Toxic vs Authentic Gratitude
A very happy Thanksgiving to all our Thrivers who are celebrating!
It’s such a beautiful way of focussing on gratitude – and it got me to thinking about how sometimes gratitude can be used and spun in ways that mean it is toxic to us.
And of course, narcissists are fully capable of employing toxic gratitude in their arsenal of weapons against us!
New Age ‘love and light’ positivity and standard Law of Attraction techniques are other ways in which gratitude can become toxic. It’s like ‘putting ice-cream on top of poop’ – it looks beautiful, but it’s hard to stomach.
So join me in today’s Thriver TV episode, where I will show you how to recognise toxic gratitude. I’ll explain how to anchor into your own authenticity so that true gratitude can naturally flow, as an outpouring of your Beingness – and as a part of the magical journey of Life.
Video Transcript
Today I want to wish you all a really happy and beautiful Thanksgiving!
This is such a special time for our Thriver tribe in the United States, to be able to get together with your family and friends and share gorgeous gratitude.
That brings me to today’s topic. I want to talk about toxic and authentic gratitude.
But before I get started, I’d like to remind you to subscribe to my YouTube channel if you haven’t already, and please be sure to share my material with other people it can help. Let’s get the message out there that we can not only survive narcissistic abuse, but also truly thrive after it.
Narcissists and Toxic Gratitude
I’ll begin with the narcissist’s perspective of toxic gratitude.
A narcissist will grandstand and declare that you should be grateful for any little thing they can put their finger on that they have done for you.
This may be something they have done with an agenda attached, or maybe it’s something that is in the basic realm of normal, decent human behavior – like an abusive parent who expects their child to be grateful that they have put food in their mouth and clothes on their back.
They will use any little thing to proclaim that, “I’ve done all of this amazing stuff, so how dare you speak up about the atrocious, disgusting stuff I’ve also done!”
It’s like living next door to a really lovely man who beings in your garbage each week but he ends up shooting another neighbour or his family. There is absolutely no excuse for such atrocious behaviour, however many garbage bins have been brought in for you.
Likewise a narcissist will tell you that you should be grateful for all of the things that they have apparently done for you, and those small things are meant to completely cancel out the way they trample your values, your rights and your deservedness with their atrocious behaviour.
This is not about gratitude. This is gaslighting.
It also trains you to be in a scarcity mentality of thinking, “Well, I have to accept breadcrumbs. I have to accept the bad with the good in order to try to get any sort of love, approval, security and survival.”
If we haven’t healed up and grown, we are unable to anchor into our deservedness and abundance.
None of us deserve perfection (because it doesn’t exist), but we absolutely do deserve kindness, decency and consistency, and we can hold people accountable if they do atrocious things.
We also can choose not to continue our life with them if they don’t show genuine remorse, atone for their actions and learn from their behavior. That’s the fundamental foundations of any healthy relationship.
I promise you, when you become a thriver you will no longer will put up with shocking behaviour to try to have your needs met. It just won’t happen.
New Age Toxic Positivity
The second type of toxic gratitude that I want to look at is this New Age, fluffy, ‘love and light’ belief that we have got to look for the positive, and be positive about everything. I’m going to be really outspoken about this – it’s garbage.
I’m sick of seeing people behave like that, because it’s not real.
It’s kind of interesting that even people in this community who have shed their trauma and done the inner work can be grandstanding in their righteousness. They can be blossoming, blooming and feeling that beautiful life force and Source energy flowing through them, yet be saying to others, “You should just be positive”.
They’ve maybe forgotten what it was like at the start of their journey, when they had to dig in and lean inwards, to be able to detox their trauma. It is only by removing trauma that we can make space for well-being, Source flow, and true gratitude and positivity.
So if you find yourself doing this, I want you to be really humble and remember what it was like when you were stuck in your internal trauma. Humans are not appliances, so you couldn’t just flick a switch. You had to make space for the good stuff.
Law of Attraction and Faux Gratitude
The third place where toxic gratitude can happen is within Law of Attraction.
I’m not a fan of standard Law of Attraction, because it can involve faux gratitude and ‘fake it til I make it’. For example, inwardly declaring “I’m grateful for my life partner” – and then pretending this person is already present, and being really grateful for him or her. Setting the table for two, for example – people can take this to the nth degree.
Or “I’m really grateful for all of the money that I have,” when you don’t have any.
You might have seen on social media that a lot of people are putting up posts about, “You’ll be blessed with riches if you say amen,” and all this kind of stuff. I find it interesting that the people who frequent those kind of posts and say “amen” don’t have riches. And I don’t expect them to get riches because they’re not living in the now, where our power really is.
Our power is not in the future.
What happens is that if you are grateful for your future and trying to manifest it into the now, then there’s a big gap between reality and your projection into the future, which isn’t congruent in the quantum time-space of your power with Source now.
So a lot of these people end up being very devastated, disappointed and self-sabotaging in regard to getting love, money, or whatever else they desire.
This is why I see that as toxic gratitude rather than as authentic gratitude.
Authentic Gratitude
So what is authentic gratitude?
