Having a regular ‘gratitude practice’ may be one of the more cliche personal growth/spirituality practices out there - but there’s a reason it’s one of those things that have stuck around through time.
Learning to shift our perspective out of one of constantly feeling like life is going wrong, like we are wrong and bad, like everything is falling apart and like we don’t have enough into one where we can appreciate all that truly IS going well for us really DOES help us feel better.
Practicing gratitude can be a great way of shifting ourselves out of fear and anxiety and into a more balanced, pragmatic and true vision of our lives and the world around us.
Practicing gratitude can be a simple way of giving ourselves a feeling of empowerment.
But there’s a dark side to this practice that I think ALSO needs to be looked at - and that’s the reality that sometimes practicing gratitude can become a practice that actually just makes us feel worse.
It can be something we use to shame ourselves, blame ourselves and guilt ourselves into feeling like if we ARE unhappy, unsatisfied, feeling upset with our past, seemingly ‘stuck’ in anger or resentment or having trouble processing the trauma of what we’ve been through, that this is a sign that we just aren’t being ‘grateful enough’.
Many of us can feel like focusing on the good means that we should then be totally FINE and if we are still in pain, suffering, processing the past or otherwise upset that this just means we suck and aren’t doing good enough.
THIS is what I want to explore today.
How we can use gratitude to ACTUALLY help ourselves feel BETTER without falling into cycles of using gratitude to SHAME ourselves for the pain we still have or the emotions we’re still processing.
<3
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