Hi, It’s Aine.

This week’s newsletter is a longer one. Take what’s useful and save the rest for when you need it.

Last week, a friend mentioned feeling weird about invoicing a client because she enjoys doing the work so much and charging for it didn’t feel right.

In the same hour, a group convo turned to why it’s often so hard for people to accept compliments.

And another friend mentioned a challenge around the idea of accepting love.

All three chats ended up moving to the same question: Why does ‘receiving’ sometimes feel weird/hard/wrong/difficult?

Here’s the science behind it, and a few writing experiments that might help.

The basic clash: reward vs. alarm

On a biological level, receiving good things, like money, praise, care, affection, should light up our brain’s reward and social bonding systems. Regions like the ventral striatum and parts of the prefrontal cortex help track value, pleasure, and connection.

But that system also runs on context - the stories we've learned to tell about what we're experiencing.

If your history or beliefs say “this isn’t safe” or “this doesn’t fit who I am,” your brain’s threat systems (especially the amygdala) can fire at the same time. That’s the internal clash: a reward on the surface, a subtle alarm underneath.

The result is that something that should feel good, feels like:

• awkwardness
• guilt
• suspicion (“did they really mean it?”)
• or an urge to shrink or push it away

It’s two systems talking over each other: the part that recognizes reward, and the part that’s busy scanning for danger.

Compliments & “positive information rejection”

Compliments and kudos are a very specific kind of “receiving”: they bring in information about you from the outside.

When that information doesn’t match your internal picture of yourself, your brain experiences it as a kind of cognitive dissonance.

The phrase sometimes used for this is “positive information rejection,” your brain discounting or pushing away data that doesn’t fit your existing self‑story.

If your inner story is “I’m competent,” praise lands as confirmation.
If your inner story is “I’m barely holding it together,” the same praise can land as pressure, exposure, or “they don’t really know the truth.”

This is one reason people sometimes believe criticism more easily than praise: criticism fits the familiar narrative better, so the brain accepts it without a fight.

From the outside, it looks like modesty, but from the inside, it’s more like “this doesn’t match who I think I am, so I can’t let it in.”

Two writing prompts to try out:

Write: “A compliment that felt hard to let in recently was…”

Write: “If I treated that compliment as accurate for 10 minutes, what might shift in how I see myself?”

Writing helps here because it slows the process down enough for your brain to notice the gap between the compliment and your current self‑image, instead of just spiking threat and dismissing it.

Money

Money arrives wrapped in stories: about fairness, deservingness, scarcity, and identity.

A few examples of patterns that show up a lot:

• If you’ve internalized “good people don’t take too much,” or “real work is supposed to feel hard,” getting paid for something that feels easy or enjoyable can clash with that identity.
• If your background carries scarcity messages like “there’s not enough,” “someone else might go without,” “I should be grateful for anything,” receiving money can trigger guilt or fear instead of satisfaction.
• If you grew up watching conflict or control around money, your nervous system may tag “being paid” as a zone where danger lives.

Just like with compliments, your brain’s reward system doesn’t just respond to a financial issue on its own; it runs that signal through your existing rules and stories.

When getting paid bumps up against those internal rules, your brain usually protects the old story. It will do that even if it means turning down the ‘feel-good’ reward of receiving money.

Writing prompts to explore:

Write: “When I think about receiving money, the first sentences that come up are…”

Write: “What I picked up about receiving money growing up was…”

Write: “The way I relate to managing money now (what feels okay, what doesn’t) is…”

Then: “Given what I just wrote, one small change I could try in how I receive or say yes to money is…”

When you put those existing beliefs into words and then name one concrete change to test, you’re giving your prediction systems new input and a specific behavior to learn from.

Being seen

Biologically, receiving support and connection activates reward and bonding circuits and can reduce stress markers when it feels safe.

Whether it does feel safe is where the differences show up.

Attachment research and clinical work both point to the same thing: if closeness historically came with withdrawal, criticism, volatility, or misuse of trust, love can land as a threat to stability.

So the brain learns to do things like:

• downplaying what you did (“it was nothing”)
• insisting you’re fine without support
• staying half present when someone is very warm with you
• or keeping relationships at a distance where care feels manageable

From our brain’s point of view, “receiving” becomes tied to loss of control or risk, not just pleasure. It down‑regulates openness and up‑regulates protective moves: deflecting, minimizing, changing the subject.

Writing prompts to try:

Write: “A time recently when someone tried to offer care or appreciation, and I pulled back, was…”

Write: “What would have needed to feel different for it to be easier to accept?”

Here, you’re using writing to start identifying what your nervous system is treating as a threat signal around love or care, and why.

That kind of mapping gves the brain new data to update on, instead of just repeating the same protective response by default.

If receiving feels awkward - whether it’s money, compliments, or care – it’s often because somewhere in your system, the rules about safety, identity, or fairness don’t quite match what’s happening.

Questions like these are about mapping what your brain and nervous system currently think they’re protecting.

Once you can see that map more clearly, it’s easier to experiment with tiny updates: which protections still make sense, and which ones your system might not need anymore.

-- Aine

PS... this week I'm launching two new protocol packs - one for the nighttime frictions that make it hard to settle, sleep, or stop looping on things, and one for the money tensions that show up when you try to earn, charge, or receive. Watch for an email announcement in a couple of days.

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