Have You Ever Felt Gratitude Guilt?



I’m experiencing a feeling today that I’ve never felt before. The only title I can think to give it is “gratitude guilt.”

I remember back in the late 1980s hearing the term “survivor’s guilt” for the first time. It was coined to describe how some gay men felt after learning that they were HIV free. Some men felt guilty because so many of their friends were dying of AIDS, and they were not.

Gratitude guilt seems somewhat similar to me. I’m feeling grateful right now for all of the good, all of the blessings that have always been in my life, but I’m also feeling guilty for never truly having felt grateful in the past.

Like Shakespeare, I’ve spent so much of my life focused on what I didn’t have— and crying about it. My focus was almost never on the good in my life, and if my focus should swing in that direction, I felt too cheated to acknowledge any gratitude. I never allowed my feelings to wander beyond the victim hood of lack.

Last Tuesday, in Manhattan, I did see a man without legs. He was sitting on a street corner with a coffee can in front of him. I was immediately shaken by seeing him. I felt stunned and sad; empathetic and shameful. So I placed some money in his can, but it wasn’t near enough to make up for my past lack of gratitude.

I’ve never been truly grateful for the fact that my body is fully intact. I have legs, I’m in good health, I can move around with the energy of a 25 year old when my mind is focused on positives. I’ve never gone without eating, I have never gone without a roof over my head, and I’ve never lacked medical care. In fact, I’ve never lacked anything essential in life— aside from myself.

I was never present to myself or grateful for being me. I never even liked my name. If we aren’t grateful for life, and for being who we are, how can we really be grateful for anything? We can’t. We leave a big, empty hole inside of ourselves when we refuse to be grateful for being who we are. All of my life I wanted to fade into someone else. I wanted someone or something (clothes, food, all things material) to rescue me from being me. But every time I received something I direly wanted, I still wasn’t truly happy— and I certainly wasn’t grateful.

Why? Because material things can’t fill up the emptiness inside of us. That emptiness is spiritual. It needs us and our Higher Power to fill it up. Clothing can meet our physical needs. Food can meet our physical needs. But material things cannot meet our spiritual needs— the inner needs of our souls.

Now that I know that the only thing missing from my life was me. Now that I am meeting my spiritual needs by showing up for myself and owning my personal power. And now that I’m surrendering to and partnering with a a Higher Power, I’m actually experiencing gratitude for the first time. And I believe the guilt I’m feeling today is all about the years and years that I severely lacked any gratitude at all.

For those years, I am truly sorry— to my family, friends, coworkers and especially to God. I guess I need to feel this Gratitude (or lack of gratitude) Guilt for a while. I certainly earned it. But I don’t intend to stay stuck in it. I can’t change the past. But I can be grateful now in every present moment.

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