Thank you for viewing my service. Click on the links below to navigate the page.
Video
Text
- Introduction
- Appreciation As Compared To Gratitude/Thankfulness
- Building The World Through Appreciation
- Showing Appreciation For Others’ Pain
Service Recording
Presentation
Introduction
Today’s service is about Showing Appreciation, with a specific focus on how I think it is an entirely different process from Showing Gratitude. I think showing appreciation presents healing opportunities that showing gratitude does not, for both myself and the community around me. This service is going to be composed of an introduction and three parts.
Once I start talking, I would prefer minimal interruptions because this is going to be very raw and I’m likely to cry quite a bit during this service. This is part of my newfound appreciation for my emotions as a part of myself that does not necessarily have to guide my behavior.
The third section is the section that evolved the furthest from my original plans. It was originally going to be talking about the pains of the everyday worker, but in the process of writing it it shifted towards the pains that I perceive across rural communities in America that generally don’t feel represented or seen.
In the introduction, I will discuss my personal connection to this service.
In the first part, I am going to discuss what I perceive are the main differences between Gratitude and Appreciation.
In the second part, I will discuss how I believe appreciation creates healing opportunities where gratitude does not – for self, for loved ones, and for the communities around us.
In the third part, I am going to delve into how I am trying to show Appreciation for the hidden pains in the people around me – for those I love, for passing strangers, for distant relatives, for the checkout clerk, and everyone in between.
In my last service, I said I have little interest in controlling or manipulating others. That wasn’t the whole story, so now I’ll try to elaborate.
Since childhood I have been fighting a number of defense mechanisms that I adopted to get through difficult times, including a tendency to manipulate others into taking care of my emotions.
It was a constant struggle throughout my teens and twenties, to the point where I made the decision to bottle up all my emotions. It felt like they were only useful for manipulating others. Well… as you might guess, that eventually ended poorly.
I’ve gotten better at tending to my own emotions since then, especially over this past year. Building on that, since my last service I have cultivated an appreciation for those manipulative defense mechanisms within me. This doesn’t mean that I have given them power over my behaviors – I feel it means the opposite.
Over the last month I have reconnected with my sister for the first time in a decade. In doing so, I’ve come to realize that my perception of the past was shaped heavily by my own pain over the course of the years since we spoke.
During our talks I found out about a lot of pain that happened in our childhoods that I was unaware of, but I also found out how distorted my perception of myself has been.
I remembered myself as a monster that terrorized my siblings during my moments of pain – but they didn’t remember me that way at all. They remembered all the little moments when I showed them kindness. This brought me to a realization:
At key moments in my past, those defense mechanisms saved my soul, my spirit, whatever name you want to call the essence of who I am in my unique identity. At that moment, those defense mechanisms let me get to the next moment – which let me get to the next and next, until I found people that love me for who I am in that unique identity, creating space for me to heal.
Another thing that I discovered upon reconnecting with my sister is that she has done quite a lot of work in helping our other siblings be independent people in their own right. This is something that has caused me a lot of pain in the past, so I tried to show her my gratitude for it – but expressing gratitude towards her didn’t quite feel right.
I appreciate her. From the depths of my heart, I appreciate her. It’s not gratitude because her actions had nothing to do with me. I was not a factor. I don’t feel so much that gratitude applies here. We’ll go into that in the next section.
This brought me to another realization – the common refrain of ‘expressing gratitude’ in interactions with others doesn’t feel quite right to me for more interactions.
It feels like there are often times when an ‘attitude of gratitude’ feels like it can actually damage my ability to understand others.
But, before we get into the meat of the service, let’s go ahead and take care of the collection while we listen to some Dolly Parton.
Appreciation As Compared To Gratitude/Thankfulness
As I’ve been exploring my emotions and learning about the various aspects within myself, I realized that expressing gratitude towards my internal processes felt wrong. Gratitude feels like it creates assumptions about agency, so expressing gratitude towards those defense mechanisms felt like it was giving them a life of their own.
There is a reason for that, rooted in language.
As discussed in the video, the language we use shapes the way we think. That is true of both the internal language we use to think about ourselves and the external language we use in communication with others.
Looking at the definitions of ‘Gratitude’ and ‘Grateful,’ the most common usages seem to imply some self-knowledge of agency on behalf of the other party – as if they are helping out of a desire to help.
Expressions of gratitude feel like they are statements about my knowledge of the other person’s agency, when very often I actually have no idea what is happening within their mind.
For this reason, it doesn’t feel right to express gratitude in respect to my everyday interactions with others, nor in respect to my interactions with my own internal processes. As we saw in the video, the language we use matters. That includes the language we use towards ourselves. It shapes the way we behave, generating implicit behaviors that we aren’t even aware of on a conscious level, like how we stand or how our hand gesture.
I am of the opinion that fostering an ‘attitude of gratitude’ in everyday life encourages assumptions about agency that create boundaries that hinder true understanding of others within ourselves. Even if it didn’t, I don’t want to walk through the world while fostering a mindset of “They give to me and I am thankful for them” in regards to all of the people I encounter.
