When the Getting Gets Tough

We all know someone who says “Don’t get me anything”--and means it. Or can barely say “thank you” before shoving your gift aside. Why are they like that? Don’t they know how hard you worked to get them just the right thing?

There are a lot of reasons why some people can’t accept gifts graciously, experts say. Most stem from the past. One might be that when the person was a child, gifts came with strings attached. So now, as an adult, “They assume, even if the gift is not from their parents, that maybe there’s a string attached,” says Maud Purcell, a Stamford, Conn., psychotherapist.

This can be a problem when parents are divorced and use presents to try to “buy” their child’s love, says Meri Wallace, a family therapist in Brooklyn and the author of “Birth Order Blues” (Owl Books, 1999). “It’s like the child is saying, ‘You just want something from me--my love,’ and they never forget that. Or the parents give gifts instead of giving time.”

The guilt-gift link can be strong, she says.

“Say there’s no money in the household,” she says. “The idea of your parents spending any money, you know is a hardship. As you grow, you sort of cut off your desires for things, and you feel guilty when they give to you.

“Or, if you’re the oldest of many kids, you’re so used to just giving, and nothing coming your way, that you just give up. You say, ‘Don’t give to me.’”

But even affluent parents can pass the message that receiving presents is bad.

“In a lot of families, children’s desires are treated as greedy and wrong. It’s not OK to want,” Wallace says.

A mixed message is hurtful, too. “In a toy store, the child asks for something and the parent says, ‘It’s too expensive, you have too much,’ and then they buy it. The unconscious message is, ‘I’ll give it to you, but it’s not right’ and children can sense that.”

Sometimes the rejection of gifts is simple shyness. “Some people just hate being the center of attention and hate having that attention brought to them,” says Purcell.

It could go deeper, though. Giving and receiving are tied very closely to our concepts of ourselves and each other, and that relationship can be fraught with complexities.

“If somebody doesn’t feel good about themselves, they don’t feel that they deserve to be given anything,” Purcell says.

Mary Wolfinbarger, a professor of marketing at Cal State Long Beach, did a lot of research on gift-giving for her doctorate. She found that some receivers see the gift as a message about the kind of person they are. It can be a cycle--people with a poor self-concept are more sensitive to what the gift says about them, which leads to more opportunities to be wounded: Does this sweater mean he thinks I’m fat? Does this bubble bath mean I’m dirty?

And the closer the gift-giver is, the harder it is. “You have higher expectations from people closer to you,” she says. “They should understand who you are, what you like, what you want.”

But Wolfinbarger stresses that most people are not that hypersensitive, and her research has found that most receivers have high tolerance, and actually like the gift more than the receiver thinks.

When there are hard feelings with gift giving, Wolfinbarger isn’t so quick to lay all the blame on the receiver.

“The basic violation is simply not trying to buy the recipient what they really want to get,” she says. “The failure comes from wanting to put your stamp on it as a giver: ‘I buy what I think you should want’ or ‘I want you to look a certain way.’”

Wolfinbarger interviewed people who were identified by friends and family as great gift givers and found that they were year-round listeners. “The basic tip is to open your ears all year to what the person likes because they are always telling you what they like.”

Those people who sap the joy out of giving gifts should look at the process from the other person’s point of view.

“They have to realize that people give gifts because it makes them feel good,” Purcell says. “Realize how much pleasure it gives someone else to give you a gift. Give them that opportunity.”

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Mary Beth Faller is a reporter for the Stamford Advocate, a Tribune company newspaper.