Trauma & Art

Gratitude

“Gratitude is like breathing in – letting ourselves be touched by the goodness in others and in our world. Generosity is like breathing out – sensing our mutual belonging and offering our care. When we are awake and whole, breathing in and out happens naturally. But these beautiful expressions of our heart become blocked when we are dominated by the fear and grasping of our survival brain.” Tara Brach

“Try taking refuge in gratitude … Your brain is shaped by your experiences, which are shaped by what you attend to. With mindfulness, you can rest your attention on experiences of psychological resources such as compassion and gratitude, and hardwire them into your nervous system.” Rick Hanson

 “Looking out over the evening skyscape, I felt some of what Joseph Campbell must have when he spoke of feeling “a certain tenderness toward the lovely gift of light, a gentle gratitude for things made visible.” Diane Ackerman – 2011

Today’s post is about gratitude. Gratitude involves a giver offering a gift and a receiver of this gift. Emmons says that in order for gratitude to exist, the giver must act intentionally and the person receiving the gift needs to acknowledge it as something good that was freely bestowed out of compassion, generosity, or love. A clear understanding of gratitude is important because like hope and other experiences there can be a potential “shadow side”. For instance, in their article, The Meaning and Valence of Gratitude in Positive Psychology, Liz Gulliford and Blaire Morgan write that we need to be mindful of the ‘triadic’ model (benefactor, benefit and beneficiary) because it only represents one understanding of gratitude. They believe that gratitude interventions should incorporate the educational task of promoting “virtue literacy” regarding gratitude as a potential virtue; an understanding of what gratitude is, why it might be a desirable quality to cultivate and when it is appropriate.  Emmons writes that “gratitude engages at least three different aspects of the mind. We intellectually recognize the benefit, we willingly acknowledge this benefit, and we emotionally appreciate both the gift and the giver. The term “gift” is important in this context because gifts are unearned, things we are not owed by the giver and to which we are not entitled.” So, there is a distinction between this kind of experience and other transactions and exchanges even though we may be thankful for these experiences, too. I will provide a simple personal example to somehow clarify this. When I worked as a teacher I exchanged teaching services for tuition fees. There was an exchange there, a mutual respect of a certain contract between two parties. However, beyond that a different give and take took place that opened up a space where the experience of gratitude could emerge. I offered many additional teaching hours and material during exams and end of terms that were not part of our agreement. This effort and time was an offering based on good intentions and generosity. My students on the other hand often brought me little gifts, flowers and thank you cards as expressions of their gratitude.

Generally, in many papers gratitude was consistently correlated with greater happiness and increased levels of resilience during difficult times, with ripple effects in many areas of our life. In his book, Resilience, Rick Hanson writes that “Gratitude and other positive emotions have many important benefits. They support physical health by strengthening the immune system and protecting the cardiovascular system. They help us recover from loss and trauma. They widen the perceptual field and help us see the big picture and the opportunities in it; they encourage ambition. And they connect people together.” In his book: The Little Book of Gratitude: Create a Life of Happiness and Wellbeing by Giving Thanks, Robert Emmons also suggests that as we create gratitude, a positive ripple effect is generated through every area of our lives, our pursuit of better relationships, and our quest for inner peace, health, wholeness, and contentment.

Skimming through a variety of research papers one reads that there is a link between gratitude and positive emotions and enhancement of interpersonal and social relationships. Awareness and expression of gratitude have been associated with measures of well-being and gratitude is linked to positive affective and pro-social traits. Some research points to the role of gratitude as a significant component of relationship building and maintenance of bonding in human communities. Emiliana Simon-Thomas says, “Experiences that heighten meaningful connections with others— like noticing how another person has helped you, acknowledging the effort it took, and savoring how you benefited from it— engage biological systems for trust and affection, alongside circuits for pleasure and reward. This provides a synergistic and enduring boost to the positive experience. Saying ‘thank you’ to a person, your brain registers that something good has happened and that you are more richly enmeshed in a meaningful social community” (cited in Dan Siegel’s book Aware). It seems that gratitude or the lack of it impacts our relatedness at a personal and collective level. As Emmons says: “Human relationships would unravel without gratitude…… It is the thread that stitches us together. Each act of gratitude contributes to the overall patchwork but these threads are frail. Ingratitude, forgetfulness, resentment, entitlement are forces that weaken and can ultimately unravel the fabric. However, it can be strengthened in some proven, effective ways that allow us to reap the rewards of grateful living.”

