How To Escape The Gratitude Trap
When it comes to making change in your life, your health, or the health of your business, the #1 item on every “Law of Attraction”-based, personal growth-oriented list is always gratitude.
Why? Because, the logic goes, when you are feeling grateful for something, you’re in a state of appreciation and happiness, which begets a greater state of happiness. The more you get accustomed to feeling good about what you have, the more you get to feel good about, and the more good you feel about what you have, and so on… it’s an ever-growing spiral.
But what if gratitude brings you down?
I have to admit, I used to resist gratitude in a huge way. Not because I have anything against showing appreciation, but because whenever I’d do a practice involving gratitude, I ended up feeling small and unhappy, which is the opposite of what it was supposed to do for me.
Not cool, I thought. Not cool.
But, being the ever-curious guy that I am, I decided to probe a bit deeper into why I was feeling this way, wondering if I could find a way to an effortless, empowering gratitude practice, and away from the depressing version I’d been practicing. So, like I used to do with my healing clients, I watched myself while I expressed my gratitude to see what the problem was.
And right away, I realized that there wasn’t a problem. There were two.
One Problem Was Shame
Sometimes, situations in your life can link negative feelings to something otherwise positive, such as gratitude. When that happens, it can cause feelings of contraction even when, for most people, the same situation would cause feelings of expansion.
My habitual way of cultivating gratitude—and I’m guessing this is pretty common—was to think of something in my life that I was thankful for, and then, just like we’re taught when we’re kids, to thank someone for it.
But remember when you were a kid and you got a gift from someone? There you are, staring down at your brand new Lego castle, or shiny new stuffed animal, and you’re just thrilled. You’re thinking about all the fun you’ll have with your new toy, and your parents, mortified that you might grow up to be socially uncouth someday, jump on your back and say, “What do you say, huh?”
You look at them, steeped in shame, and whimper, “Thank you.”
What a bummer, huh? You’re just jazzed about what life just brought you, and you get shamed into muttering a ‘thanks’ when you aren’t really up for it. Now you feel like a loser for not saying it without being hounded. And so receiving a gift and feeling great about it has now been linked to feelings of shame. How wonderful.
That was my experience to a ‘T’. As soon as I felt gratitude, I felt shame along with it. I felt that I wasn’t good enough for what I’d received. Talk about shutting down the fun factory!
The Other was the Other
I also realized that in addition to the shame piece, my efforts at gratitude were at odds with my spiritual beliefs. Not as if I was saying, “We don’t do gratitude around here,” in the same way some folks don’t believe in vaccinations, reincarnation, or going outside without your head covered.
I’m talking about an incongruity in the sense of not-being-aligned-with-my-experience-of-Oneness. My experience of the Divine has taught me to believe that the Oneness permeates everything in (and out) of creation, and therefore, in the deepest sense of things, there is no “outside”, and no “other”. And, therefore, the idea of thanking something “outside of me” for bringing me something, as if I couldn’t have obtained it otherwise, was really, really stifling.
This ego-centric, disembodied concept of God was really putting a kink in my chances to experience true gratitude, because every time I tried to feel good about something in my life, I reverted to feeling tiny, insignificant, and separate from All That Is. Bummer, huh?
So, in short, the practice of gratitude became a shame-inducing exercise in smallness. Rrrrrrrt! Hit the brakes!
Redefining Gratitude
If you’ve got roadblocks in the way of tapping into feelings of thankfulness and gratitude, it can seriously hamper your efforts to move forward in your life, not to mention put a halt on the growth of your business. I mean, what kind of signal does it send when a taste of success comes your way, and instead of appreciating it, you feel shameful and less than deserving? Geez!
So if you know—or suspect—that this is the case for you, here’s what I recommend:
- Take a moment to quiet your mind, and step into the process of expressing gratitude (if you need a cue for that, try thinking about something in your life you like, and simply say, “thanks.”). Notice what happens inside you, emotionally speaking, and with your thoughts.
- Take whatever bizarre thoughts, painful memories, or incongruous emotions come to the surface and apply your favorite healing technique (mine, EFT, whatever).
- Watch and see what happens to your feelings and thoughts about gratitude.
- And once you feel a good degree of resolution from the past, start visualizing how you’d like gratitude to work for you. You can ask yourself, “If I were to have a practice of gratitude that fit entirely with my beliefs and were to bring me incredible peace, energy, and joy, what would it be?
