Gratitude as Emotional Bypassing

“You should be grateful for what you have.”  Chances are you have probably heard this phrase a million times throughout your life.  Depending On the moment in which you heard this phrase, it may have been an uplifting and meaningful reminder, or an apathetic and uncaring platitude.  When you are feeling lost or adrift, gratitude might be a helpful anchor to call you back to yourself.  But if you are feeling alone in the world, broken, or unheard–phrases like this tend to do more harm than good.  

Gratitude exercises and meditations have become a staple of the mental health and wellness space and field of psychotherapy.  And while it is important to hold space for gratitude in our lives, the rise in gratitude suggests an overemphasis on being grateful for the good fortunes we have, and simultaneously deny the misfortunes and hardships.  Gratitude, like happiness, has become a buzzword for the positive psychology movement that now dominates mental health and wellness spaces, and has seeped into the culture of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and other “evidence-based” approaches like Acceptance-Commitment Therapy.  Gratitude is now used as a tool for dispelling depressive thoughts or feelings, as a reality check against painful emotions that we might be experiencing. Gratitude has shifted into an emotional override function, bypassing pain and heartache that we might be genuinely struggling with and experiencing in our day-to-day lives.  

This emotional bypassing, while well-intentioned, has harmful effects on our overall mental health and only serves to prolong and complicate the issues that plague a person.  Emotional bypassing occurs, whenever we engage in rituals, practices, or behaviors that skip over our feeling or processing of an emotion.  Rather than feeling our feelings, people often employ different diversionary tactics to distract away from pain or a particularly undesirable emotion.  We often see this in the form of spiritual bypassing through acts of forgiveness that are made immediately after a transgression, and pass over the rupture and repair process entirely.  This often leaves the one who has been transgressed to feel uncared for, unheard, silenced, and further harmed.  

The modern form of emotional bypassing that has been handed down from positive psychology is that of gratitude exercises.  Patients of positive psychologists or CBT style therapy, might be assigned gratitude homework– constructing a list of things they should be grateful and are grateful for, but must recite and rehearse these everyday to fully appreciate them and negate the depressed feelings or emotion of anger.  Mindfulness often engages with this, with a focus on gratitude meditations that are aimed at holding onto the meaningful things, people, or relationships in our lives– in face and opposition to that which brings us down.   While, I believe these are well-intentioned and meaningful practices to engage in on a regular basis– it is the assigning and prescriptive nature that passes over the feelings and emotions that lie underneath that is problematic.  

It’s important to acknowledge your pain, and not simply push it away and force positive emotions upon ourselves.  Modern approaches to therapy like Cognitive Behavioral or Acceptance Commitment therapy have appropriated various terms and beliefs from Eastern thought and Buddhist philosophy, and reduced them to mechanical processes.  The gratitude exercise used in CBT, along with many other techniques in these Behavioral approaches or positive psychology schools, has stripped the meaning and context from Buddhist philosophical principles and teachings, and mechanized them .  When taken in by Western psychology traditions, these practices have been and are used to benefit capitalist practices and avoid feeling our feelings.  Suppression of emotions and pain, only serves to bottle them up for later unconscious expression and disruption.

It’s okay to feel sad, angry, upset, hurt, lost, scared, or depressed.  Holding space for these feelings is necessary and healthy.  Simply passing over these emotions for positive feelings such as gratitude or appreciation, misses a logical and important development step in emotion regulation.  Being told that you shouldn’t feel an emotion like anger or sadness often makes the emotion more pronounced, as you aren’t being heard or attuned to.  It’s telling you that there is a specific way to Be, and that expressing “negative” emotions is not allowed or sanctioned by the culture and community  For emotions to actually regulate within a person’s nervous system, the individual must allow themselves to feel a feeling, and for their feelings and emotions to be acknowledged and recognized by another person. In this way, we can complete the effective cycle.  An incomplete affective cycle, leads to further emotional dysregulation, and ruptures within relationships.  

I encourage you to feel your feelings, rather than skip over them and force yourself to be grateful, when you aren’t feeling particularly grateful.  Honor and hold space for the “negative” feelings that you may be experiencing.  Feel your feelings, rather than shoving them down and bottling them up.  Our modern society loves to compartmentalize and shelve feelings and emotions away for later examination or use– but emotions that are stored away or tamped down wreak havoc on the nervous system and body of the individual.  This doesn’t mean going around and exploding at others or immediately reacting to our emotions– I merely advocate for being true to what you are feeling, and not forcing yourself to be happy or grateful in those times of true despair or pain.  Gratitude has its place in our lives.  And we have many things to be grateful for.  But we don’t need to forsake other emotions, just to fit into a society that wants humanoid, emotionless robots.