GRATITUDE AS A TONIC FOR SELF-PITY: HOW ACTION TRANSFORMS

Well, hello world. Happy Thanksgiving to anyone out there who is celebrating it. More importantly, this little recording is about gratitude since it infers in the name of the holiday that we give thanks. I think thankful is usually synonymous with being grateful. But I see gratitude as a little bit different because in recovery we talk about it all the time, about needing to remember to be grateful. But I think there's a specific way to go about achieving it or being able to live in gratitude. Specifically when you're dealing with self-pity. And so gratitude is this tonic for self-pity and action is what transforms. You know, self-pity, it can be really quiet. It is this persistent fog that can kill us. It sort of settles in and down when life feels unfair, when we have expectations that collapse. Or when we slip into comparing ourselves to other people, or when we focus on what we lack. And gratitude is often suggested as this fixing elixir. And that's a pretty sound idea. You know, it shifts our attention away from what we believe we are lacking to maybe abundance of what we do have from deficits to credits, from isolation to connections. But really, I think the truth is much more complicated. You can't always think your way into gratitude. Much like you can't think your way into good action. We have these recommendations, gratitude lists, reflections, mental exercises, and all of those things help. But I think they just skim the surface. Never really quite burrowing into like our emotional core, like get us out of it. You know, to feel gratitude, not just to think it requires action. Helping someone else, stepping outside of yourself, becoming useful. These acts create the conditions that will lead to genuine gratitude and allow it to flourish. And we know this, like science actually backs this up. They have done brain scans. They have put people in MRI or MFRI machines, and they can tell that gratitude activates parts of our brain associated with reward, with social bonding, with emotional regulation. And those same systems light up when we help others, when we offer kindness, or we engage in actually altruistic behavior, gratitude, generosity, they share the same pathways. So in many ways, helping someone is like a booster, or it's like a bonus, into gratitude. Because it shifts our attention outward. It interrupts that negative rumination that I know I do. And it roots this appreciation in actually lived experience rather than just abstract thought. And I want to give an example from my life that illustrates how gratitude plus action can transform that feeling sorry for yourself, that self-pity into purpose. And how when we can step outside of ourselves, we can often grow to a deeper and more durable actual gratitude than just reflection alone. And this was early in my sobriety. I had been in recovery for about six months, and self-pity was on me. I kind of had that malaise. I was off the pink cloud. I had this malaise, is this as good as it gets? And I woke up. It was probably sometime in January. I came in in July, and I didn't want to get out of bed. I wasn't hungover. I just felt like I was stuck in a job I didn't really like. I was stuck in a financial hole from old mistakes, and then I still had some resentments of what I wished I had done differently. I had made a gratitude list, right, roof over my head. Bills were being paid. My kids were healthy. I had a loving wife. The problem was that list didn't really move me emotionally. I just felt like I was going through the motions. But there was this old timer, and his name was Bill Isler. And there was a really challenging newcomer in the hall whose name was Billy. And for some reason, Isler made it my mission to get Billy to meetings. And so I got a call from him one day, and he didn't have a ride in the meeting. So I had to go pick him up, and I wasn't thrilled about it. The drive from my house to his apartment to the hall was probably about ten minutes. But during that time something kind of shifted. You know, you're in that confined space, and I listened to Billy, and he went on about like the madness which it was of his life. He talked about not having a job, about how lonely he was, about how he was relapsing. And so I found that I was encouraging him, sharing some things that I really didn't share a lot with people, that I normally kept to myself. But at the time we got to the hall, I didn't really feel so bad. And I went to the meeting, shared more. You know, I wasn't fixed. I wasn't super happy, but I was feeling easier, a little bit lighter. You know, and working with him, Billy helped me realize something pretty profound, which changed how I behaved, and how I was thinking. Was helping him didn't erase my problems, but it did put them into perspective, lived experience. My life, it was far from perfect. But it was stable enough that I could help someone else. And dammit, it's really hard for people out there. It was really hard for him. Life was hard. And there was something for me to be grateful for. You know, action became that gateway to gratitude, because self-pity it thrives on isolation, on rumination and on comparison. Gratitude, it does disrupt that cycle, but only when we become embodied by it. Written gratitude, it might shift my thoughts a little, but lived gratitude shifts who I am. To start by helping someone, try to be helpful, it breaks self-absorption. It grows your perspective, it creates a new meaning for you, a new purpose, it activates your brain's reward systems. Not only that, it strengthens connection with the people that you're helping. And it reveals what we have rather than what we lack. Because in my life, gratitude didn't appear first, it appeared second. It showed up as a byproduct of action I have to move forward. And if gratitude is this antidote for self-pity, which I believe that it is, then action is the spoon that delivers it. You don't have to solve someone else's life. You just show up, you do something small, and you step outside long enough to see the world from a different angle, change your perspective. Gratitude begins with noticing, but it deepens with doing. And when we help someone, not for credit, not for recognition, not for moral points, but because it's the right thing to do, we don't just feel grateful for our good fortune. We feel grateful for our ability to make an actual difference in the world even if it's tiny. Gratitude becomes lived, not listed. And that is when it becomes transformational. Peace.