Gratitude as a Path Toward Love and Happiness
Author: Dennis Rivers, M.A.

Because life continually requires us to attend to problems and breakdowns, it gets very easy to see in life only what is broken and needs fixing. But satisfying relationships (and a happy life) require us to notice and respond to what is delightful, excellent, enjoyable, to work well done, to food well cooked, etc. It is appreciation that makes a relationship strong enough to accommodate differences and disagreements. Thinkers and researchers in many different fields have reached similar conclusions: healthy relationships need a core of mutual appreciation.

To express gratitude in a meaningful way, a person needs to actually feel grateful, and that often involves looking at a person or situation from a new angle. Expressing appreciation thus involves both an expressive action and an inner attitude. This essay explores the attitude of gratitude. (The www.coopcomm.org chapter from which this essay was adapted includes exercises in expressing more appreciation.) My hope is that this essay will help you to put "Exploring and Expressing More Appreciation" on your lifetime Do List. Unfortunately, there is no button in our brains that we can push to make ourselves instantly more grateful and appreciative. But there are countless opportunities each day to grow in that direction.

RESEARCH ON THE POWER OF APPRECIATION AND GRATEFULNESS

COUPLES. If, like me, you have not given much attention to the topic of appreciation, you will probably be as amazed as I was to learn the results of recent research on appreciation. What researchers call "positive interactions" are at the heart of good marriages, healthy development in children and successful businesses! For example, researchers at the University of Washington have discovered that couples who stay together tend to have five times more positive interactions than negative ones. Couples who stay together often have real disagreements, but a strong pattern of appreciative and affirming interaction appears to give them the positive momentum they need to work through their problems.

BRINGING UP KIDS. The child development research of Betty Hart and Todd Risley produced a strikingly parallel conclusion regarding parent-child interaction. "They found that children who are the most intelligent, self-confident and flexible ... at ages six to eight had experienced five times more positive than negative interchanges with their parents by age three" By age three, the children who would thrive had received an average of around 500,000 positive interactions! (The most important implication of the Hart and Risley research for this workbook is that appreciation nurtures! Self-esteem in both children and adults contains a large component of internalized appreciation. It is never too late to begin listening and appreciating, and paying attention to the qualities and behaviors you want to encourage in others.)

CREATIING SUCCESSFUL BUSINESSES. In his book for managers, Bringing Out the Best in People, management consultant Aubrey Daniels argues that recognition and appreciation are the most powerful motivators of improved performance. But in spite of this many managers are still more focused on punishing the low performers than on recognizing the high performers. Building a successful business means most of all bringing out the best in people, according to Daniels, and only people-oriented positive reinforcement, in the form of appreciation, recognition and gratitude, can do that.

Living more gratefully. In his book, Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer, Brother David Steindl-Rast suggests that spiritual life makes much more sense if we see all spiritual virtues as radiating out from gratefulness. To be grateful for the goodness of the simplest things, bread baked by an neighbor, the turning of the seasons, the sound of water running in a brook, the sound of children playing in a schoolyard, is to affirm that there is a source of goodness in life, in spite of the many sorrows that life also includes. For Brother David, our gratefulness is our deepest prayer, prayed not with words but with our hearts.

STORIES, SUFFERING AND GRATITUDE

Gratitude as a way of seeing. The only problem with all these great discoveries in favor of gratitude is that appreciation and gratitude are not like mental faucets that we can just turn on at will. Gratefulness has two sides. Expressing gratitude is partly a conscious action, like opening a door or telling a story. It is also a result of deep attitudes: the way we look at our lives and the way we turn the events of our lives into meaningful stories. Parents teach their children to say "thank you," the action part, in the hope that their children will grow into the attitude part. For adults, I believe, the path toward gratitude includes an exploration of both.

Human beings need to make sense out of what can be a bewildering variety of life experiences. Life is not particularly consistent. Joy comes one day, sorrow the next. Success alternates with failure. Sometimes our efforts matter a lot and sometimes it is a matter of luck, good or bad. One of the main ways we bring coherence to this mind-boggling variety is to develop our own personal organizing "themes" such as "my life of adventure" or "my struggle with alcohol." Since no one theme can hold all the events in our lives, we pick out and emphasize the experiences that illustrate our main theme and let all the other events fade into the background.

Most people do not consciously pick their themes. We more often borrow them from our parents, or are pushed into them by powerful events in our lives such as love, war, abuse, success or failure. A former soldier might weave his life story around the theme of "I went to Vietnam and got totally messed up." Another soldier from the same combat unit might organize his life around the theme "In my family we get through difficult times by staying close." These two men might have experienced the same horrors of war, but their different themes are going to keep them looking for and paying attention to different kinds of experiences in the present.

The important thing to remember about themes is that although they may be deeply true, they are never all of the truth about a person’s life or about life in general. Life is always larger than all our stories, and the events of a person’s life can be arranged, with effort, to illustrate many different themes, not just one. This fact can open a path toward gratitude, even for people who have endured great suffering and deprivation.

Exploring a new theme: Receiving each day as a gift. Becoming aware that our themes emphasize some events in our lives and ignore many others can be a real jolt. But this jolt can empower us to explore more energizing and more life-supporting story-lines. In offering for your consideration the theme of receiving each day as a gift, I draw on the inspiring work of two monks, Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Catholic, and Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist, who are modern apostles of the grateful heart. I also draw on the many wonderful current writers on narrative therapy.

With great inner kindness we can thank the themes that have helped us make sense of life up to now (they were the best we could do), and gently move toward themes that emphasize more of the good things that have happened in our lives. This conscious work on developing a new story will make it easier for us to see opportunities for appreciation in all our daily environments (work, home, community).

One possible first step in receiving each day as a gift is to think of any days in your life that have felt like gifts or blessings. This can be even more helpful if you write down these wonderful times as part of developing a journal of gratitude. Slowly, over weeks and months, you can begin to feel out an alternative way of telling the story of your life. I will never forget the smell of Christmas trees in our living room when I was a child. And the glow of the multi-colored lights when all the other lights in the room had been turned off. So in spite of the fact that I was part of a troubled family, I had moments of amazing wonder and delight, and those moments became an inner treasure for me that helped me endure the troubles.

If we think about it rationally, we would have to admit that the fact that gratitude-inspiring events do happen in our lives at least every now and then is proof beyond a shadow of a doubt that happy events are possible! If we pay more attention to such experiences we might find that we gradually become more willing to be surprised by new moments of joy. We might even find that events which we previously ignored, like the sun coming up in the morning, can start to seem like gifts.

(Adapted from Chapter 6 of The Seven Challenges Workbook and Reader, which is available for free at www.coopcomm.org.)








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Dennis Rivers, M.A., is writer and teacher who lives near Santa Barbara, California. He is director of the Institute for Cooperative Communication Skills. This essay is adapted from The Seven Challenges Workbook, which is available for free from the Cooperative Communication Skills Internet Resource Center -- www.coopcomm.org

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