Around Thanksgiving we are inundated with evidence that it is beneficial to be grateful. Now, with emerging brain science, we can even see how appreciation changes our wiring. I don’t know if we need science to tell us this; Most of us will intuitively agree that, chances are, it is good to be grateful. Most of us sincerely would like to be grateful. So why does it sometimes feel so hard? And why, when we try to feel grateful and come up blank, does it feel even worse? Bear with me as I try to make this as simple as possible. Ideally, we can all tolerate feeling the good and the not so good in life. But in order to have this tolerance as adults, we needed support and modeling in our childhoods. We needed people who let us know it was safe to feel bad things and good things. This isn’t easy, and many of our parents didn’t get this support when they were young, so the cards weren’t in our favor. So, if as kids we aren’t supported to have our bad feelings and know they were okay, we end up stuffing them. We may not know much about these bad feelings, but they have a lot of power over us. Sometimes we can become sort of flag bearers for these feelings, like, we need to hold on to them for dear life because no one else wanted them. If we let ourselves feel good things, then somehow we betray the bad. After all, we were the only ones who had to bear the bad feelings because no one else could. Flash over to the alternate scenario where we were supported in having our bad feelings; In this case, we know that feeling good will not mean that our bad feelings will be ignored. So, when we were forced to exist in the land that we had to pretend to feel good, feelings become an either/or scenario. We feel good OR bad. When we were more supported, feelings exist in a both/and scenario. We can feel good AND bad. So, next time you are hard on yourself for not feeling grateful or thankful or appreciative enough, conjure up that little kid in you that was probably forced to pretend you felt okay when you didn’t. Give that little kid a hug and tell him or her that it’s okay to feel bad. Sit with that moment and see what happens. Eventually, you will find that you can feel good AND bad.
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AuthorI am a psychotherapist in private practice in Manhattan and Brooklyn Archives
December 2015
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