Fake Gratitude, The Relationship Termite

How Feigning Gratitude is a Quiet Destructive Force Eating Away at Heartfelt Love

Gratitude is an emotion that all people want to have. Similar to happiness or confidence, gratitude feels good and is reinforced socially. Because gratitude has such allure, gratitude is often faked in hopes of getting the results of gratitude without the important processes that lead to true gratefulness. Yet, true gratitude is too powerful and beneficial to overlook or short cut.

Genuine gratitude is a spontaneous uncontrollable emotionally response, similar to deep joy. It feels good, yet quite vulnerable.

The Steps That Produces Genuine Gratitude

Gratitude is a response to you getting what you genuinely want. The heartfelt warmth of being given what you want implies that God, the other person, or even you, yourself, are truly listening, understanding, and caring about what you desire – and that is an amazing feeling. That feeling contributes profoundly to your sense of self worth. It also deepens your enjoyment of the relationship.

Each step that leads to genuine gratitude is important for a healthy and sustainable relationship. Someone else’s expression of what they desire is an act of humble and vulnerable faith in the other. The response of the other to acknowledge, validate, and respond to that desire is an act of generous attentive care. These steps are essential to the deepening of connection, trust, and rewards in relationship.

The degree by which the other person is genuinely grateful for what you offer gives you meaningful clues about that person. By truly listening, you get understanding on where to best spend your efforts in this relationship.

If Your Efforts Are Not Appreciated

If you give someone something you value, he/she may not be thankful for it at all. If you feel entitled you to his/her thankfulness, a typical response would be to get offended, make demands for gratitude, or walk away – all of which will further deteriorate the relationship. Awareness and trust are lost if you judge or think you know BETTER, presuming your wants are what the other person SHOULD want.

Why Genuine Gratitude is So Great

By magnifying the joy of receiving your true desires, genuine gratitude highlights and reinforces self awareness. Genuine gratitude deepens connection and trust between people. Genuine gratitude also signals what people most value in marriage and in the marketplace.

Genuine gratitude embodies the beauty of the scripture, “Ask, believe, receive, so that your joy may be full.” The equation for heartfelt gratitude is given: request + fulfillment of request = joy.

Again, genuine gratitude is a very powerful experience. Genuine gratitude is a highly desirable state of being for all humans. So desirable in fact that it is common for people to force, manipulate, or numb with feigned gratitude. Although faking gratitude may seem like a quick a fast way to get the benefits of gratitude, (such as social acceptance or appeasing tension), faking gratitude becomes very expensive, especially over time.

3 Ways Fake or Feigned Gratitude may be Eating Away at Your Success in Life and Relationships

If one uses feigned gratitude as a coping mechanism, he or she will exhibit patterns of:

1. Forcing gratitude. When gratitude is forced, awareness of genuine desire is muted, connection is smothered and lost, and resentment builds. There is a deception about what is or is not truly appreciated. This may be within oneself or from others. Forcing gratitude often comes from social pressure, shame, or impatience.
2. Manipulating with gratitude. This is when someone tries to control the responses to the process versus actually upgrade the process itself. Manipulation skips over steps like listening, understanding, caring and instead just tries to control outcomes. Unsatisfactory or unappreciated outcomes are beautiful opportunities to reassess the process. If someone feels powerless to upgrading the process, fear will prompt the use of manipulation instead.
3. Numbing through gratitude. When one feels powerless in getting the caring responses he/she genuinely wants from others, he or she may just succumb to generating feigned gratitude to silence the disappointment. In order to do this, he/she numbs many other emotions, desires, and drives with a sense of “gratitude.” In time, he/she is not even aware that he/she is coping, accepting, and even inviting unwanted situations or patterns anymore. His/her awareness, drive, and creativity are stunted when using gratitude as a coping mechanism.

Feigned Gratitude Keeps You Stuck

As a coach, I see how costly fake gratitude is as people seek to upgrade their lives. Many people are not even aware of how costly it can be. Usually the assumption is, “I am “grateful”, so how could that be a bad thing?” To upgrade your experience of life, you must become aware of inauthenticity, even in regards to gratitude and familiarize yourself with inauthenticity’s costs.