My new practice allows me to experience a profound state of gratitude and appreciation for everything in my life, and it rekindles the sense of intrinsic connection and flow I share with the Oneness, in a taoist-like sense. It’s empowering and paradigm-changing, and I’m really grateful for it.
And that’s the great thing about this: no matter where you’re coming from, no matter what hand life has dealt you, you can create a new practice, a new relationship, to gratitude that is healthy, positive, and empowering.
And that is something to be grateful for.
Image by >lonushi.
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O.k., here it is. This is the best thing I’ve read all day. Thanks for the intelligent and articulate article. Gratitude is something that should come naturally to each of us, but the associated feelings that go with can be a stumbling point without us even realizing it.
Thank you for this,
Adam
Hi Adam. You are so right about the shame being attached to the gratitude. My mother used to do this with my sisters and I. She was of course only trying to teach us to be polite, but now that you mention it, I felt exactly as you have described here. This is brilliant… great insight! What I’m really trying to be conscious of every day is to be compassionate with everyone, including myself. I find that if I’m feeling off and/or defensive, if I can remind myself about compassion, that takes the edge off. I’m grateful for compassion.
Adam,
This is such a great observation — feeling ashamed that you’re feeling ashamed because you’re not feeling grateful, because you know you should be grateful… And the shoulds just reinforce a sense of failure…
Oh, it is a spiral indeed — one that can spin in either direction. I totally get this.
I think it’s Super Cool that you actually managed to say something “new” and intellectually insightful about a topic that I felt certain had been bludgeoned to death in Personal Development | Law of Attraction articles Everywhere.
Ya, so true. Sometimes in life we end up saying thank you then just feeling greater and happier which inturn makes us feel lesser than what we have.
Thanks, everyone… obviously, gratitude is a big topic, and a popular one. I’m glad what I shared added to the conversation, and didn’t just re-hash the sound bites of the day.
It would be great, if people have found personal insights about this kind of thing with their own gratitude practice, to hear what’s been working for you, so we can play with it and try new things.
HI Adam, just found you from a twitter spiritual directory. Great article. I took one of your practices a step further just now.
When you say “You can ask yourself, “If I were to have a practice of gratitude that fit entirely with my beliefs and were to bring me incredible peace, energy, and joy, what would it be?” – it reminded me of how you can use the practice of asking yourself “how would it feel if ”
So I thought about a particular state of being I have not been living up to – and it provided instant clarity and guidance. Thanks!
First- Great typography here. I’ve been a reader guy since whatever changes you’ve made last, and holycrap the typography rocks here.
Second- I’ve never heard of anyone that didn’t know what to do with gratitude, but I guess it makes sense. Such a better problem to have though, than the reverse of gratitude–entitlement.
Wow.
It never occurred to me to question the twinges I’ve experienced expressing gratitude. But now that I am, I think my downside has been feeling like I can’t express it enough. Like when I’m sincerely grateful that someone did something, but I just think they are getting how sincere I am. I REALLY want, no, need, people to know that they are appreciated. Is that because I REALLY need to know that I am appreciated? Hmm.
And in raising my kids, I always struggled with the whole “say thank you” thing. (And really despised, “so, what do you say…?) Society expects it, and I didn’t want to be thought of as raising rude kids, but it seemed like it was teaching them insincerity. I’m happy to say as teens they express gratitude quite naturally.
Thank you for writing this, Adam. No, really. thank you.
Hey Scott, thanks for sharing that. And thanks for coming by.
Genuine Chris (thank goodness it wasn’t that fake Chris coming by again) – thanks. I’m a bit of a typography nut myself, and even though this site’s typography is super-simplified in some ways, it’s probably the one I’ve put the most time and attention into.
I checked out ftherapy, too; I dig what you’ve done with it. F@#$%ing great approach.
Gina – thanks—seriously—and I’d love to hear more about your approach with your kids, since I’m navigating that myself right now.
Wow! You always make me think
I recognize the shame because my mom was always big on that too. With her appearances were everything, and so we were always subjected to “so what do you say” even if we were getting there in our own childlike speed. The other thing that hit me reading this was the sense of obligation that was always attached to saying thank you. And I don’t mean in a equal, balanced, Law of Reciprocity way. With my mom, expressing gratitude for something was never enough, she always had to know that she was gonna get something back from you.
