A friend told me last week that something I’d written had changed the way she talks to her daughter. She said it quietly, sincerely, looking me right in the eyes.

And I said, “Oh, I’m sure you were already doing all that stuff naturally.”

I didn’t even hear myself do it. I just - erased it. Took her words and handed them back like something that didn’t belong to me. Like a package delivered to the wrong address.

I’ve been doing this for decades. Someone says “you look beautiful tonight” and I say “this dress was twelve dollars at a thrift store.” Someone says “that presentation was incredible” and I say “honestly, half of it was pulled together last minute.” Someone says “you’re such a good mother” and I say “you should have seen me this morning.”

I am fifty-nine years old, and I have just understood what I’ve been doing. Not humility. Not self-deprecation. Not even low confidence, exactly. Something older than all of that. Something that was put in place before I had the language to question it.

I have been making myself small before anyone else could do it for me.

The girl who brought home the A and learned to hide it

I was nine the first time I remember the sequence clearly. A spelling test - perfect score. I ran home with the paper held in front of me like a flag, already tasting the moment my mother would see it.

She looked at it. She nodded. Then she said, “Well, don’t go getting a big head about it.”

That was it. That was the whole response. No hug, no “I’m proud of you,” no moment of shared joy. Just a warning. As if my happiness about doing something well was a dangerous thing that needed to be corrected immediately.

I learned the lesson instantly, the way children do - not intellectually, but in my body. Pride is not safe. Being seen is not safe. The feeling of “I did something good” is the feeling that comes right before someone takes you down.

So I started taking myself down first.

By twelve, I had perfected it. If a teacher praised my essay in front of the class, I’d roll my eyes before anyone else could. If I won something, I’d immediately credit luck, or the weakness of the competition, or anything other than the possibility that I had actually earned it.

I wasn’t being modest. I was being strategic. I was removing the target from my own back before someone else could take aim.

The psychology of preemptive shrinking

There’s a term researchers use - “self-silencing.” It was first described by psychologist Dana Jack in her work on women and depression, and it refers to the practice of suppressing your own needs, opinions, and sense of self in order to maintain relationships and avoid conflict.

But what I’m describing is a very specific flavor of self-silencing. It’s not just staying quiet. It’s actively dismantling any evidence that you might be worthy of admiration.

A 2012 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that women who grew up in environments where self-promotion was punished developed what the researchers called “achievement deflection patterns” - habitual, automatic responses designed to neutralize any positive attention before it could trigger a negative social consequence.

The women in the study didn’t think of themselves as insecure. Many were highly accomplished. They ran departments, raised families, built things. But when asked to simply accept a compliment - to say “thank you” and nothing else - most of them physically could not do it. Their bodies resisted. They laughed, redirected, minimized, or immediately complimented the other person back.

It looked like politeness. It felt like survival.

What “don’t get too big for your boots” actually teaches a child

I want you to hear that phrase the way a seven-year-old hears it.

You’ve done something you’re proud of. You feel big inside - expansive, glowing, full of the rare and beautiful sensation of “I am good at something.” And an adult you love and depend on looks at you and says: stop that. Shrink back down. You are taking up too much space.

The phrase isn’t about boots. It’s about belonging. It says: your place in this family, in this world, is conditional on staying small. If you grow too tall, you’ll be cut.

In Australia and the UK, they call it tall poppy syndrome - the cultural tendency to cut down anyone who stands above the rest. But in families, it’s more personal than culture. It’s a parent looking at a child’s natural pride and treating it like a threat.

Maybe the parent was cut down themselves. Maybe they were raised to believe that pride was vanity, that confidence was arrogance, that a woman who knew her own worth was somehow dangerous. They pass it down not out of cruelty, but out of a kind of distorted protectiveness. If I teach her to stay small, no one will hurt her for being big.

But the child doesn’t hear protection. The child hears: something is wrong with the way you feel right now. And the child learns to stop feeling it.

The fifty-nine-year-old woman who cannot say “thank you”

Here’s what it looks like at fifty-nine.

Someone tells you that your garden is stunning, and you immediately point out the patch of dead grass by the fence. Someone says your grandchildren are lucky to have you, and you say “oh, they’d be fine with anyone.” Your husband tells you that you look lovely and you say “I look old” before he’s even finished the sentence.

You do this so fast you don’t even notice. It’s not a choice. It’s a reflex - as automatic as pulling your hand from a hot stove. Except the stove isn’t real anymore. The danger was manufactured by a childhood that taught you the wrong lesson about what happens when people see your light.

Brene Brown has spent years researching this exact territory. In her work on vulnerability and worthiness, she found that the inability to receive love, praise, or positive attention is one of the most common and least recognized signs of shame. Not shame about something you did. Shame about who you are. A bone-deep belief that you are not quite worthy of the good things people try to give you.

Brown calls it “foreboding joy” - the sense that if you let yourself feel good, something bad will follow. And for women who grew up hearing “don’t get too big for your boots,” that’s not a theory. That’s a lived, embodied, repeatedly confirmed experience. Joy was followed by correction. Pride was followed by cold. The safest place was invisible.

The difference between humility and a survival program

Real humility is beautiful. It comes from security - from knowing your worth so deeply that you don’t need to perform it. You can hold praise lightly because you’re already full.

What I’ve been doing is not humility. It is a survival program running on forty-year-old code. It is a child’s strategy operating inside an adult’s body, still trying to solve a problem that no longer exists.

The mother who said “don’t get a big head” is gone, or elderly, or simply not the authority she once was. The classroom where being praised felt dangerous is decades behind me. The world I live in now is full of people who genuinely want to tell me I matter.

And I keep handing their words back.

A 2019 study in Frontiers in Psychology found that the ability to internalize positive feedback - to actually let it land, to believe it, to let it change how you see yourself - is one of the strongest predictors of psychological wellbeing in midlife women. Not giving compliments. Receiving them. The women who could hear “you did a wonderful job” and simply say “thank you” without deflecting, minimizing, or redirecting showed significantly lower rates of depression and significantly higher life satisfaction.

Receiving is not passive. It is one of the bravest things a person can learn to do.

Learning to stand in the light without flinching

I am working on this. I want to be honest about how hard it is.

Last Tuesday, a colleague told me that something I wrote had helped her understand her own mother. I felt the familiar wave rise - the urge to say “oh, I basically just summarized someone else’s research” or “I’m sure you would have figured it out on your own.”

Instead, I paused. I breathed. And I said, “That means a lot to me. Thank you.”

Four words. They took everything I had. My face went hot. My chest tightened. Some part of me braced for the correction that has always, always come after being seen.

It didn’t come.

Nothing bad happened. The room didn’t turn cold. She smiled. I smiled. And for a few seconds, I let myself be a person who had done something good and was allowed to know it.

If you’re fifty-nine, or forty-seven, or sixty-three, and you’ve spent your whole life deflecting every kind word that came your way - I want you to know something. You’re not being humble. You’re not being realistic. You are running a program that was installed before you could read, by people who didn’t know they were teaching you to disappear.

You are allowed to take up space. You are allowed to hear something kind and let it land. You are allowed to say “thank you” and mean it and feel it and not immediately undo it.

The girl who was told not to get too big for her boots deserved to feel proud. She deserved to glow. She deserved a room that stayed warm.

You still do.