Gratitude Is Dangerous

Gratitude is a powerful spiritual practice. But, gratitude can also be used to avoid or distract from deeper truths. Renee talks about spiritual bi-pass and her many experiences with being grateful and ungrateful and how there is value in both.

Transcript

Welcome to Spiritual Psychology.

My name is Renée LaValley McKenna and I bring my 30-plus years as a recovering addict and ex-crazy person,

Turned therapist and shamanic healer,

To bring you snackable teachings on spirituality,

Psychology,

And all things personal growth.

And today I want to talk about the value of being ungrateful.

There's a pretty steady stream of teachings about gratitude.

I believe Oprah Winfrey writes a gratitude list every day,

And that's a practice that has been suggested to me many times.

I've had a pretty varied relationship with the idea of gratitude,

Depending on the time and circumstances of my life.

I remember when I was 33.

I was 10 years clean and sober and had some expectations about where I should be at that age and stage in my life.

And I was not meeting those expectations.

In fact,

I remember driving to a meditation center with pretty much everything I owned in the back of my crappy little Ford Escort.

My boyfriend had broken up with me,

So I had nowhere to live.

I had recently filed bankruptcy.

I had gotten divorced a few years before and I was cleaning houses for a living,

Which I actually really loved.

But yet another failed relationship had me pretty grumpy and feeling bad about myself.

And I spoke to this old man after the group,

Listed my tale of woe,

And he looked me dead in the face and said,

Maybe you'd better get grateful,

To which I wanted to reply,

Fuck you.

But I actually went home and did what he said.

And the first story I remember hearing about the principle of gratitude was a woman trying to get sober.

She was living in a homeless shelter and the shelter had mice that scurried around and kept her awake at night.

And she complained to her spiritual advisor about it.

And the advisor said,

You'd better be grateful those mice aren't rats.

So gratitude is certainly a matter of perspective.

And I recalled this really transformative meditation that was led by the monks and nuns of Plum Village when I was on retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh,

The Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk,

His followers called Thay.

And they had us go through every part of our body and smile at it and say thank you,

To say thank you to our eyes and smile at them,

For they allow us to see,

To become aware of our hands and fingers,

And thank them for all that they allow us to do,

To become aware of our heart always pumping,

Endlessly working to keep us alive and our cells and bodies healthy for our whole life,

To say thank you for our legs,

To smile at them,

The hard work they do to support our bodies and move us through the world.

It was a very long meditation and it really changed the way I related to my body.

I had struggled with eating disorders and weight since adolescence,

And often felt like I was at war with my physical form.

And that battle was mostly around my own judgment of how I thought my body looked.

And that experience,

Which was a deep practice of body-centered gratitude,

Made me realize how ungrateful I had been.

That I had taken my sight and my hearing,

My sense of taste,

And my generally pretty healthy physical self for granted.

In fact,

That short bout of homelessness and couch surfing happened in that same year that I did that Thich Nhat Hanh retreat.

It was an amazing three-week experience in Vermont,

And Thay wrote a book about it called The Path of Emancipation,

And that depressing string of failures and my lame attempts at gratitude brought me to a powerful conclusion.

That I had no idea what the fuck I was doing.

That everything I was trying was not working out very well.

And maybe I should give up.

Not give up living,

But give up living in pursuit of these things that just didn't seem to be working out.

Trying to find the right job and get the right guy.

I was still trying to fix the outside of my life,

Hoping the inside would feel better.

And it wasn't working out very well.

So I decided to take the hint and follow the lead of the monks and nuns of Plum Village.

And I sold pretty much everything I owned,

And I moved into a little bedroom of an old friend's mother's house with a terrible red shag rug.

And I meditated a lot,

And I did a lot of yoga.

And I started to ask God or the universe what it wanted from me,

Because my will and my plans were obviously not working.

I continued to clean houses,

But I did give up men for a while.

And I began to lean into the work of Stephen Covey and the Seven Habits of Highly Successful People,

A set of really powerful and transformative spiritual teachings couched in a book about business success.

And one of the habits,

I don't remember which one,

Was to create a personal mission statement.

And a mission statement is like a compass or a guiding principle that's used in businesses and organizations and can also be used in our own life.

And I did a lot of journaling,

Praying,

And meditating,

And my mission evolved as I want to use all of my gifts and talents for the benefit of the most people and myself.

And that remains my mission to this day.

And it continues to unfold and develop and evolve.

And at the end of that period of letting go,

Intentional celibacy,

I don't think you could really say intentional poverty,

But certainly separating myself from material things and getting in touch with the deeper felt experience,

Meaning,

And perhaps purpose of my life.

I had an opportunity to come to California.

And three months later,

I moved to San Francisco,

Completely changed the course,

The tone,

And the fabric of my life.

In fact,

That experience really left the whole idea of success and failure behind.

From that point on,

I really consider anything that happens as an experience.

