Emotionally generous people continuously bring happiness love and positivity to others, without expecting anything in return. They are constantly thinking about how they can make others around them feel better. They love praising others, rewarding people, recognizing the talents in others, showing signs of appreciation, among other positive emotion inducing actions.
The opposite of emotional generosity is emotional stinginess.
Emotionally stingy people have a very meager and miserly mindset towards sharing and giving. They are reluctant to praise other people, often sizing others up to certain expectations before they are willing to express their approval of them. They are judgmental and critical of what others say, feel, think, act. They are selfish in sharing what they have; they would rather keep things for their own.
What leads to Emotional Stinginess?
Emotionally stingy people can be motivated to behave in that manner because of any or a combination of the following 8 reasons:
1. Avoidance. Seeing other people happy makes them feel insecure and reminds them that they’re not happy.
2. Misery. They are miserable on the inside and want people to be like them. After all, misery loves company.
3. Self-righteousness. They feel a person do not deserve to receive any act of kindness from them until he/she really proves his/her worth or earns it.
4. Selfishness. They don’t want others to experience what they have earned for themselves.
5. Ego. Praising someone else means acknowledging he/she is superior and admitting they’re worse than him/her.
6. Competitiveness. They see other people as a source of competition and don’t want to share what they have with their ‘competitors’.
7. Fear. Offering an act of kindness to someone opens them up and makes them vulnerable. They are afraid of being humiliated if the kindness is not returned.
8. Zero-sum mentality (a.k.a sum of all the gains in a situation are equal to losses). If they share what they have with others, it means they will have lesser for themselves.
If you look around you, emotional stinginess is a phenomenon that is common in our society today. Many people have been cultivated and conditioned to be emotionally stingy by their family, friends, schoolmates, colleagues, acquaintances, etc. This is because our average society vibrates at consciousness levels of Pride and below. At this level, the duality mindset is dominant. People are viewed as separate entities; scarcity mindset is the norm; zero-sum is the name of the game; ego drives our actions; it is all about winning and beating the competition.
Have you been around emotionally stingy people? People who are just so uptight about sharing what they have, dispensing compliments, giving encouragements, offering help, and so on? How does it feel?
I have come across emotionally stingy people in my life and the truth is, these people just aren’t very enjoyable to be around. Being around them feels like being in an emotional vortex that just sucks up all your energy and leaves you with a dry and unpleasant feeling inside. It’s very draining. No matter how the person may look on the outside, you just feel that the person is ugly on both the inside and outside because it’s always such as negative experience.
