Gratitude

[Kara.]

I have many good things in my life. Sometimes, many times, I do focus on the negative aspects of things only, even of myself. I can become demanding if something fails as if that same thing has never been helpful and good to me. This is because my 'not met needs' get triggered but this is not the 'thing''s fault. My life can become really difficult and the world a place not very attractive to live in. 

When I am able to feel gratitude then the world feels a better place to be. I would like to develop my sense of gratitude and make it really robust. I can feel gratitude today and I want to share my gratitude with you because I am also grateful to you and to this forum. 

[Carthraziel]

I hear your words Karaindrou
I am grateful for your pressense here too.

[lonelyheartemma]

Gratitude is a difficult emotion. It's difficult to feel and difficult to express. It took me a long time to understand it because people didn't often do nice things for me. When it did happen, I didn't feel grateful. I just felt really excited because I thought I'd finally found someone who liked me. I think this put people off. I don't know if they thought I was just pretending because they couldn't understand how anyone could be that happy over something that considered small- or if they could tell I was happy with what they'd done but not grateful to them (of course it was more complicated than that but again it was a feeling most people wouldn't understand). I think it was probably a combination of both. And then when I did start to feel gratitude it was because I'd realised that I wasn't  worth anything and I was really really lucky that someone had taken the trouble to say something nice to me. So gratitude always came with a bit of embarrassment and self hatred.  

It sounds like you're doing really well with it- I think celebrating the feeling and getting to know it when it's there is a good thing. You also seem to have accepted it's something you find difficult which isn't an easy thing to do. I think maybe the best way of learning to feel an emotion is to work on it a little bit but not all the time. It's a new skill, it's going to take a lot of mental effort and concentrating on it all day would probably be exhausting. Like when I'm practising my cello or my English I'll only spend a short amount of each day working on it. I might decide in advance to put the time aside or it might be a spur of the moment decision- and I think with gratitude it often will be spur of the moment because you can't plan for someone to do something you want to feel grateful for, though like you said there are also long-term gratitude things like this forum. But it might help if you just spent a short time working on it and then stop and the rest of the day doesn't matter.  

I think you will be successful in developing your sense of gratitude because you are so good at inspiring gratitude in others. You know how to make other people feel good and you think it's worth doing. I think lots of people never realise that.