The Goodness You Can’t Receive.

I have a surefire way of making most people cringe. Or at least feel quite uncomfortable.

Just look someone in the eye and genuinely tell them that they are a good person.

Even better if you can name some of the goodness you see in them, or give specific examples of when you noticed it.

They will almost certainly look away, deny it, or minimise it.

“If only you really knew me…”

There are always exceptions, but in my experience this pattern is almost universal.

Have you noticed this within yourself? Someone names your goodness and you respond by saying something like “yeah but…” or immediately thinking of the thing you got wrong yesterday.

Strangely, we may be even more comfortable being teased or criticised, than having someone mirroring back what is genuinely good in us. It can feel more familiar to relate to what’s not working than to what is. We’re often more at ease with our darkness than our light.

Isn’t that fascinating?

For various reasons, we haven’t really learned how to recognise, accept and stay with the essential goodness that is already present within. We can possibly do it with others, but not ourselves.

I want to suggest this is more than a common human quirk, and it matters more than it might appear. This resistance to our own goodness may be one of the things that most holds us back from living freely, and from offering what is most true in us to the world.

When we shy away from our inherent goodness, or allow our limitations, weaknesses and failures to shape how we see ourselves, we end up relating to ourselves through a very narrow lens.

From there, much of our energy goes into managing or compensating for what we think is lacking. Trying to mask it. Trying to make up for it. And in the process, we lose touch with a deeper sense of who we are.

Until we can be at home in that deeper goodness, something in us stays unsettled. Either we hold back from pursuing what matters, or we move forward with a low-level sense that something isn’t quite right.

In Part 1 of this article, I want to stay with the pattern itself. Why is it so difficult to recognise and appreciate the ways that goodness surfaces through us, in the midst of our weakness and imperfections? Why are we so quick to flinch when someone names something beautiful in us?

For some of us it could be because an affirmation of our goodness might clash with a background narrative we have long held about who we are. That we are not quite enough. Still a bit off where we need to be. That we need to try harder, be better.

For others, the difficulty is less about the story and more about trust. If affirmation or approval has felt inconsistent across your life, being seen positively can feel risky. Like something that won’t last. So instead of letting it in, we minimise it. Better to lower it now than lose it later.

For others, our resistance might be from a fear of losing an edge. When someone names something genuinely good in you, a subtle anxiety can arise. If you actually believe it, you worry you might get complacent, perhaps even proud, and stop pushing. So you brush past it and get back to fixing.

Sometimes the discomfort is simpler than all of that. When someone looks you in the eye and names something real, it can feel exposing. Someone is truly seeing you. So we laugh it off. Change the subject. Return the compliment. Anything to move the attention elsewhere.

Then there’s what many of us were taught, often without it being said directly. That downplaying ourselves is the right response. Agreeing with something good about yourself can feel like crossing a line, even when it resonates. So we respond, “Yeah, maybe… but I’ve still got a long way to go.”

And for some of us, being seen as good can feel a little threatening. In certain environments, standing out invites comparison, or a subtle shift in how people relate to you. You don’t want to get ahead of yourself, or change how others see you. So you learn to stay level. Not too much. Not too visible.

Underneath several of these patterns, there’s often something deeper. A sense that “if you really knew me…”

When someone names something good, another voice pushes back: “They don’t see the whole picture.”

Instead of holding both, the goodness and the mess, we tend to default to the more critical view.

None of us are without failure or limitation. We can all point to moments when we haven’t lived from our best, truest selves.

But how we interpret these moments reveals something important.

Many of us have learned to tie our sense of self to performance. We were rewarded for being “good,” and over time we started to measure ourselves the same way. By behaviour. By outcomes. Even by our thoughts.

You do something well, you feel okay. You get it wrong, and the whole sense of yourself deflates.

So when someone names something more fundamental than that surface behaviour, we don’t quite know what to do with it.

It doesn’t fit the way we’ve learned to see ourselves.

Across many spiritual traditions, there’s a shared intuition that what is most essential in us is not something we earn or achieve. It is something already given. It comes prior to all our effort, success, or failure. A goodness that belongs to us not because of what we’ve done, but because of what we are.

In the Christian tradition, this is sometimes expressed as being made in the image and likeness of God. This is not supposed to be a theological abstraction, but a living reality. And if that is true, then learning to receive and live from that deeper goodness may be one of the most meaningful ways faith takes shape in our lives.

We might say we believe that we carry this reflection of the divine within us, but it’s often much harder to receive that as a living reality in the midst of our imperfect lives.

But what if the difficulty isn’t that the goodness isn’t real?

What if it’s that we’ve been relating to ourselves from a level of awareness that simply can’t recognise it?

Because every now and then, if you pay attention, something else does come through.

A different quality of seeing. One that doesn’t need to argue for your worth. One that is steadier and more spacious than the usual voice.

Most of us catch it only in brief moments before the familiar commentary returns.

But what if that way of seeing is not the exception?

What if it’s actually closer to the truth of who you are than the voice you’ve been listening to?

That’s what I want to explore in Part 2.