The Dark Side of Gratitude
There came a point though when practicing gratitude exposed things that weren't working as well in my life as I'd thought, or at least wanted to believe. I shrugged it off at first and focused on the things that inspired gratitude. But, the more I focused on gratitude, the more I became aware of my tendency to ignore the negative things in my life. It was easier. It felt better. However, ignoring them didn't put me on a path to finding solutions.
Even as I started to see some of the past events in my life through a lens that allowed me to feel gratitude for the lessons I learned from some of my more painful experiences, I also found it increasingly difficult to suppress the things that weren't quite right in my life.
As I faced those things I'd long ignored, gratitude often offered me a way to re-contextualize them in order to deal with them. Often as I sat down to think about what brought me gratitude, these things that I didn't want to face popped up and stayed with me. They begged for my attention in ways that made me realize that if I didn't deal with them, I couldn't truly feel the gratitude I wanted to feel.There were days it hurt so much I didn't know how I'd survive.
Feeling positive emotional reactions also opened me up to the negative emotional reactions I so often tried to avoid. I felt opened up and vulnerable and raw. I couldn't hide my own emotions from me anymore.
I planned to write a book exploring how gratitude changed my life by revisiting each gratitude statement I posted on Facebook over a year's time and exploring what I learned. I worked on this book for several years, and I never could get it quite right.
As I worked on the book, I realized just how much life changes from day to day, month to month, year to year, and how much it also stays the same. I also came in direct contact with all the lessons I've learned since that year and how they had nothing to do with the gratitude I practiced at that time. We are always learning and growing.
More importantly as I edited the manuscript, the dark side of gratitude seemed to pour off the pages as some of my observations felt both disingenuous and inauthentic, the exact opposite of what I wanted, because of changes in my life. As I struggled to fix those issues, I felt increasingly disconnected from what I was writing. I eventually admitted to myself I couldn't publish the book in the form I'd written it.
I don't know what will happen with the manuscript. There are some things in it that might end up inspiring some blog posts or possibly an entirely different book from the one I planned to write. I'm exploring possibilities.
Over the years, I started to resent my efforts to feel grateful, especially when I had days filled with reasons to feel ungrateful, even though they also held reasons to be grateful. I wanted gratitude to be the panacea for everything that went wrong in my life, but it wasn't.
Something increasingly bothered me about practicing gratitude. To whom was I grateful? I couldn't quite figure that out. Most of the things I felt grateful for were things I'd worked for or relationships I'd cultivated. They weren't things or people that appeared magically or were given to me. I found it better for everyone involved to express gratitude directly to the people who did kind things for me, gave me a gift, or otherwise positively influenced my life.
As I wrote my gratitude list every night, I started to feel like it was a habit I paid very little attention to. It had become rote, thoughtless, sometimes even inauthentic. It felt increasingly like a chore I just had to get done instead of a way to connect with the positive in my life, especially on nights when I was tired and really just wanted to go to sleep. The more I asked myself who I was grateful to for this thing I did or that thing I did or particular people's presence in my life, the more I resented writing the nightly list.
When I started practicing gratitude, it felt empowering; however over time it started to feel dis-empowering. It felt like I was losing my value along the way. It felt like I was devaluing myself every time I wrote that I was grateful for something I did myself as if the accomplishment was gifted to me instead of my own effort. At times, I even felt guilty when I'd leave certain things or people off the list. This wasn't what I imagined practicing gratitude was meant to be.
I didn't quite understand why I felt this way, and I fought it. I fought it hard. I kept telling myself I wasn't being grateful enough. I kept telling myself the problem was me. I kept telling myself if I could just be better... I kept telling myself if I could just get it right... If I could just be perfect... Oh, yes, those old tropes started bleeding into my gratitude practice.
But, news flash, I wasn't broken. I was trying to fix something that wasn't broken. I was trying to find something that wasn't lost.
Recently as I sat in bed, exhausted and just wanting to go to sleep, I felt pressured to write my gratitude list. All I could think was "I really don't want to do this anymore." I finally wrote something about being grateful that I didn't have to write a gratitude list to be grateful, and that's when something clicked.
I can feel appreciative for the people and things and experiences in my life without making a nightly list. I truly can.
Practicing gratitude bridged a gap for me that allowed me to heal and grow, and I appreciate that immensely; however, I think it's time for me to change the way I approach appreciating the good in my life, to discover my own way of feeling and expressing appreciation that empowers me.
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