Desire, guilt, and gratitude

Recently, I was thinking about how I want more in this life. I know, I know, I was just writing about how this life is enough, and now here I am saying that I want more. Life is complicated. Let’s admit it.

Anyway, I want more in this life.

I want more money. More adventure. More travel. More opportunity. More generosity.

I also want less in this life.

I want less worry. Less stress. Less “we can’t afford that.” Less “I wish we could, but we can’t.”

And a lot of what I want boils down to wanting more money.

And that makes me feel…

Guilty.

Ungrateful.

Selfish.

Un-spiritual.

Un-Christlike.

Egotistical.

Impolite.

Unkind.

Unfaithful.

Mean.

Bad.

And all around yucky.

Somewhere down the line, I got the impression that being poor was a good thing and wanting was bad. I even have a letter to Santa from my 5-year old self where I told him that we were poor but it was a good thing because it made our family closer. While I appreciate the optimism of that sweet girl, it also kind of wrenches my heart a little. I was glad to be poor?

Several years later, I was an 19-year old college student returning home from a missions trip to Ecuador where we had handed out fresh t-shirts to men who lived in a garbage dump and led vacation bible school classes for children whose parents couldn’t afford to feed them. As we pulled up to our church parking lot, having been away for a few weeks, I saw a beautiful stained glass steeple perched high above our church’s newly constructed massive sanctuary. Righteously, I fumed inside. Do they know how many children that steeple could have fed? Instead of a new sanctuary, couldn’t the church have given the money to the people at the dump?!?! I had seen, firsthand, cardboard “houses” literally built out of and surrounded by trash, and now I would be spending my Sundays sitting in the pretty pews of a multi-million dollar building. My young mind struggled to make sense of it. How can the church not feel guilty about spending all this money on a stupid building when there are people starving and struggling in the world???

And that revealed a problem that I continue to deal with today. How can I be ok with having money and material things, and, more so, wanting them, when there are people who need that stuff more than me? As with all limiting beliefs and childhood impressions, my views on money don’t always add up. I don’t feel guilty going over-budget at the grocery store when we have a credit card bill to pay off, but I do feel guilty donating money to a good cause when we are still in debt. I don’t feel bad buying 100 small things at Target, but god forbid I spend the same amount on one pair of shoes for myself. I mean, I have so many issues with money, I have not even begun to sort through them all.

But as I started thinking about wanting more, the voice in my head whispered, “You should be content with what you have. You’re being ungrateful. Don’t you know how good you have it? You should give thanks in all circumstances and be glad for everything God has already given you. All you can think about is yourself and what you want. If you could just get over yourself and be grateful for this life, maybe then you’d be happy. How would you feel if you lost it all??? Maybe then you’d wish you had felt more thankful.”

And while there is definitely an element of truth to all of that, I feel like there are other things at stake.

It struck me that, sometimes, promoting an “attitude of gratitude” can be a way of coercing and shaming people into staying small, into not wanting more. Insisting that people feel grateful for difficult circumstances in their lives is one way of controlling them and forcing them into a submissive role. I have even heard women say things like, “well, I’m thankful that at least he doesn’t beat me.” Or, “well, I’m grateful that at least he provides for me and the kids,” as a way of validating their relationship with an abusive spouse.

Other times, thanksgiving can be a way of escaping the reality of a situation, a way to excuse yourself from taking action. “I hate my job, but I’m thankful I didn’t get fired.” “My kids are taking over our lives, but at least they’re healthy.” It’s almost like anything goes, as long as you’re thankful for it. Like the simple expression of thanksgiving is what is more important and impressive than actually dealing with the truth of the situation. There also seems to be an implied command that if you’re thankful for something, you have to feel good about it, have to accept it. Like, if you’re really thankful and content in your circumstances, you won’t try to change them. If you try to change them, then you’re no longer thankful.

And, if you can believe it (ha!), I am not the first person to observe this strange connection between gratitude and shame. Disturbingly, my feelings seem to resonate most with those who have experienced abuse in their past. I have not been physically abused, but there were some emotionally intense situations in my childhood, and, so, I was curious as to why I related with these people so much.

On this issue of coerced gratitude, One woman wrote, “I knew that to be acceptable, I had to have a good attitude. I took this lesson into adulthood and ingested all the books and articles I could find on positive thinking. It was almost a religion—in fact, my church taught it too, except they put a twist on it: “Thou shalt be cheerful, lest God think you’re ungrateful and take away what little you have. This coping method that helped me survive as a child followed me in big and small ways into my adult years. It kept me vulnerable to abuse and perpetuated it. I learned to have a positive attitude about everything—things that I should have run from. I accepted circumstances without questioning them. Instead of making improvements to my life, I improved the way I *perceived* my life.“

This last line got to me. I thought about a relationship in my early 20’s that was so incredibly toxic, but instead of running from it like I should have, I justified it and excused his behavior and forced myself to think about the things I should be thankful for. Instead of recognizing the ways he humiliated me, I focused on how thankful I was that I had a boyfriend who cared for his church community. Instead of acknowledging how he shamed me, I told myself I needed to be more thankful that he was with me at all.

Another woman described it like this, “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.”

This, sadly, reminded me of a time after my dad died when I was struggling to write anything nice about him for his funeral service. People were reminding me of how much he loved our family, and it was almost more than I could take. So, I should be thankful for all those times when he was a jerk? I should just pretend like we didn’t ever have to walk on eggshells around him for fear of igniting his temper? The fact that he loved us justified and excused all those times he yelled and accused and criticized?? Even though I know and understand that they meant well, my family’s comments felt like gaslighting and like I was being selfish for not feeling grateful for him. I loved my dad and I know he loved me, but that doesn’t mean I am not allowed to feel the whole range of complicated emotions, and it doesn’t mean I need to be shamed into an attitude of gratitude just so others can feel better about it.

