Gratitude can be truly healing – but you need more than a checklist | Life and style
A.Recently, my psychoanalyst irritated me. She said something and I felt misunderstood, criticized – and I knew she was wrong. I wanted an apology. As we worked on this, as she listened to me and I listened to her, I gradually realized that she hadn’t thought exactly what I was thinking, and that it was me who had misunderstood, who was so critical. But why couldn’t she have made it easier for me to understand, not phrased it the way I would have done? She replied, “That’s not what I thought.” »
In that moment, something clicked. I felt the rush and relief of sudden emotional clarity. I think this came from seeing that my psychoanalyst, by not apologizing to appease my anger, by not taking the easy way out of the conflict, by persisting in giving me her honest thoughts about what was going on in my mind and by supporting my struggle to assimilate them, was giving me an extremely rare and precious experience. I felt an overwhelming and surprising surge of gratitude.
Years ago, for this journal, I wrote about the latest psychological research on gratitude, which found it to be a self-help superfood, like a goji berry for emotional well-being. I tried keeping a gratitude journal, writing down what I felt grateful for each evening. It was an interesting exercise. What I discovered then – and what I have learned through experience since – is that if you try to “play” with gratitude or any emotion in that way, treating it as an asset to be accumulated, it can only be a “nice feeling” – and a fleeting one.
Good feelings have their place. But I don’t believe they contribute to building a better life. They are part of the result of a fulfilling and meaningful life (with lots of not-so-nice feelings). On their own, they are not enough to precipitate internal change. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: what we all want is to feel better – but what we really need is to feel better.
Because, as psychoanalyst Melanie Klein realized, if we’re lucky, gratitude can be more than just a nice feeling. It can be part of a powerful and nourishing developmental process that helps us maintain good experiences and relationships. In my sessions as a patient in psychoanalysis and as a psychotherapist with patients, I saw that it was both a trigger and an outcome of psychological growth. But getting there is not easy – not as simple as writing a list. Before you can truly feel gratitude, you may need to feel envious, needy, and vulnerable, just as I did in my psychoanalysis session. You may need to develop the ability to tolerate your hatred, rage, despair, and all kinds of feelings that are not pleasant. And of course, you have to have something to feel grateful for. For it to be a transformative experience, gratitude must be spontaneous, it must be real, and it must develop in a relationship with another person. This is why I felt so strongly when my psychoanalyst used her mind to help me understand mine: gratitude arises from a connection between minds.
I’ve been thinking about this for 20 months, writing this column to you every fortnight, because it’s been a bonding experience. Making connections in my own mind, from feelings to thoughts to theories I’ve learned during my psychotherapy training to experiences I’ve had both with patients and as a patient. It was a time for me where I found deep meaning in our daily losses and loves, as well as in a sweater that shrank in the wash, in potty training, and in a perfectly cooked jacket potato.
And it’s also been a bonding experience between our minds: I’ve felt so hopeful and comforted by the connections we’ve made through your messages, week after week, letting me know that my column touched you or was helpful. You told me that you shared my work with my family after the loss of a parent, after the loss of a child: that took my breath away. You told me that you had read my work and decided to seek therapy, to travel, to read more books. And some of you have sent me your own creative work – I’ve listened to your songs, looked at your art, read your articles, and bought your books that have captivated me or made me cry (in a good way). I also made friends. Each of these bonds felt like a gift, bonds forged at a time in our society when it is so much easier, and there is so much opportunity and encouragement, to break them.
An important part of my treatment as a patient, and the treatment I provide to my patients, is to somehow try to find a home in our minds for the parts of us that seek to connect, to create, to feel, and to come alive, and the parts of us that seek to sever connections, to destroy, to kill feelings and ourselves. I wish it were otherwise, but I know that a better life can only be built when we can each integrate all of these parts of ourselves.
This column is now coming to an end – the next one will be the last – and I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to make these connections with all of you. I hope we can keep them all. Research shows that the results of psychodynamic psychotherapy improve over time after treatment ends: patients feel more helped as time passes, because the unconscious changes become larger and larger, like ripples in a pond. I hope that the connections we have made together can take root in our minds and, over time, continue to grow and nourish us, helping us build better lives, not just for ourselves.