Research on the felt and subjective experience of gratitude suggests that gratitude enhances feelings of connectedness and influences the boundaries that define relationships. Specifically, it was found that boundaries between self and other were reduced, softened, or attenuated and that there was a shift of emphasis from the receipt of a gift to the value and significance of the relationship with the gift-giver. Participants in studies claimed that they felt seen and they used emotions like: love, joy, happiness, peace, safety, release, freedom, lightness, to describe their experiences of feeling grateful. When describing the felt sense participants identified the feeling of gratitude as occurring in the thoracic area, reported a rush of warmth in various parts of the body or a feeling of warmth in the entire body. These experiences seem to be associated with the part of the parasympathetic nervous system that allows for a soothing effect. Another interesting finding was that participants described experiences of becoming more present and alert, more awake and hopeful.  Kerry Howells whose work focuses on the importance of gratitude in education claims that gratitude awakens us and facilitates learning: “when we thank while we think, we think in a more engaged way.”

At the molecular level, gratitude is associated with oxytocin and with the release of dopamine and serotonin, which contribute positively to enhanced mood and motivation. Feelings of gratitude activate the limbic system that includes the hypothalamus and amygdala, which play a big role in regulating our emotions, memory, and endocrine function. Emmons cites research results to support the benefits of gratitude in the physical realm. For instance, keeping a gratitude diary for two weeks produced reductions in perceived stress (28 per cent) and depression (16 per cent) in health-care practitioners.  Gratitude was also related to 23 per cent lower levels of stress hormones (cortisol). Writing a letter of gratitude reduced feelings of hopelessness in 88 per cent of suicidal inpatients and increased levels of optimism in 94 per cent of them. Gratitude is related to a 10 per cent improvement in sleep quality in patients with chronic pain, and so on.  However, as suggested in the book the effects of gratitude are not limited to the physical realm. Summarily, research suggests that gratitude increases self-esteem, enhances willpower, strengthens relationships, deepens spirituality, boosts creativity, and improves athletic and academic performance.

It has also been suggested that gratitude is our best weapon to counter the constant drip of negativity in our contemporary societies. Emmons writes: “Gratitude rescues us from thieves that derail our opportunity for happiness, and gets us back on track to contentment and inner peace.” He also advises against feeling envious and comparing ourselves with those whom we perceive as having more advantages because this often leads to insecurity, increased anxiety and unhappiness. In his book, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Changes the Way We Think, Live and Die, Keith Payne, PhD, believes that we can exert more control over how we compare. First, we need to be mindful enough to recognize when we are in the grips of it, and second, to choose wisely what kind of comparison is relevant and useful. According to Payne the idea is not to stop comparing, but to compare more wisely because different types of comparisons have different effects. He distinguishes two types of comparison, upward comparisons, which make us feel poorer, less talented, and needier, and downward comparisons, which involves thinking about others who are less fortunate in order to feel better by comparison because as he explains downward comparisons are not only the source of smug pride; they can also be a source of gratitude. He writes: “The key is to be aware that, under different circumstances or as the result of an unexpected change in fortune, you could have been less fortunate, too.” The risk of downward comparisons is complacency and upward comparisons, can inspire us to work harder and achieve more, only if we believe that our targets are realistic. He writes “Comparing ourselves to the Albert Einsteins and Michael Jordans of the world just makes us feel miserable and demotivated.”

Gratitude can also influence our evaluation of the past and how we construct our life narrative. Emmons writes that “when we respond to our lives, our past as well as events in the present, from a point of view of gratitude and appreciation, the way we interpret our experiences begins to shift and soften as we begin to soften inside.” Studies mentioned in Emmons’ book have shown that when writing about past losses or negative events from a grateful perspective participants reported feeling more closure and less unhappiness than those who didn’t write about their experience from a grateful perspective. We may not be able to always do this and not all past losses or painful experiences can be viewed this way, but often there might be certain outcomes that we could eventually, and after a lot of processing and coming to terms with, be thankful for. A serious violation, injustice or loss can lead to clarity and reclaiming of things important to us. Some losses create time and space for waking up, learning, boundary setting, growth and change…. So, I think it is important to distinguish the adversity or injustice from any potential positive outcomes. It is also important to be able to discern and attend to the good things in life alongside the adversities. This process leads to a more integrated life narrative and an owning of the totality of our life. An example that comes to mind might be friends’ betrayal. Embracing the good moments, as well as, the bad helps us to bring about balance and integration, make new meaning, and also, reclaim the past goodness in our life. Through embracing it all we embrace the totality of our life and self. Also, while it is important in the midst of adversity to not deny reality, feeling gratitude for something outside the adversity can build up resilience, decrease stress and help us see the bigger picture like the societal dynamics that supported events or the belief systems underlying particular behaviours and so on.

