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Gratitude

When Gratitude Turns Into Guilt

A Personal Perspective: Gratitude is not a formula or a fault-finder.

Key points

  • Gratitude is not a formula—and it should not be guilt-inducing.
  • Gratitude is a daily practice. It takes work.
  • Sometimes gratitude is hard—and that's OK.
  • Easy does it. We learn best when we avoid rushing gratitude.
Dana Bowman
My son's handprint Santa when he was four.
Source: Dana Bowman

Hard things happened in our family in October and November of this year. We were hit with a three-tiered Let’s Take You Out at the Knees gratitude-busting plan.

One: My husband was “let go”* from a job where he had worked for over sixteen years.

Two: We left our church. It was a spiritual punch in the gut and it felt like a divorce. It’s a long story. It won’t be told here, but “church hurt” is real.

And Three: I got sick. Like, really sick. It was this horrible bronchial/can’t breathe/can’t move thing that I am still dealing with. I haven’t been able to run for over three months, and I still wheeze like a sad little broken accordion anytime I walk the length of our house—just walking. Don’t even get me started on stairs.

November is when people talk about gratitude a lot. I am one of those people. I have posted daily gratitudes on the 'Gram. I’ve enjoyed writing about it on my blog. I’ve researched how it boosts our health.

But mostly, I understood and valued the power of gratitude when it comes to my sobriety. I often say I am a grateful alcoholic.

Some say this is a bit dramatic; why be thankful for something that almost killed me? Well, I am. Because I’m a stronger, more badass woman now because I had to dig myself out of a hole so deep it almost killed me. Digging is hard. It made me all muscled and strong like I’d had sober Cross Fit, and now I can stand up top, breathing deep, where I can see far. And I am so very grateful.

But these past few months have made me wonder about how I have plied what I thought was gratitude in a way that was becoming unhealthy.

Here’s the scenario: When I got sick, I kept thinking, “Well, it’s not COVID. It could be worse!” The same with the job thing. I kept muttering, in my stress and worry, “Well, none of us have cancer! At least we have our health! And we always have each other!”

And the church thing? Well, honestly, I couldn’t come up with a gratitude platitude for that one. Maybe spiritual stuff takes more time; it’s tricky that way.

It’s the “at least” part that catches me. It’s like I had stuck gratitude on the bottom shelf. It had become a bargain brand with worse ingredients and lower value.

My November version of gratitude had become bagged cereal, friends. It was the Life Cereal knock-off called Live it Up! that doesn’t live up to its name at all.

I had managed to wrestle gratitude into guilt-itude. “It could be cancer,” I kept thinking, when all that did was make me feel survivor’s guilt about something that wasn’t even in the rotation of awfulness going on at our house. It was like I was lobbing every bad thing that could happen at my brain to see if something would snap me out of anxiety. This. Does. Not. Work.

I had made gratitude into an unhealthy comparison. I had mangled it.

Granted, it’s hard to find gratitude in looming uncertainty. But, that’s the whole point. Like my recovery gratitude, which still rings straight and true, it was hard-earned. It meant something that way.

A friend told me about her mother-in-law, who likes to lob gratitude attacks. If my friend would comment on how it had been tough to get over her knee surgery, her mother-in-law would respond like this:

Some people don’t even have legs! They don't have knees. You should be grateful!”

I had been channeling my inner mother-in-law, I guess. And, I had attached all these expectations to it. It had gotten all tangled. Like, if I make my gratitude list every morning, shouldn't I be able to bound away, suddenly 25.7 percent happier? Guaranteed?

It’s a big, mysterious thing, gratitude. It's not a formula; it's faith. It’s acceptance and a little bit of prayer, and oh my goodness, maybe that’s why I’ve been having such a hard time with it lately.

So, it’s early December. We went to the Christmas tree farm yesterday, and now our house smells of pine. The tree is not Pinterest-worthy. It’s decorated with many handmade ornaments from my sons’ early days: small handprint Santas, wobbly beaded candy canes, and styrofoam snowballs. Each ornament is precious and just a tiny bit ugly. They are priceless.

And they remind me of who I was back then, when I had given up drinking when they were so very small, and of who I am now. That kind of gratitude works. I focus on that and promise to look for the good and stop trying to thwack myself over the head with thankfulness. Progress, not perfection.

Oh, I'm grateful for you, dear reader. I am always very grateful for you.

References

*Can they just come up with a better phrase than “let go”? He’s not a fish. He’s not Elsa. He’s not even the 70s poster of the horse running in the field about loving something and letting it free.

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