A few weeks ago I posed the question: How can gratitude go wrong? Today I’ll suggest some answers of my own. I’ll also bring in some observations by author and psychotherapist Pete Walker.
Shaming (Wrongfully)
Accusations of ingratitude, or assertions that one ought to be grateful (and is not), can be used to shame someone abusively or inappropriately. Statements such as “You should (just) be grateful,” or “You should (just) be grateful for ___ ,” expressed with a certain tone of voice, posture, facial expression etc., have played an unfortunate role in many people’s lives. The idea of gratitude has far too often been abused in this way in order to shame people. Often the person being shamed is a child, but it happens to adults too.
More Than Just Shaming
Moreover it is not simply about shaming someone. The real goal or motivation, I think, is usually something beyond causing a feeling of shame, or causing a belief in one’s shamefulness. The shaming, that is, is done in service of something else. Something else such as:
1. To invalidate a natural feeling;
2. To invalidate a legitimate objection or concern;
3. To defend inappropriate behavior through both changing the subject and attacking the victim;
4. Simply to denigrate.
All of that is the idea of gratitude being used as a weapon to needlessly and wrongfully hurt and harm.
Further Damages
An additional unfortunate effect of this misuse of the notion of gratitude is that it damages the concept of gratitude. It damages our relationship with gratitude. Damages our understanding of gratitude and our ability to experience it.
Wider Manifestations
Sometimes, more generalized messaging about gratitude can be similar. The message, for example, that if you have something that is good (or is viewed as good), then you should “just” feel grateful for that good thing, and you should not have any concerns, objections, complaints, or “negative” feelings about anything else whatsoever.
Again, this does additional damage to our ability to understand, practice, and feel gratitude in ways that are authentic and healthy.
Gratitude Shaming and Complex PTSD
Pete Walker discusses gratitude and gratitude cultivating practices in connection with Complex PTSD, recovering from Complex PTSD, and living a fully-feeling life. (See my post Pete Walker’s Five Key Features of Complex PTSD. )
This is excellent because psychological, philosophical, and spiritual ideas and practices are often discussed without regard for the situation and experience of people with C-PTSD, other disorders, or neuro-divergences. And advice for people without, for example, C-PTSD, may be ineffective or even counter-productive for people with C-PTSD.
Besides that, however, I suspect what Walker says may in some way be relevant for a great many people who do not have any form of PTSD.
Walker says a great deal more about gratitude than what I’ll be sharing here, by the way; these are just two of the many important points he makes.
Abusive Shaming and Reacting Against the Idea of Gratitude
The first point is that many people with Complex PTSD — and perhaps many other people as well, I might add — “have been abused by shaming advice to “just be grateful for what you have.”” Or by similar forms of gratitude-connected toxic shaming. Therefore many people with Complex PTSD experience powerful negative reactions toward the idea of gratitude, and may be inclined to “reject the concept of gratitude and throw the baby out with the scorn-ridden bathwater.” Obviously this is an unfortunate situation to find oneself in. Gratitude itself is good, and is even — potentially — healing. That is, if one can access it appropriately.
Psychotherapy, Gratitude, Denial, and Spiritual Bypassing
The second point is that many psychologists (which is to say, persons functioning as psychotherapists), very unfortunately, habitually use “the concept of gratitude” “damagingly” “to support the psychological defense of denial.” Another way to put this, is to say that some psychotherapists will harm their clients by promoting gratitude in the service of spiritual bypassing (an important concept I should probably create a post about). Again, this is to say that some psychologists, counselors, social workers, will use the idea of gratitude and/or gratitude “exercises” in a way that leads clients to avoid encountering, confronting, working through unresolved traumatic pain or perhaps even general unpleasant experience and difficult truths. This of course helps no one, ultimately.
Gratitude is good, of course, and knowing these things about how it can be misused or misunderstood can help us benefit from it, while avoiding damaging ourselves and others through misuse of it.
Quotations are from Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, by Pete Walker.
Again, see my post Pete Walker’s Five Key Features of Complex PTSD.
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