Going Deeper than Gratitude: How to Stop Shoulding Yourself

I have been at this spirituality and personal growth thing for a long time. I have been blessed to study with a lot of wise and wonderful teachers in ancient and beautiful traditions. I have received a lot of profound, complicated, and simple teachings. And I have explored my heart and mind in meditation for months and days at a time on retreat.

One topic that has been sticky for me has been gratitude.

On “Shoulding” Ourselves

What I have realized about myself is that I have been able to use almost any spiritual teaching or practice as yet another way to shame or try to perfect myself, and try to get to a feeling that I’m enough. I find a teaching that is beautiful, such as gratitude, and then my pattern has been to add a should to that. I should be grateful. I should be peaceful, I should meditate…you get my drift.

I know I am not alone in this. We love to should on ourselves, all the time, in this culture, and it leads right into shame and perfectionism and the relentless project of the self. And so beautiful teachings, such as gratitude, meant to be a support for awakening and wellbeing, can often become yet another stick to beat ourselves with. At least that has been my experience, and that of many patients I work with.

I have seen a lot of emphasis on gratitude; a lot of gratitude journals, a lot of instagram posts about gratitude, gratitude practices… It is very en vogue. There is also a lot of wonderful research on how beneficial gratitude practice can be for the mind and emotions. But if we do not address the patterns in our minds and society as we do any of these practices, they can sometimes be used to spiritually bypass our real work, and we end up “shoulding” ourselves away from our authentic experience in the name of gratitude.

I wish gratitude practice worked for me. I can see the beauty in it. What a profound reminder it is to open up and enjoy, savor and relish this amazing cornucopia of experience we get to dance in here on Earth. When done in a genuine, spontaneous, open hearted way, gratitude practice is so beautiful.

So why hasn’t it felt like a helpful practice for me? Because I was thinking I should be grateful. And under that was shame that I was having a hard time being grateful, or that things felt hard. Not because there weren’t whispers and splashes of beauty and kindness around me that I could see and enjoy. What was really happening was that underneath my attempt to be grateful was a lot of unacknowledged pain, grief and confusion that I was trying to override.
Because of the way I was trained in spirituality, any time a challenge came up for me, my mind wanted to jump immediately to:

    • How I have it so much better than many people (which I do), and so I should just be grateful.
    • My life could be so much worse (which it could), so I should be grateful.
    • At least I am receiving some love or support (which I do), so I should be grateful.

    But underneath, there was an unacknowledged part of me that really just wanted to be seen, validated and heard about what was feeling hard, what needed some love and empathy, and what my real blockages to happiness were. I had suppressed my true feelings, experience and needs, because I thought I should be grateful instead.

    Making Genuine Space for a New Practice

    Before I could open up into genuine gratitude – that kind of gratitude that lifts like a song from the heart, the spontaneous splashing out of delight and wellness that the spirit loves to do – I had to also make room for the part that needed to say that this was hard, this being a human thing. That there was a lot of pain and managing and tracking that I had done from my first breath onward in this life in order to survive. My amygdala had gotten pretty overactive with it all. And that there were a lot of times when I actually was experiencing really difficult things that I didn’t know how to handle.

    Once the pain is acknowledged, honored and heard, then I find it is much more likely to be able to find my way to gratitude. Genuine gratitude. There is a gift in everything. Perhaps your struggles lead to you having a much wider and more compassionate heart. Perhaps your challenges caused you to need some support from others, and blessedly those others appeared, offering understanding and witnessing. Perhaps your pain took you on a deep journey where you finally saw the resilience and power of your own heart, broken open by life. These things happen when we are willing to turn toward our pain, and they are powerful experiences worthy of gratitude. But if we suppress them, in the paradigm that we “should just be grateful for what is here”, we can miss out on meeting our inner self in a much more whole and true way.

    Navigating Negativity Bias

    The negativity bias of the human brain is real. I see it in my patients, and in myself, regularly. Our active amygdala and hippocampus have tried to protect us since the cave days, tracking what in our lives leads to danger and pain. And then we start to see those dangers everywhere. Our brains are designed to build implicit memory and the constructs that we experience ourselves through, based on negative experiences1.

    Gratitude practice is a wonderful antidote to that. But only if it is done well. Otherwise we just dig another hole for us to sit in, which is that we should be grateful but we are not.

    Another way gratitude practice is used that can be detrimental is that it can contribute to the “good vibes only” bypass that many modern people try to use. “I won’t think about what is hard, difficult, or painful. I will just focus on gratitude and being happy. Good vibes only! Don’t bring me down!” And some people seem to manage this quite well for a long time. But what happens when things inevitably do get hard, or when we run out of enough resources, time, health, or relationships to keep the good vibes party going? How do they authentically relate to our experience when this happens? How well can they show up for others in times of difficulty if they’re focused on staying in their good vibes place?

    Going Deeper than Gratitude, through Enjoyment Practice

    Instead of gratitude practice, I now focus on enjoyment practice. What am I enjoying right now? I ask myself this regularly, especially when things feel hard. Because there might be a lot that is happening that I can’t find the gratitude for yet, but I can always find something that I can enjoy. My whole body might be in pain, but I can enjoy the kindness of a friend. I might be feeling deep heartbreak about the loss of a loved one, but I can appreciate the softness of the pillow behind me, holding up my tender heart. I might have a busy mind full of worries about the future, but I can let the enjoyment of the way the light comes through the window wake me up into the present moment.

    Once I have softened and rounded out my reality by making room for not only what is hard but also what I am enjoying, I then take some time to extend self-compassion for what is feeling difficult or painful. The enjoyment practice opens up my awareness, and softens the inherent negativity bias in the brain. This makes more room for the truth that there is a lot more possibility and wellness available than I originally thought. I open up through enjoyment, and then I can make room for whatever roots of pain might need some loving attention underneath the surface of my experience. I take a moment to just be with my experience, which always feels a lot more bearable after I have connected to enjoyment. From this place, I can often find genuine gratitude. It might even just be gratitude that I remembered to be kind to myself and relate directly to my experience, which brings a much more powerful kind of healing.

    We can always find something to enjoy, and through that we can find our way back to self connection and our present moment experience. And in that moment we can find our way to genuine gratitude, no shoulds involved.

    1. Carretié, L., Mercado, F., Tapia, M., & Hinojosa, J. A. (2001). Emotion, attention, and the ‘negativity bias,’ studied
    through event-related potentials. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 41(1), 75–85.

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