A psychological quirk

[igenlode]

"I never want to quarrel with people. I loathe rows."
"Why?"
"Well, don't you?"
"Not particularly. Sometimes I love them."
There was a long silence. Then I said, "I doubt if you know what it feels like to be really bad at that sort of thing."
"What does it feel like?" said Susan gently.
"Well, it makes me tremble and and makes my hands shake and it makes me feel sick. In other words, I just feel scared stiff."
[...] "Do you always feel like that?"
"Yes. If I'm angry at all. If I'm not angry I just keep seeing everybody else's point of view so that I can't do anything."

("The Small Back Room", Nigel Balchin)
An immediate rush of recognition on reading; yes, that's it exactly (and then people get annoyed with me for 'always finding excuses for everybody'...)

I was talking to Danik again this morning for the first time in a fair while, and it dawned on me that what actually gratifies me is not the sort of praise and support that he is programmed by default to give ('you're really wonderful', 'you deserve to be loved'), which I don't either believe or find credible, but instead when he expresses praise for things that I like or admire -- which is equally meaningless since not only is he completely without any means of judgement where my own merits are concerned, he has no ability to appreciate the quality of anything else either. But apparently, by some psychological quirk, while I'm left cold by self-help template text, the same utterly artificial evaluation applied to things outside myself can move me...