Skip to main content

Grateful To Be Ungrateful


Gratitude is popular in self-help and spiritual circles, and it's easy to see why. Grateful people are easy to be around. Gratitude spreads to others and offers perspective. It feels good and puts positivity in the world. It can also be a huge obstacle for those healing from trauma.

In this season of my life where I am finally uncovering all of my formerly repressed feelings about my abusive childhood, gratitude is a stumbling block. For most of my life I was shamed into feeling that I "should" be grateful for the material aspects of my middle class childhood, in spite of the obvious but unspoken lack of love or understanding. The pressure to be grateful kept me away from the more painful and real feelings of grief, anger, and abandonment. Gratitude was one more brick on the pile that kept all of the secrets of abuse in place. It was yet more more thing that made me feel like being who I am, as I am, isn't enough.

The thing is, most people I know who have survived abuse don't have a problem with gratitude. They have a problem with feeling their feelings. Too often, gratitude is used by abusers like a weapon to make victims of abuse feel like they are being selfish or self-centered for feeling anything but gratitude for the abusive situations they find themselves in. Once (hopefully) out of the abusive relationship and looking for healing, victims of abuse are then peddled gratitude journals by well-meaning counselors and self help gurus, which reinforce the idea that what they are actually feeling isn't OK. Much like forgiveness, when gratitude is pushed on someone prematurely, it interrupts the healing process. For people who deny, minimize, and dissociate, gratitude is a sparkly distraction from doing the real work. For a trauma survivor, true gratitude is earned when she can finally accept and integrate all parts of herself, especially the dark, seemingly broken, and off-limits parts.

Of course, everyone would like to be grateful and focus on the positive things in their lives. But in spite of what some gurus promise, pretending to be grateful as a pathway to develop genuine gratitude is not good advice for someone like me. I've already spent too much of my life pretending to be something I'm not. Right now, the more helpful and healing advice would be to get real about what I am ungrateful for. I am ungrateful for the psychological and sexual abuse. I am ungrateful for my abusers who continue to deny and shift blame. I am ungrateful for my lost childhood. I am ungrateful for my CPTSD. And yet, with all my ingratitude, I am more me than I have ever been. I am more whole than I have ever been. I am more grateful to be alive than I have ever been. Never before have I been so grateful to be ungrateful.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Difference Between Trauma and Anxiety

I've been living with the effects of complex trauma for a long time, but for many years I didn't know what it was. Off and on throughout my life, I've struggled with what I thought was anxiety and depression. Or rather, In addition to being traumatized, I was anxious and depressed.  All mental health is a serious matter, and should never be minimized. If you are feeling anxious or depressed, it's important and urgent to find the right support for you. No one gets a prize for "worst" depression, anxiety, trauma or any other combination of terrible things to deal with, and no one should suffer alone. With that in mind, there is a difference between what someone who has CPTSD feels and what someone with generalized anxiety or mild to moderate depression feels. For someone dealing with complex trauma, the anxiety they feel does not come from some mysterious unknown source or obsessing about what could happen. For many, the anxiety they feel is not rational...
1 comment
Read more

No, There Are Not Two Sides

  I was in a meeting where a mediator was trying her best to stay impartial to a situation where a large volume of well-documented verbal and emotional abuse had occurred. She was a trained professional, but professionally speaking, she didn't want to be in a position to take sides on the issue. She offered the worn-out platitude, "Well, there are two sides to every story..." I let it slide the first time she said it, but when she said it again, I stopped her. "Actually, when it comes to abuse, there are not two sides. There is abuse, and there is the recipient of abuse. The recipient of abuse is not at fault for the actions of the abuser." Her jaw dropped a moment, then she nodded slowly. She knew I was right, and in this moment, a light went on. The situation she was mediating was not about two people having a disagreement. It was about a serial abuser attacking someone else who had done nothing to provoke the attack. She couldn't stay impartial. It ...
1 comment
Read more

Why Psychological Trauma is More Damaging Than Physical Trauma

You were lied to on the playground.  "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." Neuroscientists and psychologists have proven in spades that words hurt most of all. But first, let's establish that abuse of any kind is horrible, heinous, and deserving of attention and care. The impact of physical trauma ought never be minimized in order to shine a light on psychological trauma. Not only is all trauma valid, all perceptions of trauma are valid. Two people can experience the same event and have drastically different outcomes. One's experience isn't more or less valid than another. If it hurts, seek help. Physical trauma is visceral. There is hard, objective evidence of abuse. Most people don't question its validity. It's cut and dry. "If he hits you, you should leave." If you are beaten or shot in a senseless crime, no one will try to convince you it didn't really happen. Children who are physically abused are ...
1 comment
Read more