While an attitude of gratitude seems well-meaning, I don’t think it actually benefits anyone. Instead, I try to foster an attitude of Appreciation – both towards my internal processes and in how I communicate with others. It feels like since I started reshaping my language towards myself in this way, I have had an easier time seeing people for who they are in each individual moment.
In turn, it feels like this shift in internal language has led to an easier time creating productive conversations with others where I feel understood and respected in my positions, even if they don’t agree with those positions. During many of these interactions, I have felt like I learned something new about myself because of that person – regardless of whether we agreed or disagreed during that conversation.
Looking into the definition of ‘Appreciate’ and ‘Appreciation,’ I think I am beginning to see why that is so.
These definitions seem to me to have more depth. They seem to imply more reflectfulness, to emphasize the value of something without assigning an agency or an emotion. One can appreciate something while still feeling a wide range of emotions other than pleasure.
Appreciation feels like it removes the specificity of agency from the equation. In a way, it feels like fostering an attitude of appreciation allows me to view interactions with people in a similar manner to my interactions with nature.
To expound upon that:
I love going out and hiking, but the word gratitude doesn’t fit for me in connection to nature. I don’t feel gratitude towards the trees, nor the sky, nor the pebbles, nor the mountains. My being there is only a momentary blip in their existence – they exist in their own form regardless of my being there, so being thankful for them never felt right. What I do feel towards nature during those moments feels like it falls better under the label of appreciation.
I can appreciate the wonder of nature even if it leads to pain and misery on my part, because ‘nature’ simply exists and conducts its processes regardless of me being there.
So following this realization, I began trying to show appreciation instead of gratitude towards that impulsive thought created by my defense mechanisms and sitting with them.
I soon found that internally expressing appreciation towards that impulse made it feel easier to take responsibility for acting in a manner that opposed the impulse. It felt like it became easier to avoid expressing manipulative behavior because I was explicitly showing appreciation for my defense mechanism that recognized the behavior.
At some point in the past, those defense mechanisms saved me. But despite that, expressing gratitude towards them doesn’t feel right. Those defense mechanisms are a part of me, in the same way that a rock is part of the mountain and the mountain is a part of the landmass. They don’t do what they do for me, they just do them.
This has led me to shifting towards language that expresses Appreciation for my own emotions and internal processes, rather than Gratitude. In the same way that I appreciate the beauty of nature, I want to cultivate an appreciation for the beauty of both my own internal self and for every bit of growth granted by meeting someone new, regardless of their opinions.
And because I am as much a part of nature as the animals in the woods, I am trying to extend that appreciation to my interactions with everyone.
Building The World Through Appreciation
The choice of words for this heading is intentional. We just have this one world. I’ve realized that abstracting it out into ‘building a better world’ just obscures what I know to be true but don’t want to think about: Building the world we want to live in is a constant act that will never reach completion.
Appreciation isn’t a magical remedy that will fix the world overnight. It’s a starting block I feel we can all use to create healing opportunities that cascade out into the world.
It’s easy to talk about how humanity is destroying the world in the abstract, and even easier to cast blame on the companies creating the obvious problems.
But to me, the core issue that is preventing growth and healing on a societal level is that we humans have a tendency to forget how often our actions can cascade through the lives of every single person we interact with. Tiny moments that are easy for us to forget can be pivotal, keystone moments in the lives of others.
I’m a human being that has gone through a lot of pain to get where I am. But what I tend to forget is that I am also a composite of every person that I have interacted with in my life, and that they are composites of everyone they know as well. When someone I love feels pain, it affects me. I think most people could say the same to some degree.
I recognize that the world we live in has suffered immensely, and I recognize that a significant portion of this is as a result of this pain. Everyone’s pain.
And to be quite honest, I don’t think we’re going to have any chance to heal and rebuild the planet if we can’t heal ourselves on an individual level first.
A lot of that pain is beyond my ability to heal, but I can still try to pass each and every person I interact with a spark of appreciation for their truest self during our brief shared experience – even if I am opposing their agenda with my every breath. This feels like the healthiest way to grant them a healing opportunity for them to heal themselves if there is damage.
I want to create cascade effects that result in multitudes of healing opportunities for my community. The best way I can think to help others do that is to show my appreciation to those people, places, and things in my life and community. They are all pieces of my life, even if for just a moment.
I can only hope that by showing my appreciation and by constantly attempting to understand others around me that I can create healing opportunities through the cascade effect.
As we move through life, our words and actions cause cascade effects to ripple through our communities and create multitudes of opportunities for healing or hurting in those around us and all the people we love and they love.
Even if the people I interact with have views that are the complete opposite to mine, I can appreciate the strength they give me without making an internal statement about their agency.
When I focus on Showing Appreciation rather than Gratitude in my interactions, it feels like I am granting them respect and kindness for just existing in their truest state without making an internal statement about their agency or motivations for the outward actions or words I see and hear.