Some questions to journal or reflect on suggested in Emmon’s book are:

What kinds of things do you now feel grateful for? What personal strengths have grown out of your experience? How has the event made you better able to meet the challenges of the future? How has it put your life into perspective?

Emmons also touches upon existing myths or misconceptions about gratitude. One of these myths is that gratitude leads to complacency and passivity, and de-motivates us to improve our lot in life or challenge the status quo, which he claims is not necessarily true. Studies have shown that consistent gratitude practices, for instance, result in feeling more energetic, alive and alert, and also, that gratitude inspires good-neighbourly behaviour, generosity, compassion, charitable giving. What I also found interesting is his reference to gratitude metaphors that inspire and drive personal change, encouraging us to go deeper into grateful living. He writes: “Lock and key metaphors are especially common. Gratitude has been referred to as “the key that opens all doors”, that which “unlocks the fullness of life”, and the “key to abundance, prosperity, and fulfillment.”

I will end this post today with Oliver Sacks, a British neurologist, naturalist, historian of science, and writer. The reason I’ve chosen to end this post with Sack’s words is because they reflect the preciousness of the gift of life and the uniqueness of everybody’s life and all sentient beings’ life on this beautiful planet.

In the first essay in his book Gratitude, which he wrote during the last two years of his life while he was facing aging, serious illness and fear of dying, he writes: “At nearly eighty, with a scattering of medical and surgical problems, none disabling, I feel glad to be alive—“I’m glad I’m not dead!” sometimes bursts out of me when the weather is perfect….. Perhaps, with luck, I will make it, more or less intact, for another few years and be granted the liberty to continue to love and work, the two most important things, Freud insisted, in life………

In his second essay, “My Own Life”, which he wrote when his health had deteriorated and he was face to face with dying, he says: “It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can….  I have been increasingly conscious, for the last ten years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate— the genetic and neural fate— of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death…. I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”

Trees

‘And so, as the train crossed the plain, she thought that trees were not to be pitied. Because trees live through their roots and through their roots they fruit and are redeemed’ Margarita Lyberaki

“The fireball produced by the nuclear explosion reached temperatures equivalent to the sun— millions of degrees. It was like a lunar landscape or what I imagine Dante’s Inferno might look like. Scientists predicted that nothing would grow for decades. But, amazingly, two five-hundred-year-old camphor trees had survived. Only the lower half of their trunks remained, and from that most of the branches had been torn off. Not a single leaf remained on the mutilated trees. But they were alive….. I was taken to see one of the survivors. It’s now a large tree but its thick trunk has cracks and fissures, and you can see it’s all black inside. But every spring that tree puts out new leaves…. Many Japanese regard it as a holy monument to peace and survival; and prayers, written in tiny kanji characters on parchment, had been hung from the branches in memory of all those who died. I stood there, humbled by the devastation we humans can cause and the unbelievable resilience of nature.” (Jane Goodall / The Book of Hope)

I’ve recently been trying to collect information to create a family tree on my mother’s family. However, requesting information about her ancestors from the municipal registry has been fruitless so far. A few years ago I had completed a brief online course to see how we go about collecting and accessing data to create a family tree. Of course, things are not the same in all countries and record keeping varies, but a couple of years ago I was able to access the recorded data available at the local registry office for my father’s family even though the information did not go many generations back. So, I was expecting more assistance and success this time… Anyway, this process reminded me of a chapter in a personal narrative project I engaged periodically over several years. A few extracts nelow:

Trees

“….  On the first page the author writes: ‘Since when she was little she had felt sorry for the trees, she had felt tenderness and mercy for them. She remembered that still a child she had asked her mother: “Mama, why do trees not walk?” And she had responded: “They have roots, my child.” Then she would go and hug their trunks and whisper words of consolation. And they used to bend and moan’ (The Trees, 1995, Margarita Lyberakis).