The experience may be pleasant or unpleasant,

Easy or challenging,

But the success failure thing just didn't work for me anymore.

And I do believe the purpose of our human life here is to grow and evolve.

And I have grown and evolved often much more from the difficulties and failures in my life than I have from the easy successes.

Now,

I'm moving into another level of success,

Which in itself is a challenge,

But that's another conversation.

So to return to the value of being ungrateful,

And just like I had to lose almost everything in order to find a new and more authentic life,

It has been often important for me to be deeply honest about the suffering that I'm in,

For that suffering to heal and transform so that I can come to a place of genuine gratitude.

I think of the old adage that the good is the enemy of the best.

And gratitude,

As I see it tossed around,

Is often superficial,

And it can be used as a tool to keep us stuck or quiet.

One of the powerful things I saw come out of the Black Lives Movement was this tremendous white guilt.

And what does it mean to have gratitude for privilege when others do not have it?

An even different perspective on being ungrateful in a way that deepens and transforms us.

So I grew up in a very simple,

Kind of traditional,

American middle-class home.

My father worked,

My mother stayed home,

They didn't drink or swear or go to church,

My mother smoked Lucky Strike cigarettes,

But I never went hungry,

I always had clothes,

And although they kept the heat much lower than I would have liked,

I was never really cold.

I went to decent public schools in a suburb south of Boston,

And it all looked good on the outside,

Right?

So what did I have to complain about?

What was my problem?

But as far back as I could remember,

I was plagued with fear,

Self-doubt,

And self-hatred.

And it took me years to break through that candy-coated shell of what I should be grateful for,

To connect with the emptiness,

The lack of love and loyalty and connection that ultimately drove me into enough therapy that I became a therapist.

And so for me,

Superficial gratitude has often been a way to distract from the suffering of my own soul.

I've been a prisoner of a privileged life more than once,

And a cage in a castle is still a cage.

And it has been the deeper yearnings of my soul's truth and often unmet needs that have driven me to powerful,

Positive and constructive change.

And from that perspective,

Gratitude can be dangerous.

Now again,

An attitude of gratitude certainly has its place and has brightened my day more than once.

But trying to be grateful for what is when it actually makes me unhappy has reinforced suffering and hopelessness many times in my life.

I can't tell you how many times I have sat with a client who hates their job but says,

But I should be grateful I'm working.

People in broken and dysfunctional relationships can use gratitude for what they have to avoid the fear of the unknown and asking for what they really need and want.

So if you've never written a gratitude list,

I definitely encourage you to try it.

Gratitude is an excellent addition to any spiritual practice and certainly can have a magnetic effect of pulling even more of what we're grateful for into our lives.

But if you lean into being grateful and you're actually not,

Then gratitude can be a cheap slipcover on a flea-infested couch.

When we use gratitude as a distraction,

A diversion or a delusion,

Then it keeps us from expressing and feeling what may be our soul's deeper truth.

And gratitude may be an attitude,

But the truth will set us free.

Thank you so much for listening.

Blessings on your path until we meet again.

This is Renee LaValley McKenna for Spiritual Psychology.

Reviews

Thank you for this perspective and your story. Years ago I learned that gratitude and “feeling good” are not necessarily the same. I was a few years into my journey of sobriety and was debating getting out of a toxic marriage. I was full of doubt, fear, and shame and didn’t know what to do. I didn’t even want to talk to anyone for fear that the tears would start. As I was driving to a 12-Step meeting one evening, I glanced at the setting sun, and a question popped into my head: “You’re feeling misesable right now, but are you grateful?” The answer was a stunning yes. A couple of years before, I’d thrown my life away, and it was given back to me. But I’d been given ALL of life, the good and the bad. Even though my current state was emotionally difficult, my life and that day were still a gift. My gratitude was not dependent on how I felt. Eventually I left the marriage. I consider myself fairly (not always) grateful, but when the sadness and fear return, I have space at the table for them also, to be present with them. There is a certain freedom in not “should-ing” all over myself with the demand to feel happy all the time. It’s just not realistic. Thanks again.

I’ve used gratitude lists on and off again over the past thirty-forty years to boost my optimism. I felt enormous freedom when you said the quiet part out loud. The analogy about the cheap couch cover was a laugh out loud bonus. 🙏❤️

Thank you. I have often struggled with this, I am grateful for all my blessings but i am careful about being grateful for something that is actually holding me in a place that i don't want to be. When i consider this, i feel childhood frustration rise up. There was alot wrong with my childhood yet i was constantly told to be grateful. The analogy of the flea ridden couch with a new slip cover is perfect 🥰

Wonderful You expressed what I have felt for a long time,but as you point out, the popular culture around gratitude creates a pressure to conform. How refreshing to probe this with such honesty. Blessings and many thanks! 🙏

Love this. Humorous and insightful. Something to think about.