F*ck Gratitude: Why You Should Stop Trying So Hard to Be Grateful

When you’re going through a hard time, have you ever heard someone tell you that you should be more grateful? Have you ever said this to yourself? 

Did it help? 

It doesn’t help me. It just makes me feel guilty. Of course, I have a ton of things to feel grateful for. We all do. 

But we also have things to feel bad about, and that’s valid. Our bad things need space to be felt, too. When someone tells us we should feel grateful when we are feeling bad, it’s another way of saying, “Stop feeling bad.” Underneath that, it also says this: 

I don’t want you to feel bad because I care about you but also because it makes me feel bad and I don’t know how to manage feeling bad so let’s just all be happy and focus on good vibes only because I CANNOT MANAGE ANY OTHER KIND OF VIBE OKAY

It’s not our fault that we are so bad about being with each other in our difficult emotions. Of course, we don’t want to see the people we care about suffering, and gratitude feels like a quick way of getting away from suffering. Also, most of us don’t have a great capacity to feel our uncomfortable emotions because our society does not want us to. If we all deeply and genuinely felt our sadness, anger, and disappointment about the world, we might want to change things. We might connect with each other more deeply. We might feel more richness and sweetness from simpler things. And then we’d need to buy less stuff. Our culture revolves around stuff. How are we supposed to live if everyone is out here feeling their feelings instead of buying stuff?

As we all know, however, telling someone to “just feel grateful” simply doesn’t work. That’s because gratitude is an emotion, and you can’t just make yourself feel an emotion. Psychiatrist and holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl has written, 

It is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to “be happy.” But happiness cannot be pursued, it must ensue. One must have a reason to “be happy.” […]If you want anyone to laugh you have to provide him with a reason, e.g., you have to tell him a joke. In no way is it possible to evoke real laughter by urging him, or having him urge himself, to laugh.  (from Man’s Search for Meaning).

HA HA HA WE ARE LAUGHING HA HA

When we tell ourselves or others to “feel grateful,” it’s like urging a laugh without a joke. Yes, there are ways we can cultivate our gratitude, such as keeping a gratitude journal or simply listing the things we feel thankful for. This is potentially a good practice, especially because the human mind runs on habits, and if we get into a habit of telling ourselves a gratitude joke, as it were, we might laugh more often as a result. But the gratitude practices should never exist in order to suppress or replace our other, necessary emotions, such as anger, sadness, and disappointment. All these emotions can sit together in the same room, certainly, but anytime we try to replace one with another, the first emotion only gets annoyed for having been ignored—and that only makes it stronger. 

Gratitude as a practice can also be used to minimize the real pain someone is going through. In my practice with my clients, I have heard, over and over again, people trying to deny or avoid feelings of real pain over something they are trying to process by telling me that they should feel more grateful. They are not pausing to feel grateful—the emotion is not easily accessible at that moment. Rather, they are experiencing guilt for not feeling grateful instead of processing the real emotions related to what they went through.  Guilt is what psychotherapist Hilary Jacobs Hendel has referred to as an inhibitory emotion: it’s there to help protect you from the core emotion sitting just beneath it.

Trauma survivors, in particular, seem to have a habit of deflecting their own experiences by remembering that other people have it worse. There certainly are plenty of traumatic experiences to go around in this world, but it’s not a competition. And one person’s pain doesn’t do anything to lessen another’s. Whatever we are going through is real and it matters. Gratitude can come when it’s ready but trying to force ourselves to feel it won’t eliminate any of our other feelings anyway. 

So instead of trying to force gratitude, let’s be honest with ourselves about how we really feel. I know it’s not easy, but we don’t have to do it alone. Here is my gentle reminder that it is okay, right now, to feel whatever it is you are feeling. And f*ck gratitude. 

Julie is grateful when she darn well feels like it. Want to learn more about her one-on-one program for processing emotions, making decisions, and generally feeling supported in your life journey? Learn more here: https://www.juliepeters.ca/pathfinding-sessions