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'it's ok to say things are crappy': how gratitude can mess you up

if your gratitude "practice" means looking on the bright side and not acknowledging the hailstorm that's beating you down, it can have disastrous implications to your well-being.

by lisa machado

published oct 09, 2022

last updated oct 09, 2023

7 minute read

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7 minute read

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are you having trouble feeling grateful?

guilty gratitude can make us disregard our negative feelings, worries and emotions. getty images

“it’s ok to say things are crappy,” said a man sitting at the back of the room. it was the last time our cancer group met in person, just as covid was ramping up, and a woman who had recently been diagnosed asked a question about the side effects of medication. it had been two months and she was dealing with side effects that were making life very difficult, but she was torn about what she should expect. was it worth telling her doctor that she couldn’t eat most meals without vomiting? after all, she was alive. she wanted to know from the others: how bad could it be?

as she put the question out to everyone, about 20 or so people, her hands gripped the red velvety armrests of her chair, steeling herself for what might come. maybe tearful stories of life-limiting pain, fatigue, and nausea, or platitudes about staying strong, “fighting” and thinking positive. possibly the dreaded: “it doesn’t get any better.”

her world was spinning. and between painful tests, figuring out how to pay for the medication that hopefully would save her life and explaining cancer to her young children, she was getting used to things being, well, not so great.

as the discussion rambled on, she got just what she asked for — honest stories of what life taking a daily dose of chemo is like: headaches, diarrhea, exhaustion, hair loss, muscle pain and spasms, vomiting and nausea were just some. and then there were the extra bonus comments about anxiety and depression which brought tears to her eyes.

on the plus side, there weren’t many annoying platitudes — people with cancer tend not to bother with pat comments like, ‘everything happens for a reason,’ and ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’ and while no one weighed in on what the future might hold for her, the woman sat back, processing what she was hearing and took a deep breath as her grip loosened on the armrests.

“it’s not that i’m complaining,” she said, her eyes looking at the floor. “i mean, at least, i guess, i am alive, and there is medication. at least there is that, and i am well enough to spend time with my children.”

everyone was nodding sympathetically, until the guy in the back cleared his throat. he looked tired, but freshly washed — his black curly hair was still a little damp. he held up a very large cup of tim hortons coffee as he spoke.

“sure, it’s great to be alive and to have medication,” he said. “but it also sucks to have cancer.”

mumbles of agreement rippled through the room. there was an older man sitting with him who rolled his eyes and said, “it’s ok to say things are crappy.” his words sounded like they exploded from his mouth — as if they had been pressing at his lips trying to get out. it seemed that he had been wanting to say them for a long time.

he was right, of course. it’s completely ok to say that things stink. but humans generally don’t, for a whole bunch of reasons. besides, imagine if you told the truth every time someone asked how you were?

we say we’re fine, everything’s fine

instead, we say we’re fine, everything’s fine, that we’re “not too bad” because we don’t want to make others feel uncomfortable or responsible for empathizing. or maybe we don’t want to seem weak, or to be thought of as ungrateful.

or perhaps we force ourselves to make lists in a fancy journal with sunflowers on the cover of all that’s amazing in our lives, scraping the bottom of our life barrel, until we find something, anything at all, worth a little gratitude: my socks are clean. and though mental health experts for years have been extolling the seemingly endless mental health benefits of formalizing gratitude in our lives — making it a “practice”— (healthing writer robin roberts talks about it in her story this week) if it’s hard to find blessings to count beyond clean socks, you may have ventured into “toxic gratitude” territory.

according to therapist kelsey mclaughlin, when gratitude crosses over from something we do to consciously squeeze more joy out of something to a tool to avoid addressing what’s bringing us down, it dismisses and suppresses these negative feelings which, in turn, increases stress and can lead to mental health issues.

“you can’t just put a layer of frosting on a s**t cake — it still won’t taste very good,” she told medium.

the thing no one tells you though, is that it’s not a one-or-the-other thing. it is possible to be unhappy and grateful at the same time.

as humans, we are capable of feeling several emotions at once, and one doesn’t necessarily negate the other. basically, if your gratitude practice means looking on the bright side while not acknowledging the hailstorm that’s beating you down, it can have disastrous implications to your well-being and ultimately, the quality of your life. it actually influences how you see your place in the world, how you define your worth and what you think you deserve.

things could be better

think of the woman in the cancer meeting. she was grappling with a cancer diagnosis along with horrible side effects that she didn’t want to tell her doctor about because she didn’t want to seem ungrateful to be alive. i have been there too, a few times. after sitting for hours in a waiting room at the cancer clinic, watching visibly ill people being wheeled in and out, the blinding headaches or leg pain i had planned to talk to my doctor about become not a big deal and i opt not to say anything. because, after all, things could be so much worse.

but they could also be so much better.

it’s this game of comparison that we get trapped into playing when we force gratitude. your boss treats you badly, but at least you have a job, your wife is cheating on you, but man, she’s great with the kids, you have to wait a year for surgery, but at least you have an appointment. this kind of thinking messes with our ability to take a stand and care for ourselves in the way that we deserve. by allowing gratitude to show up in our lives like this, we are basically disregarding our own feelings, worries and emotions and confusing what we need with what we will settle for — because as much as we dislike our situation, there is always someone who is worse off.

and that, when you really think about it, is straight-up bananas.

but it doesn’t mean that practising gratitude is some whack trend, or that you’re not doing it right. it just highlights the importance of realizing that it’s possible to look for the silver lining at the same time as railing against the storm of crud you may find yourself wading through.

“it’s important when practising gratitude, not to invalidate your feelings of stress,” dr. nekeshia hammond, a psychologist and author in florida, told healthline. “you can have both: a strong sense of gratitude along with feelings of sadness, confusion, or anxiety.”

but how do you do that?

there are some techniques, according to healthline, that can help you rethink the role that gratitude plays in your life, with the first being authenticity — don’t pretend to be grateful when you’re not. next is taking the pressure off of yourself to come up with big things to be grateful for. maybe clean socks are a win right now.

finally, acknowledging that being unhappy or upset doesn’t mean that you aren’t grateful and that it’s ok for you to need help even though someone else may need it more can help frame how to experience gratitude in a way that’s both authentic and better for your mental well-being.

it’s thanksgiving, the time of year when it’s most cool to talk about gratitude. some of us will have an empty chair at the dinner table, others may be dealing with a serious illness or worried about their job, while others will be eating alone, or not eating at all. there’s always someone who has it worse.

but the key to being good at gratitude is not comparing our marbles to someone else’s. it’s about learning how to find the good in our lives while allowing ourselves to acknowledge our own personal bad without feeling guilty and without rules or guidelines and not based on what other people say.

that’s true gratitude.

lisa machado is the executive producer of healthing.ca.

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lisa machado

lisa machado began her journalism career as a financial reporter with investor's digest and then rogers media. after a few years editing and writing for a financial magazine, she tried her hand at custom publishing and then left to launch a canadian women's magazine with a colleague. after being diagnosed with a rare blood cancer, lisa founded the canadian cml network and shifted her focus to healthcare advocacy and education.

'it's ok to say things are crappy': how gratitude can mess you up

if your gratitude "practice" means looking on the bright side and not acknowledging the hailstorm that's beating you down, it can have disastrous implications to your well-being.

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'it's ok to say things are crappy': how gratitude can mess you up

if your gratitude "practice" means looking on the bright side and not acknowledging the hailstorm that's beating you down, it can have disastrous implications to your well-being.

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