For instance, the costs of feigned gratitude easily show up in those who don’t know what they want, those who are angry that his/her spouse does not appreciate them, or those can’t seem to get past a certain income level. Without distinguishing the patterns of feigned gratitude, you will be left confused, disappointed, and stuck. Beware of buffering every attempt of clarity with feigned gratitude.

Feigning gratitude costs us valuable self awareness. It costs us hunger and drive for what we most desire. It costs us vibrant relationships with others. It can even cost us the discernment of high return on investment tasks in business endeavors. Yep, Feigning gratitude is expensive.

Steps To Shift from Feigned to Genuine Gratitude

So what do you do if you have been trained or patterned to force, manipulate, or numb through gratitude?

1. Familiarize yourself with the costs of faking gratitude.
2. Consider that you likely have little confidence that others (including God and yourself) will honor and respond to your requests. Consider that you also may feel powerless to the process of listening, understanding, validating your own and others desires.
3. Compassionately seek to understand where you developed these patterns and beliefs. Give yourself opportunity to grieve the loss of self awareness, deep connection, and discernment.
4. Be willing to not be grateful and give your relationships room to reassess the powerful processes that led to genuine gratitude.* Challenge yourself to let others not be grateful, and recognize their true priorities and preferences. Resist the temptation to assume you know what values or priorities others/you should have. Journal what you notice.
5. Recognize when you or others are genuinely grateful. Enjoy and look to cultivate more of the patterns that lead to feelings of genuine gratitude. What is an uncontrollable response of joy and gratitude telling you about what you or others value? Are you willing to make adjustments to be of high value to yourself and others?

*If you find yourself afraid to not be grateful, ask yourself: Who would punish you for not appreciating them? Who would withdrawal his/her attention or affection versus take the opportunity to upgrade his/her attentive listening, understanding, and responsiveness? Did you get shamed as a child if you were not thankful? Why might that have been?

Where Did We Learn Fake Gratitude

Here is an example:

Everyone is at a family dinner. Bobby wants more bread and butter. Dad says no. Grandmom offers another scoop of peas instead. Bobby throws a fit, declaring “Yuck! I don’t like peas.”

Dad feels the disapproval of Grandmom. Dad stares down Bobby. Bobby again says “I don’t want Grandmom’s peas.” Grandmom looks at Dad with shock, disappointment, and offense.

Dad tells Bobby “You better be thankful, or ELSE.” Bobby resists. Dad leans in harder, “Be thankful for these peas or go to your bedroom for the rest of the night.” Bobby grumbles, “Thanks Grandmom,” as he stares down at a plate now full of peas.

Now, here’s another way to handle this scenario:

Everyone is at a family dinner. Bobby wants more bread and butter. Dad says no. Grandmom offers another scoop of peas instead. Bobby throws a fit, declaring “Yuck! I don’t like peas.”

Dad feels the disapproval of Grandmom. Dad says to Grandmom, “Bobby does not want any peas.”

Dad says to Bobby, “Bobby, restate that you don’t want peas with this language: Grandmom, I do not want any peas, what I really want is bread.” Grandmom looks at Dad with shock, disappointment, and offense. [Notice this did not change. ]

Bobby says, “Grandmom, I do not want any peas, I only really wanted bread.”

Dad says to Grandmom, “Thank you for offering peas to Bobby.”

Dad tells Bobby “You will not be getting bread or peas. Are you done with dinner?” Bobby will have to decide if he is hungry enough for any other food on the table (requiring him to become aware of the true level of his hunger aka appreciation for food at this time). He also has the choice to be done, leave the table, and play – for which he is genuinely grateful.

Bobby replies, “No thank you. I am really not that hungry. Grandmom, do you want to play cards when you are done?”

This scenario does not force, manipulate, or numb the uncomfortable social feelings through “gratitude.” Instead it gives everyone a chance to be true, boundaried, and authentically connected. New patterns like these may feel awkward or offensive at first, but pave the way for genuine gratitude.