Validating Our Pain — A Better Road to Gratitude

For those who are disillusioned with the gratitude movement

I don't know about you guys but I can’t quite handle another article, meditation, or Instagram post telling me to cultivate gratitude nor can I handle another text or phone call where someone is asking me what I am grateful for or what is good in my life, as a way of ‘uplifting me’. There has got to be another road to gratitude that doesn’t result in me wanting to bang my head against a wall in protest.

How the gratitude movement affects me and maybe you too

Instead of all this gratitude stuff making me feel better or leading me to want to develop my practice more, I am instead left feeling frustrated, annoyed, confused, and ashamed.

• Frustrated, because I feel that this gratitude stuff is mostly targeted at people who are struggling, which is precisely when one struggles most to feel grateful.
• Annoyed, because I am sick of these gratitude messages and all the uber positivity that seems to surround me, especially when I am struggling.
• Confused because, despite the scientific research that has so clearly demonstrated the benefits of intentional gratitude on mental wellbeing, I still can’t help but feel opposed to it.
• Ashamed, because if I am not doing this gratitude thing like everyone else, then is there something wrong with me, am I just ‘giving in’ to my struggles? Am I just a negative person?

The problem with gratitude as we know it

I have reflected on all this for many years, trying to get to grips with what bothers me so much about this whole seemingly wonderful gratitude movement.

I reflected on it a lot in my counseling work (I am a Counsellor/Therapist) and in my relationships as well as in my years of living with chronic ill health and myriad other struggles and significant losses.

I think I have finally got to the crux of my issue with it and what I have come to is this:

I think that although there is undeniable truth in the fact that gratitude is good for us, it has been removed and isolated away from what is, in my opinion, its most natural and effortless context of expression, which is that it arises almost immediately after we are validated in our struggles.

Validation of our struggles — a better road to gratitude

You see, counter to all the messaging out there about forcing yourself to stop dwelling on the negative and instead focus on the good, the opposite just ends up happening, at least most of the time, which is that one just ends up focusing more on what’s hard and struggles to see anything good at all, all the while feeling guilty for not being more ‘grateful’ or ‘positive’.

As the wise Swiss psychiatrist said:

“What you resist, persists” — Carl Jung

Instead of resisting and trying to ‘overcome’ the difficulties in our lives, we actually need to do something different, we need to acknowledge and validate how we feel about them, we need to feel the pain of our struggles, and then validate that pain, and we need to do this for each other too.

Connecting, listening to, and validating each other’s pain, are some of the most powerful things we can do for each other, and the astounding and truly wondrous net result is that without even trying or having to shove some “what are you grateful for?” nonsense down each other's throats or our own, by just acknowledging what’s hard we naturally bridge ourselves and each other to what is good, to gratitude, to the goodness that is still there, even if it is just the sunset in front of you.

I have learnt, observed, and experienced that gratitude more naturally and almost instinctively flows from the awareness, acknowledgment, validation, and acceptance of one’s pain and difficult reality, and from that place stems forth the almost effortless ability to be grateful for what one still has, grateful for what has not been stolen by misfortune, for what is still good and still standing amongst all the rubble.

I hope that this piece may bring some illumination to any fellow humans out there who have been disillusioned about gratitude as I have been.

Here’s to validating each other and ourselves and walking the better road to the wonders of gratitude.

Thanks so much for reading.

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