What researchers and these other writers have discovered is that gratitude is NOT THE PROBLEM. The problem is being told that how you feel is not ok. The problem is having your feelings dismissed as unacceptable or wrong or selfish. The problem is being made to feel unworthy if you fail to tie everything up with a big ole eucharisteo bow. The problem is being told that you must deny a hard reality for the higher sake of being found acceptable in the eyes of another. All of this has recently been coined and further investigated under the term “toxic positivity.” **

And, God, you guys. This stuff is freaking hard.

Because the truth is that I don’t want to be around people who complain all the time. And I don’t want to be the one complaining! I don’t want to be pessimistic and grumpy and discontent for the rest of my life. And I find it really hard and almost anger-inducing, to be around people who are unable to pull themselves into a more positive place.

Strangely, one of my favorite Anne LaMott stories is one she tells about an older woman in her church who went blind. Everyone was waiting for this older woman to accept her lot in life and go back to being the usual positive, strong person she was before. When she didn’t return to her smiling happy self, people didn’t know how to respond to her. Anne remarked how we don’t like it when other people’s pain makes us feel uncomfortable, how we don’t want to have to experience what it’s like to sit with other people in their despair. She suggested that our desire for other people to be positive and thankful often masks our own selfishness to not have to share in their suffering. And, honestly, we are sometimes scared to sit with our own.

And this is the problem with gratitude for people like me. We need to first learn that how we feel is OK. Because if we don’t validate ourselves, we become the people who use the admonition of gratitude like a weapon, threatening others that they must hide their truest feelings or else be outcast because we don’t want to be inconvenienced or challenged or ashamed of their pain; and we can use gratitude like a shield, protecting ourselves from the harsh realities in life so we don’t have to be inconvenienced or challenged or ashamed of our own sufferings.

And I have certainly wielded the weapon of gratitude! My husband reminded me of our early parenting days when I was constantly making him feel bad for not being more joyful about all our sleepless nights and other challenges with our firstborn son. And, just the other day, I found myself frustrated and yelling at our kids for not being more grateful.

But it’s complicated, right?

Because I do believe that the practice of gratitude can be amazing and life-transforming. I do think it is a good thing to be grateful, and I truly believe that sitting in discontentment can potentially lead you into your own kind of hell.

But, we all should tread carefully. It is easy to tell someone to “be grateful.” It is HARD to sit with someone in suffering. It is easy to ask someone what they’re thankful for. It is HARD to listen to the unfulfilled longings of their heart. It is easy to pray for someone to be content. It is HARD to love them through their struggle for happiness. It is easy to tell someone how they should feel. It is HARD to see them and love them for who they are.

Dismissing our own feelings or those of someone else can seem like the best way to go, the “healthier” way, but it’s NOT. You are allowed to feel however you feel. What we see in kids is that they don’t actually sit and wallow in self-pity all day. If you acknowledge their feelings and sit with them, the kids will rebound more quickly. If we deny their experience, they learn to shove their emotions down inside themselves and, eventually, all of those big feelings will come out in unhealthy ways. Same goes for us.

I love my life. But I also really want more, and it is nice to finally start owning those feelings without couching them in de-legitimizing terms. It has been a lifelong struggle for me to validate my own feelings and acknowledge myself as being worthy of having them. I spent countless hours, as a teenager, belittling myself for feeling the ways I did. I begged God to take my emotions away. I hated myself for having feelings in my heart.

I think that the discomfort I’m experiencing now is due, in part, to my faith deconstruction. As an evangelical Christian, I was given the tools and encouragement to tamper down my desires and make me feel guilty about having them. After all, Church (and the Bible) simply reinforced what I already knew and felt – Anger was sin. Selfishness was sin. Lust was sin. Fear was sin. Ambition was sin. Not only did my faith tell me that it was wrong to want more, but it was very much socially unacceptable (especially for a woman) to express any discontentment with life as it was. Now that I am letting go of most of those ways of thinking, and re-examining my beliefs, all those constraints are coming off and it is uncomfortable and awkward to be sitting in such a place of freedom.

I spent decades sitting under teaching that commanded gratitude, justified or excused difficult situations, demanded obedience, and constantly admonished me to “bear my cross” – all which, because of my childhood experiences, I took to mean no complaining whatsoever, no wishing for something more, no seeking anything better than what you were given, no growing bigger than those around you, and no believing that you are worth more than what someone else is willing to offer you. This doesn’t mean I always lived by these rules, but they were strong enough to induce significant guilt and shame when I didn’t.

I struggle to write this out because the truth is that I loved my faith. I loved my church. Some of the best memories and friendships of my life were fostered within the walls of my evangelical community. I do not blame the church for my issues. I think there are millions of people who have had similar faith upbringings and don’t have any of these spiritual hang-ups. For me, the church’s teachings just happened to reinforce a mindset that was already inside of me.

Now, after years of not having any dreams at all, it’s kind of exciting to be wanting more. It is energizing to believe in the possibility of a different way of life. But it is still really hard to ignore the guilt and shame that continue to crop up. I realize that there is deep work to be done, of acknowledging within myself that it is OK to want things, even if, on a practical level, I cannot have them. If nothing else, I want to get out of the habit of shaming myself for the desire.

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** Toxic positivity is particularly awful when you think of how it has been used to oppress women and minorities. Even today, in light of the #metoo and the LGBTQ+ and Black Lives Matter movements, we must recognize how our commandments to “be grateful for what you have” are incredibly dismissive of cries for equality, acceptance, and justice.