This is a quantum discussion and is something I didn’t have a grasp on until I went quantum. Once I did go quantum, I really started to embody, understand, live and reflect quantum gratitude.
What’s really interesting is that it’s a dichotomy because it’s so big, but yet it’s so simple.
It’s so big because it is the bigger picture, which is very quantum. It’s about the interconnectedness of all things. It’s about how the composition of our Beingness is connected to the Field, Source, Life and others.
The simplicity of it is in the small things – it’s in the detail.
If we’re doing toxic gratitude then we’re focussing on ’the stuff’ and the things that are separated from us – that we’re hoping to get our Beingness from. Yet it’s our Beingness that creates things durably and for real in a way that is authentic.
Authentic gratitude is about a deeper understanding, acceptance and connection to that Beingness.
For myself, rather than trying to get ‘the stuff’ from outside of myself to be grateful for, I started to be grateful about the journey of my Soul and my Beingness.
This was very simple – it was about loading up whatever hurt and letting it go, by using Quanta Freedom Healing. Then I could bring in the Superconscious Light of Source – which is my Higher Beingness and the Beingness that I actually want – the calm, the peace, the wisdom, the solidness, the feeling of love, belonging, wholeness and connection to the entire Field.
Then the gratitude became like a magical journey of life.
In seeing, knowing and embodying, it comes online. It’s something I started to live and to know – a seeing of the interconnectedness between all things and a knowing that when support came to me from the outside, it was a reflection of how I was supporting myself on the inside.
This internal support was that process of purging what wasn’t me – the ego, my 3D self, my small human egoic, logical, disconnected self – that had accumulated so much personal traumatic fear and pain. It was letting that go and then bringing in the Source self that was far more infinite, eternal, immortal and connected to the Field in a quantum way.
The simple things became so powerful.
I’ll never forget one of the first times after I’d done a lot of shifts on myself, I walked into a bakery and about three people turned and smiled at me. I remember that I was standing there and I dropped something and a man picked it up and he said, “Can I get this for you?” The lady behind the counter looked me in the eyes and she said, “Hello, sweetheart, what would you like?”
And it went ping for me.
I knew the magic was because I’d been tending to my inner being and making my journey about that – releasing the fear and the pain and filling with the light and my true self. The outside had shifted instantaneously to show me the evidence of that.
That’s what I became grateful about. That’s my authentic gratefulness.
We don’t have to wake up traumatized and having a gratitude list of 100 things, to try to save our vibration, pick it up and fix it. Running off a list of, “I’m grateful for this,” is an overlay – a spiritual bypass.
It’s like trying to put ice cream on top of poop, because the trauma is still there and the pain is still there. We’re trying to manage and train ourselves out of it, rather than actually shift and change our Beingness, to live in the wonder and the magic of the interconnectedness of all things.
I’m so grateful for that awareness now. I am grateful for when I get a horrible trigger from the outside, because it is actually showing me that I still have a matching belief or a trauma in there.
There was a situation, an event in my life just recently, which was a big trigger and a huge trauma. At first, I spun into the human aspect of it. But then I blessed, accepted and had gratitude for the trigger. I understood that, “this isn’t happening to me, it’s happening for me – what is this showing me?”
Then I was able to go inside, target the trauma generating ‘this’ – what was happening in my life and the trigger inside of me – load it up, release it and bring my Higher Self and Source.
This led me to go up to an even freer level, being eternally grateful that this person in my life had brought this forth to help me heal something and rise above. Something I never could have achieved if this hadn’t happened.
As Neale Donald Walsch famously said in one of his ‘Conversation With God’ books, “I only bring you angels. I only bring you angels.” When we go quantum, this is the level of gratitude that you start living.
This level of gratitude is completely unconditional. It’s not conditional on anything happening.
We’re no longer dependent. We’re no longer ’empty until…’. We’re fulfilled, filled, awake, aware and evolving no matter what.
Could there be any greater gratitude than that?
In Conclusion
I hope I’ve been able to express in words what I hope you can feel cellularly as a deep truth.
Sometimes it’s hard to explain something that you can’t touch, see, smell or feel. You can only know it when you start living that way.
If this has resonated with you – if it has helped you understand a deep meaning to life – then I’d love you to check out this link to the Narcissistic Abuse Recovery Program (NARP), which is exactly how I got to that level of gratitude and life force.
I also want you to have a look at what’s coming up – an exciting workshop that I’m going to be giving to help you these holidays!
This Healing Holiday Heartbreak Workshop can not only help you heal anything you have been going through this Thanksgiving, it can also help you turn your Holiday Time into the most beautiful time you could ever imagine.
This could be your entry point to start learning what I’ve been talking about today, and to start going quantum with me and this incredible community. So check that out as well.
And I just want to say to all of you, I am so grateful for you. I love you so much. I couldn’t be doing what I’m doing, living the life that I’m having and the expansion that I experience if it wasn’t for all of you in this co-creation with me.
So, so much love to you. Until the next one, keep smiling, keep healing and keep thriving because there is nothing else to do.
And I’d love to see you in the comments below.