Because of that, I’ve noticed whenever I do a gratitude exercise I word it in a way that I’m never saying thank you to someone or something for what I have. I always use “I am thankful for… ” and that allows me to express the gratitude without feeling like I have a mark against me on someone’s scorecard.
I’ve been keeping a regular gratitude log lately, and, honestly, it’s kind of freaking me out. It’s a reaction I haven’t read about anywhere: fear of losing the stuff I’ve just made myself grateful for.
I have a brilliant relationship! (Oh no, it could end!)
I have a great writing career! (Cue the media banshees with their caterwauling about the economy and how everyone’s going to lose everything.)
Your non-dualistic approach is very helpful, though, because it takes away that reverse-entitlement mentality, like I’ve been granted this stuff and thus if I’m bad or suddenly unworthy it can be taken away. If there’s no “other”, then I can just be grateful for the state of things in this moment.
Thanks for the insight.
I just wanted to add a few words to Hamish’s comment.
Something I had heard and was trying to articulate (poorly) to a friend about the difference between feeling gratitude and appreciation.
As revered as gratitude is, it seems to carry a vibration of the flip-side.. the sense of ‘There but for the grace of God go I”…. the vague discomfort that while I have this now, I could just as easily not have it. And therein lies a fear of losing it.
Which is really true… you know, that whole impermanence thing. But it seems to imply that our good fortune is dependent on external factors, and therefore our worthiness to receive.
Appreciation, to me, seems to be less detached. Things flow in and out of our lives. We’re conscious of when they’re there, and we’re happy, and when they’re not there, no big. We’re still fine.
Semantics maybe? Appreciation just feels more positive to me. More empowered. Less dependent on the external for our well-being. More aware that we already have all we need. Everything else is just icing. And we appreciate icing.
Thoughts?
Hi, Adam;
How very interesting…I had not considered the ’shame’ aspect before. How much more effective it would have been for our parents to say with excitement, ‘Wow! That’s fantastic! Whaddya say!?…’ with a genuine smile and we would likely have said thank you with enthusiasm and pleasure, attaching those emotions instead..
Like you, I have found that practising gratitude can be reduced to sort of forcing ourselves to make lists, ie. looking around and saying OK my health, my children, this beautiful day, etc., without really FEELING excited and sparkly and full of genuine gratitude – to the Universe, to ourselves for our creations – to whatever feels good. This is definitely not going to cause any expansion, and I remember discussing this in an article, “Gratitude Equals Expansion”.
Thanks for sharing your willingness to a) go back and search out WHY, and b) change it.
Shauna
P.S. Adam, I hope you don’t mind my posting — I came by to say hello after going through the Personal Development list on my own site – ! – which we’re both on. It’s such a fabulous, long list I don’t always have time to say hi to everyone on it, so I decided to do that starting this week. Best of success to you, always, and I will be back soon. I love what I see here…
I like this statement
“no matter where you’re coming from, no matter what hand life has dealt you, you can create a new practice, a new relationship, to gratitude that is healthy, positive, and empowering”.
inspire me a lot
thanks
Brilliant little piece of detective work, Adam. The job of noticing your vibrational setpoint is actually noticing all the emotions (and in what proportions) exist in your thoughts, words and deeds. Because (as you’ve discovered) any part of the emotional scale can be twinged with emotions from – usually lower – someplace else on the emotional scale, it’s frequently possible that we are playing a chord and not the beautiful, pure single note of vibration that we think we’re playing. I really like the idea of quieting the mind before reaching for the better feeling thought/emotion…so you get quiet enough to actually feel what you’re feeling. Really feeling into what you are feeling requires that silence. Wonderful post!
A very insightful read and some thought-provoking ideas on an important subject. There is definitely a difference between powerful gratitude and appreciation, and pathetic gratefulness..
Hi Adam and all,
It seems to me to largely come down to personal honesty and integrity. Don’t we spend a lot of time and healing shedding “shoulds”? I find that the better I can keep an attitude and stance of being open for opportunities to give and be thankful, the divine answers, which in turn makes me grateful. This is an ongoing dance for sure!
Thanks for the initial subject, Adam.
Be well,
Stuart Baker