…… I carry many stories and memories of trees …….  of a camping holiday among tall poplar trees that created a vast mosaic of shimmering patches of sunlight on my skin and on the ground, and of the beautiful orange tree orchards I see through the car window as we drive across the countryside on the Greek mainland, of my uncle’s small lemon orchard near the sea, the lyrics of an old song and the film ‘Lemon Tree’ that my husband and I had watched one warm summer night in an open cinema with huge bougainvillea bushes and café tables in the centre of Athens. The film was about fences, courage and common humanity. A man in the film says: ‘trees are like people; they have souls; they have feelings’…..

When we arrived in Greece my father planted a small olive grove. For years he took care of the trees and picked the fruit. These trees grow on soft land that is very close to the sea that is almost impossible to swim in because thick sea-weed has aggressively taken over the sea bed. During one of my trips to my father’s hometown I walked among the trees and I felt connected to the earth under my feet as I listened to its stories and myths. The olive tree is one of the most beloved trees in Greece, and legend has it that Zeus proposed a contest between Athena and Poseidon for the control of Athens. Poseidon struck the hard rock of the Acropolis with his three-pronged trident, which unleashed a spring of sea water, whereas the goddess Athena planted a small olive tree, The Athenians chose Athena’s gift and the olive tree became an important part of Greek life and diet, and olive wreaths were worn by brides and awarded to Olympic victors. Traditionally, the olive tree is a symbol of peace and friendship and I think the origins of using an olive branch as a symbol of peace lie in ancient Greek and Rome culture, I read somewhere that an olive branch signifies peace because due to their slow growth, olive trees are not cultivated during war time, and so they are believed to be peace-time trees…

…… Trees are like people. Some are firmly rooted and some have eroded roots. They withstand the elements, they sway this way and that, they bend and kneel and then they stand upright again and they bloom and give fruits. They grow, sometimes against all odds, in depleted soil and arid land. They too, endure, evolve and shed the old and unwanted. They are cut down, burnt down, transformed or mutated and twisted out of shape, given a different form or name. They branch out and communicate with other trees and their roots touch and mingle underground sharing the moisture and the nourishment the earth provides. Trees communicate and are connected to other trees through a network of soil fungi that allows the sharing of information and nutrients. Scientists have found that when they are attacked by insects, they can flood their leaves with noxious chemicals to repel unwanted visitors, but what is more fascinating is that they warn other trees by releasing chemicals into the wind and possibly through their network of roots.

Amazingly, trees even favour their offspring. The ecologist Suzanne Simard says “We set about an experiment, and we grew mother trees with kin and stranger’s seedlings. And it turns out they do recognize their kin. Mother trees colonize their kin with bigger mycorrhizal networks. They send them more carbon below ground. They even reduce their own root competition to make elbow room for their kids. When mother trees are injured or dying, they also send messages of wisdom on to the next generation of seedlings. So we’ve used isotope tracing to trace carbon moving from an injured mother tree down her trunk into the mycorrhizal network and into her neighbouring seedlings, not only carbon but also defense signals. And these two compounds have increased the resistance of those seedlings to future stresses. So trees talk.”

Forester and writer, Peter Wohlleben, draws on scientific discoveries to also describe how trees are like our human families: tree parents communicate with their children, support them as they grow, share nutrients with the ones that are sick or weak, and warn each other of impending dangers. The following is a short extract from his book: “When trees grow together, nutrients and water can be optimally divided among them all so that each tree can grow into the best tree it can be. If you “help” individual trees by getting rid of their supposed competition, the remaining trees are bereft. They send messages out to their neighbours in vain, because nothing remains but stumps. Every tree now muddles along on its own, giving rise to great differences in productivity. Some individuals photosynthesize like mad until sugar positively bubbles along their trunk. As a result, they are fit and grow better, but they aren’t particularly long-lived. This is because a tree can be only as strong as the forest that surrounds it. And there are now a lot of losers in the forest. Weaker members, who would once have been supported by the stronger ones, suddenly fall behind. Whether the reason for their decline is their location and lack of nutrients, a passing malaise, or genetic makeup, they now fall prey to insects and fungi…….”

The well-being of trees depends on community and when the supposedly feeble trees disappear it impacts the whole community of trees even the giants. Thich Nhat Hanh says that “people normally cut reality into compartments, and so are unable to see the interdependence of all phenomena. To see one in all and all in one is to break through the great barrier which narrows one’s perception of reality….” Everything in nature seems to point to the reality of our inescapable interconnectedness, the value of diversity and the need for a care ideal…….”