How To Escape The Gratitude Trap

Gratitude is the key

When it comes to making change in your life, your health, or the health of your business, the #1 item on every “Law of Attraction”-based, personal growth-oriented list is always gratitude.

Why? Because, the logic goes, when you are feeling grateful for something, you’re in a state of appreciation and happiness, which begets a greater state of happiness. The more you get accustomed to feeling good about what you have, the more you get to feel good about, and the more good you feel about what you have, and so on… it’s an ever-growing spiral.

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But what if gratitude brings you down?

I have to admit, I used to resist gratitude in a huge way. Not because I have anything against showing appreciation, but because whenever I’d do a practice involving gratitude, I ended up feeling small and unhappy, which is the opposite of what it was supposed to do for me.

Not cool, I thought. Not cool.

But, being the ever-curious guy that I am, I decided to probe a bit deeper into why I was feeling this way, wondering if I could find a way to an effortless, empowering gratitude practice, and away from the depressing version I’d been practicing. So, like I used to do with my healing clients, I watched myself while I expressed my gratitude to see what the problem was.

And right away, I realized that there wasn’t a problem. There were two.

One Problem Was Shame

Sometimes, situations in your life can link negative feelings to something otherwise positive, such as gratitude. When that happens, it can cause feelings of contraction even when, for most people, the same situation would cause feelings of expansion.

My habitual way of cultivating gratitude—and I’m guessing this is pretty common—was to think of something in my life that I was thankful for, and then, just like we’re taught when we’re kids, to thank someone for it.

But remember when you were a kid and you got a gift from someone? There you are, staring down at your brand new Lego castle, or shiny new stuffed animal, and you’re just thrilled. You’re thinking about all the fun you’ll have with your new toy, and your parents, mortified that you might grow up to be socially uncouth someday, jump on your back and say, “What do you say, huh?”

You look at them, steeped in shame, and whimper, “Thank you.”

What a bummer, huh? You’re just jazzed about what life just brought you, and you get shamed into muttering a ‘thanks’ when you aren’t really up for it. Now you feel like a loser for not saying it without being hounded. And so receiving a gift and feeling great about it has now been linked to feelings of shame. How wonderful.

That was my experience to a ‘T’. As soon as I felt gratitude, I felt shame along with it. I felt that I wasn’t good enough for what I’d received. Talk about shutting down the fun factory!

The Other was the Other

I also realized that in addition to the shame piece, my efforts at gratitude were at odds with my spiritual beliefs. Not as if I was saying, “We don’t do gratitude around here,” in the same way some folks don’t believe in vaccinations, reincarnation, or going outside without your head covered.

I’m talking about an incongruity in the sense of not-being-aligned-with-my-experience-of-Oneness. My experience of the Divine has taught me to believe that the Oneness permeates everything in (and out) of creation, and therefore, in the deepest sense of things, there is no “outside”, and no “other”. And, therefore, the idea of thanking something “outside of me” for bringing me something, as if I couldn’t have obtained it otherwise, was really, really stifling.

This ego-centric, disembodied concept of God was really putting a kink in my chances to experience true gratitude, because every time I tried to feel good about something in my life, I reverted to feeling tiny, insignificant, and separate from All That Is. Bummer, huh?

So, in short, the practice of gratitude became a shame-inducing exercise in smallness. Rrrrrrrt! Hit the brakes!

Redefining Gratitude

If you’ve got roadblocks in the way of tapping into feelings of thankfulness and gratitude, it can seriously hamper your efforts to move forward in your life, not to mention put a halt on the growth of your business. I mean, what kind of signal does it send when a taste of success comes your way, and instead of appreciating it, you feel shameful and less than deserving? Geez!

So if you know—or suspect—that this is the case for you, here’s what I recommend:

Take a moment to quiet your mind, and step into the process of expressing gratitude (if you need a cue for that, try thinking about something in your life you like, and simply say, “thanks.”). Notice what happens inside you, emotionally speaking, and with your thoughts.
Take whatever bizarre thoughts, painful memories, or incongruous emotions come to the surface and apply your favorite healing technique (mine, EFT, whatever).
Watch and see what happens to your feelings and thoughts about gratitude.
And once you feel a good degree of resolution from the past, start visualizing how you’d like gratitude to work for you. You can ask yourself, “If I were to have a practice of gratitude that fit entirely with my beliefs and were to bring me incredible peace, energy, and joy, what would it be?

My new practice allows me to experience a profound state of gratitude and appreciation for everything in my life, and it rekindles the sense of intrinsic connection and flow I share with the Oneness, in a taoist-like sense. It’s empowering and paradigm-changing, and I’m really grateful for it.

And that’s the great thing about this: no matter where you’re coming from, no matter what hand life has dealt you, you can create a new practice, a new relationship, to gratitude that is healthy, positive, and empowering.

And that is something to be grateful for.