Positive psychologists, coaches, and therapists alike encourage gratitude journaling. I use it in my own practice as a coach and personally as a simply flawed human being. But there is a dark side to gratitude journaling. Like everything, in balance it is helpful, and overly used or used in a way to escape uncomfortable feelings, it can be counterproductive.
Everyone wants to feel good and live their best lives. We don’t all have the skills, but deep down if our survival needs are met, that becomes our focus. Sometimes it is dressed as success and other times it is about family priorities or getting an education — all of the things that are associated with happiness.
The majority of us struggle to remember to write down or verbalize our gratitude, but, for the handful who do it religiously, it raises many questions for me as a coach. When is gratitude journaling harmful? If you’re using it to suppress or avoid emotions you are less comfortable with, or attempting to attain utopia.
Is your gratitude an authentic feeling or a forced one because it is now socially acceptable to express gratitude?
I am an advocate for gratitude journaling and gratitude in general, but never as a replacement for processing emotions that are deemed as less acceptable or “positive.”
Do you feel better because you’re focusing on better? Or is it because you’re avoiding the uncomfortable feelings that actually need processing and appreciation?
Is your gratitude journaling a form of denial, a form of minimizing your experiences and feelings? Or is it a way to build a stronger sense of self?
Is your gratitude an authentic feeling or a forced one because it is now socially acceptable to express gratitude?
I have found that gratitude journaling has had the biggest impact for me when I am in a dark corner of my life seeking hope and purpose. It has also been like a drug to a drug addict continuing in denial; an escape; a need for everything to be “good,” or for me to have a high because my own baseline was low at the time and I didn’t know how to tolerate it.
Positivity can be as destructive to authenticity as can depression, they are both extremes that pull us from our own balance, our own grey areas, our process of being in life fully. They both have a way of coloring life in a certain light, a light we can tolerate. Rarely have I seen this center people into an empowered place.
Be grateful for what you do have, seek comfort in knowing that life isn’t always the way we want — for any of us. And, if gratitude isn’t centering you and assisting you in processing all emotion, all experiences, then it may not be as helpful as you perceive and may be adding to a cycle of being stuck with false rules and fake positivity.
When my clients can’t summon a genuine feeling for gratitude in their lives and the activity of gratitude journaling feels superficial and dismissive of their real experiences, I invite them to appreciate the crap for what it is — crap. “Right now is crap. Can we be grateful for the reality established between us?”
When gratitude is forced or bypassing pain, then it can often compound feelings of failure and hopelessness.
It is a practice of bringing gratitude to anything that genuinely summons hope from within. Sometimes this consists of being grateful that others are struggling with them, being grateful that I am not going to rush them through to a feeling that is more socially embraced. Sometimes, when they can’t be grateful, I summon it from within me and ask myself what about this moment honestly rings true and allows me to be grateful for the exchange.
Gratitude triggers the happy hormones in the brain and fills us with feel-good vibes. When gratitude is forced or is bypassing pain it can compound feelings of failure and hopelessness.
The dark side of gratitude is that it sounds great and can be easily misused. Mind yourself, mind your heart, mind your emotions, they hold the key to the balance we all seek.
Photo by Bernard Hermant
New Live Course Grateful Hope: Passion for the Possible
Grateful hope is a radical stance that empowers us to move beyond the limitations of our individual dreams and opens us to what is possible in the absence of despair. It is not the way out of life’s uncertainty. It is the way through.
Join us this April for our brand new course!
Thank you for expressing this so well and having the courage to share it! This confirms things I’ve observed in myself and others, and adds new insights and questions that I’m really appreciating.
I have definitely used journaling as a way to minimize/bypass uncomfortable or intolerable feelings and experiences. In fact, I kept myself many years in a very unhealthy marriage that way, understanding only in hindsight how I had led myself astray, how those very feelings were trying to alert me to something that needed to be addressed.
I love your very useful question “Is your gratitude journaling a form of denial, a form of minimizing your experiences and feelings? Or is it a way to build a stronger sense of self?”
Such an important question, and so tough to answer. Since I am conditioned to minimize my experiences and feelings, it’s mostly invisible to me when I’m doing it. Though my learning curve is quicker these days, it still seems like I discover the answer only in hindsight.
Am learning to pay attention to the clues my body gives me: tension/relaxation, indigestion, collapsed or upright posture, etc is the best way I’ve found so far to bring those hidden truths to my awareness. And I’m curious about other ways to sense them. I guess we each learn the unique language of our own body, mind and spirit and to catch the clues reflected to us in our environment.
PS I’m still pondering: “When gratitude is forced or is bypassing pain it can compound feelings of failure and hopelessness.” Wow. I think this actually happened in a session yesterday, but would not have made the connection unless I read this today.
Dear Sile, thank-you for sharing this wonderful essay! As Walter Starcke’s book, ” It’s All God” said ,’It’s all God, the flowers and the fertilizer’. When we accept we are infinite beings and capable of experiencing every emotion and not fight against what is at the moment, it is so helpful.
Blessings and peace to all❤?
Good to see this important truth brought to light. I was in a very bad marriage and found doing a gratitude list in my head morning and night a way to survive but it was mostly my way of not dealing with what I needed to deal with.
Me too. Isn’t it wonderful how patient Life is, to keep giving clues for as long as it takes…?
Adelia, I have thought of how patient Life is, too! I am 65 years old and for much of my life was not grateful and took things for granted. Yet, Life continued to shower me abundantly with blessings! I am so grateful I have come to a point where I am able to be grateful!
Blessings to all as we journey through life together, Sheila?
I didn’t start out to keep a gratitude journal when I began writing “Morning Pages” two years ago but, that’s what it has turned into.
What I learned, as I struggled with the ugliness of police shootings, the turmoil of daily politics, tragedies, etc., was that I could use my daily writing to express my deepest thoughts, fears, frustrations and shame in a way that I couldn’t in conversation. One day, I found myself writing “Dear God”, reminiscent of Celie in the “Color Purple”. It was and is very appropriate.
Working through “my stuff” in these writings, I find that I am continually reminded of all the things that I have to be thankful for. I now try to practice giving thanks for the good and the bad. Amazingly, the latter is helping me to see more clearly the work that I still need to do.
It is a tremendous blessing to me.