tl;dr I have lots of intense feelings about the conflation of "praise" and "any positive remark."
I don't think I have as many negative associations as you with the term or the idea of praise—although your comments are making me think of the ambivalence of it in Nancy Farmer's The Ear, the Eye and the Arm (1994)—but I agree strongly on the discussion of strengths. I have my problems, but as far as we can tell, I got to skip the entire set of problems that started this thread because I knew from almost the time I was sentient that certain kinds of information were easier for me to process than for most other people and certain kinds of information were more difficult for me to process than for most other people and it made me faster at certain kinds of tasks and slower at others and this situation was presented to me by my parents in that deliberately, successfully neutral language: which did not safeguard me entirely against other children or other adults, but the worst damage to my sense of self-worth was done by grad school and chronic illness, not by the attitudes of my upbringing toward my neurology.
no subject
I don't think I have as many negative associations as you with the term or the idea of praise—although your comments are making me think of the ambivalence of it in Nancy Farmer's The Ear, the Eye and the Arm (1994)—but I agree strongly on the discussion of strengths. I have my problems, but as far as we can tell, I got to skip the entire set of problems that started this thread because I knew from almost the time I was sentient that certain kinds of information were easier for me to process than for most other people and certain kinds of information were more difficult for me to process than for most other people and it made me faster at certain kinds of tasks and slower at others and this situation was presented to me by my parents in that deliberately, successfully neutral language: which did not safeguard me entirely against other children or other adults, but the worst damage to my sense of self-worth was done by grad school and chronic illness, not by the attitudes of my upbringing toward my neurology.