Tell me NOW what you are Grateful for!
—
“What are you grateful for?”
As Thanksgiving looms for those of us in the USA, we prepare to ask-and-answer this little chestnut, often delivered as an introductory tradition before our holiday feast. A question passed around the table with our loved ones.
It is a gentle invitation that can become a challenge. Especially if Grandma started the answer chain counter-clockwise this year, and you are sitting well past the middle in that arrangement. You know all the easy answers will be taken. You won’t be getting off with “family,” “shelter,” or even the vaguely kiss-ass “this great meal.”
No, those will all get snapped up long before it’s your turn.
You do know however that a vague shrug combined with “I dunno,” will not be acceptable. No matter what else is going on in your life, there is no scenario under which a non-answer is possible. You could spring up from the table, make a choking sound, then run to the bathroom where you proceed to loudly vomit blood, only to return to find that they held your turn. Even worse they burned through a few more obvious answers.
♦◊♦
Maybe you haven’t thought about this quite so in depth before. Maybe I am the only one. I often tell my therapy patients that one of the benefits they are receiving is the point of view of a person accustomed to over-analysis.
Most of us, even you under-analysts out there, have had to come to terms with this tradition in one form or another.
Some people write down reasons for their gratitude on giant paper turkey feathers for that display on the wall. Others stick post-it notes to an appointed wall space. Many people, traveling home for the holidays, prep their kids on what to say to these types of questions. This is a rookie mistake; you should always spend that precious togetherness time prepping your kids on what NOT to say.
Whatever the tradition, be it table, wall, or faux-turkey, we usually deal with it in the same fashion: we try to think of the easiest way to answer the question that we can. That’s why the well-known lazy answers are “family,” “shelter,” “food,” “etc.” That last one was the laziest of all.
These answers aren’t lazy because they aren’t true. Family, shelter, and food are all valuable things. Things that not all people have. In the entire history of the world it is a minority of people that can sit around a fully loaded table and spew those words out in casual gratitude before spearing another sweet potato. The kind with brown sugar, People. I don’t make the rules.
Therein lies the problem. The gratitude in these cases isn’t wrong, it’s just dispassionate. Unengaged. Passive
I don’t like the passive gratitude. I prefer a more aggressive gratitude, Grrrrrrrrr-Attitude if you will. One day I used that phrase in a session, embarrassingly drawing out the GRRRR-growling noise. I thought I had invented it for almost an entire twenty minutes. Then I googled it and discovered that everyone on earth was already using it.
Here are 2 aggrrrrrrrrrressive ways to answer Grandma’s round-the-table question:
1. Collect specific things to be grateful for.
I used to have a supervisor who had a cool technique for treating depression. She would tell people to get a shoe-box and fill it with things that reminded them that the world could be a nice place to live. They would occasionally bring the box into session and share the things they had placed inside. A tree branch, a photograph, a baby shoe (hopefully owned by them).
While I have also had patients complete this exercise, I have transitioned to having people use their smart phones to photograph things that make them feel grateful, happy, activate their funny bone, or generally impart a sense of joy. This includes not only photos from the world around them, but screen captures of text messages, memes, and other things that provoke gratitude.
The key here is the specificity. Finding a specific visual or kinetic representation of your gratitude makes it more real.
You probably do this already. Switch over to your phone’s photo section and see which things you have photographed in the last month. Ask yourself why you took that specific picture of that person, place, or thing.
Congratulations, you have a good answer for the Thanksgiving table!
2. Hunt for things to thank people for.
We usually thank people in a boring way. We enter into robotic please-and-thank-you behavior when the situation tells us it is time to. While it may be a routine gesture, it is one that we are more likely to engage in with a checkout clerk than with our romantic partner.
An aggressive thanker has more fun with it. They move through the jungle of life with a thank-for-sport type of approach, with no casualties except for unhappiness.
(I’d like to immediately apologize for the “no casualties except for unhappiness,” comment, and THANK you for continuing to read the article past that point. See how easy that was?)
There are two ways to thank people, the typical (read: boring) way, and the deeper, cooler, more meaningful way.
We typically thank people for nice stuff that they do. While necessary, and we could all probably do it more often, this is no real challenge to a Grrrattitude-Hunter.
If we decide to burn a few more calories we may embrace the approach of thanking people for who they are. Thank someone for the things they bring into your life, particularly things you may not experience if you didn’t know them.
Read the following non-manipulative comparison, and then ask yourself, what would you rather hear?
“Thanks for passing the salt.”
Or
“Thanks for your sense of humor, you make me enjoy things more.”
Now ask yourself, which type of offering would you rather bring to the (literal Thanksgiving) table?
♦◊♦
The truth is we have to do gratitude aggressively because our mind doesn’t want to do it. It is a transcendent principal. Our brains are naturally trained to look for fear-based conclusions, not thankful ones. We are actually fighting against our own survival instinct when we express gratitude.
Consider how your brain notices things on a hike. There is no danger of something bad happening to you because you failed to observe a beautiful sunset. There is however a good chance of something bad happening if you don’t see that snarling bear. So your brain naturally watches out for the snarling bears and turns down the volume on sunsets. It is a rare circumstance where calm or peaceful thoughts force their way into our day, like getting run over by a Yoga instructor. Even then, you would probably focus on the being run-over part of it — Gloomy Gus that you are.
We all have to work to see joy. All to often we think the only way to be aggressive and passionate is to be filled with snark and cynicism, but we need to use the same level of emotional connection to the things that can lead to increasing our appreciation in life as well. We need to get fierce, get passionate, and not be ashamed to push it.
♦◊♦
So get aggressive this year and dig deep for a real GRRRRRRRRRR-Attitude when you answer this standard question. You might find that you surprise yourself, or those around you. You might even find that you are grateful for some things that you forgot you had.
—
Photo credit: Arianna Jeret
