… and How to Gently Challenge Those Thoughts
Free Member Resource | Downloadable PDF Guide
Have you ever received a compliment and immediately dismissed it? Or accomplished something difficult, only to tell yourself it wasn’t really that impressive?
Perhaps someone recognizes the progress you’ve made, but all you can see is how far you still have to go.
Why can it be so easy to recognize what’s wrong while finding reasons to dismiss what’s going right?
This pattern is called discounting the positive. It involves minimizing, dismissing, or explaining away positive experiences, accomplishments, compliments, and evidence of personal growth.
For survivors of complex childhood trauma, discounting the positive may be a pattern that developed early in life. Recognizing accomplishments or accepting positive attention may not have felt safe. You may have learned to minimize your successes, lower your expectations, or anticipate disappointment.
Unfortunately, those patterns can continue long after the circumstances that contributed to them have changed.
25 Ways We Discount the Positive is a downloadable resource designed to help you recognize the different ways you may be dismissing positive experiences and begin questioning the thoughts that prevent you from acknowledging them.
This resource may be helpful if…
- You frequently dismiss compliments or assume people don’t really mean them.
- You minimize your accomplishments because they don’t seem impressive enough.
- You have difficulty giving yourself credit for your efforts.
- You tend to focus on what you could have done better rather than what you accomplished.
- You compare your progress with other people’s achievements and conclude that yours don’t count.
- You find it difficult to recognize improvements in your functioning or healing.
- You struggle to believe positive things other people say about you.
- You want to become more aware of thinking patterns that interfere with recognizing your strengths and progress.
What you’ll find in this resource
This five-page PDF identifies 25 common ways people discount positive experiences, accomplishments, and feedback.
Rather than simply explaining the concept, the resource provides examples of the kinds of thoughts people may have without recognizing that they’re dismissing something positive.
The examples are organized into five categories, including minimizing accomplishments, shifting credit away from yourself, and questioning positive feedback.
For each category, you’ll also find a gentle challenge designed to help you reconsider the thoughts that are preventing you from recognizing something positive.
The goal isn’t to convince yourself that everything you do is wonderful or that every compliment is accurate.
It’s to become better at recognizing when you’re dismissing something positive without giving it fair consideration.
Why discounting the positive can interfere with healing
When you’ve experienced complex childhood trauma, your attention may naturally be drawn toward problems, mistakes, threats, and things that could go wrong.
That tendency may have helped you navigate difficult or dangerous circumstances earlier in life.
But when you consistently discount positive experiences, you may overlook evidence that things are changing.
You might be developing new skills, responding differently to difficult situations, or making meaningful progress toward greater stability. Yet if you immediately minimize those accomplishments, they may have little influence on how you understand yourself.
This can be particularly discouraging during recovery from complex trauma or DID/OSDD, when progress often happens gradually.
If you repeatedly dismiss evidence of improvement, it can become difficult to recognize that improvement is happening at all.
Learning to recognize discounting the positive doesn’t mean ignoring problems or pretending everything is going well.
It means allowing positive information to receive consideration alongside the negative.
Over time, that can help you develop a more balanced understanding of your abilities, accomplishments, and progress.
Want to Learn More About Discounting the Positive?
Trauma Thinking Trap: Discounting the Positive
Discounting the Positive, Part 2
Want to Help Positive Experiences Have a Greater Impact?
Trauma Changed What Your Brain Holds Onto. You Can Change That.
Access This Free Member Resource
25 Ways We Discount the Positive (and How to Gently Challenge Those Thoughts) is a five-page downloadable PDF available free to CommuniDID members.
Explore 25 examples of discounting the positive, recognize patterns that may be familiar to you, and discover gentle ways to begin questioning those thoughts.