Reframing Gratitude
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The other day, I was checking in on C, a friend who was in his fifth week recovering from COVID. I couldn’t begin to imagine how hard it’s been for him, but when C picked up the call, he responded with the same lightness he always would. “Damn, it’s been a while since I’ve heard that deep of a voice”, he joked. I asked how he was feeling, expecting him to describe how hard it’s been. But he instead talked about how grateful he was, for his friends, doctors, and the COVID subreddits who’ve helped him over the past month. When I praised him for being so positive, he replied:
“It’s all I can be right now.”
Lately, I’ve been considering my relationship with gratitude. Growing up, I valued prudence over many things. Partly due to nature, but definitely due to nurture, I convinced myself there wasn’t an insult or argument important enough to get angry over. I used reason like a surge protector for the unfavorable emotions in life and I was good at it. As I got older, this level-headedness applied to my view of gratitude: no failure was worth being ungrateful over.
Though this rule has saved me in countless embarrassing or extreme situations, it was also repressive. While quarantining alone over the summer, I tried to cope by being grateful whenever I could. I wrote about people I missed like M for how open I could always be around her, and more trivial things like how the workers at the El Farolito taqueria down the street would leave extra salsa for me. But the habit eventually wore on my stoic endurance. On days when the gratitude felt forced, self-doubt led to the very cynicism that I had been trying to avoid in the first place.
Yet, there’s no shortage of studies selling the refrain: grateful people are more likely to be generous, loyal, and less materialistic; grateful people are more likely to help others or even exercise more. It’s becoming popular to be or at least appear grateful. Counted “blessings” and other ambiguous thanks are just a few scrolls away online. But, this framing falls flat on my ears. When marketed like a psychological cure-all, gratitude feels more like a commodity than an emotion.
How did gratitude which is a function of the heart, get usurped by the mind?
Elizabeth Welles
Especially in times of grief, gratitude can be more than a self-help tool. Poet and author, Elizabeth Welles describes gratitude as, above all else, a social emotion. In this sense, thankfulness underpins our most meaningful relationships. It holds the space between ourselves and those who’ve extended a hand to us—a reminder of the tremendous good that exists in our friends, neighbors, and even enemies. It lets us deepen our faiths and belong to something beyond ourselves. Weaved into the fabric of our collective healing, gratitude is better when it’s not forced by reason.
I’m not dismissing the psychological benefits of gratitude. There is a lot of good in making a habit out of expressing and receiving thanks, and I plan on sticking to that. But, we should also know when and how to be less grateful. Unqualified positivity can be as harmful as unqualified negativity. It can cause guilt for feeling anything short of thankfulness and further invalidate our feelings. So, telegraph gratitude, anger, and sadness as they come. And when we do count our blessings, remember to have a place for every feeling and every feeling in its place.
