Transformative gratitude occurs within sincere relationships, but building those links is not always an easy process
R
ecently, my psychoanalyst annoyed me. She said something and I felt misunderstood, criticised – and that she was wrong. I wanted an apology. As we worked through this, as she listened to me and I listened to her, I gradually realised that she hadn’t meant exactly what I thought, and that I was the one who had misunderstood, who was being so critical. But why couldn’t she have made it easier for me to understand, phrased it like I would have done? She responded: “That isn’t what I thought.”
In that moment, something clicked. I felt the rush and the relief of sudden emotional clarity. I think this came from seeing that my psychoanalyst, by not apologising to appease my anger, by not taking an easy way out of the conflict, by persisting in offering me her honest thoughts about what was going on in my mind and by bearing my struggle to take them in, was giving me an extremely rare and precious experience. I felt an overwhelming and surprising surge of gratitude.
Years ago, for this newspaper, I wrote about the latest psychology research into gratitude, which had found it to be a self-help superfood, like a goji berry for emotional wellbeing. I experimented with keeping a gratitude diary, writing down what I felt grateful for each evening. It was an interesting exercise. What I discovered then – and what I’ve learned through experience since – is that if you try to “game” gratitude or any emotion in this way, treating it like an asset to be accumulated, it can only ever be a “nice feeling” – and a fleeting one.