Because to be honest, I don’t know anything about their internal world, nor their motivations. But I DO know that it bothers me a lot when people misunderstand me or make assumptions about my agency.
I have no knowledge of anyone’s agency unless they explicitly enlighten me. Even then, I don’t really know if anyone means a statement or action in jest or seriousness. The only thing I can know for sure about the actions of another person are that they impacted me in some way, that I have a new experience that I can grow from – and I can try to appreciate the person for that.
That’s how I am taking responsibility for building the world; that means understanding that most people are who they are because of the unique sequence of events that led them to this point. They can only be the people their past allows them to be in that moment.
I can’t change their past for them, nor would I try – we each have to walk our own paths. But I can show my Appreciation that, for whatever very brief moment it might be, they are in my life and giving me the opportunity to learn from them and grow.
Because life is really, really hard for a lot of people.
Showing Appreciation For Others’ Pain
There is a lot of pain in the world. There always has been. There always will be. On top of that, on top of the outward pains that we all know about, it feels like everyone has secret pains that they strive to hide, often amongst barbed words and blame.
But nobody chooses the place or family they were born into. Some of us are lucky enough to know our specific pain. Some of us are unlucky enough to be dealing with pains from generational trauma of events decades past.
When large populations of people are hurt en masse, it can cascade through the generations and cause repeating cycles of pain. The song I am about to play has an underlying theme that I feel represents a significant portion of Americans, especially those who have roots in rural communities.
During this song, I’m going to try to remember that these were the only lives these people knew – and some of them loved that life as much as I love my own. They had friends and lovers in their coworkers, dreams they hoped would be fulfilled by their work, and were encouraged and told that they were helping their country and fellow man. Even the ‘Jenny’ referenced in the song is the blast furnace, named “Jeanette Furnace” by the workers.
Directly putting words to the theme I referenced earlier, it feels like this song is a wail of sorrow from a people who feel their culture and experience being erased.
When I put myself in the shoes of the singer, this is the overwhelming message of pain that I hear:
‘Our mothers and fathers built this country. They broke their backs to bring us all we have, and now their legacy is the daily pain and suffering of global warming. Our sons went off to war and many never came home, and those who did come home received vilification, pains that never stopped, and poor treatment from those in power. At every turn you have shown your disdain for us as a people.’
‘Why should we trust you again?’
I know the pain of erasure on the personal level. I know the pain of having my agency assumed and having actions taken against me based upon that assumption.
Many rural communities are what created the opportunity for metro communities, yet it feels like throughout my lifetime those who live in metro communities have overwhelmingly belittled and talked down to those who live in rural communities. While the reverse is definitely true as well, I am originally from a rural community and feel a special connection to their pain that gives me a unique perspective on it.
As America has developed, outsourced its industrial capacities, and gone to war around the world over this past century, rural communities have again and again felt the pain of losing their livelihoods, their legacies, and the lives of their children. I have family that was killed in war. When I think of these communities, I worry about them becoming a forgotten people.
[Note: I was thinking of the cascade effects within my family, I did not know this family member that died on a personal level, nor do I know the circumstances – solely that they were in the military and that it affected my family]
It feels like as a result of the events over the past century, those communities have been delivered blow after blow of traumatizing pain that cascaded through the generations up until now. The steel smelter’s son, the wife who lost her husband in Vietnam, or the farmer who couldn’t keep up with advancing technology – all events that seem of the direst pain imaginable, yet these communities have been expected to bear this pain.
As a result, it feels like the pain of the parents overflowed into their children, who repeated the cycle with their own children, and so on.
Now I’m going to play a music video that is very meaningful to me. In this video, the song is being sung from the perspective of the old man looking back at his life from heaven. Whenever the song uses “I,” it is the old man with all of his pain. Over the course of the video, it will flash back and forth across four time frames in the lives of himself and those around them.
- The first time frame is when he is looking down at himself as a little boy again in a single-mother household. My assumption from the visual aesthetics is that his father died in World War 2 before he was born.
- The second time frame is when he is looking down at himself as a father to his young daughter.
- The third time frame is when he is looking down at himself as his adult daughter cares for him, locked into his body and unable to tell her any of the things that his pain prevented him from saying.
- The fourth time frame is at the very end, where he sees the generational trauma and how it was handled after he was gone.
In this video, we can clearly see her pain and fear when her daughter, the man’s grandchild, tries to enter the room where he is being fed as the old man. The adult daughter hurriedly gets up and rushes the child back out of the room to avoid repeats from the past.
To me, what the adult daughter is doing with her father isn’t showing gratitude – but appreciation. While it seems beyond doubt he cared for her physical needs, it also seems beyond doubt that he DIDN’T care for her emotional needs. She sees that. But she also seems to see that his pain was unrelated to her.
Expressing gratitude to someone that is just trying to get through the pain of their daily life just feels like it has too much potential to drag generational trauma back to the surface in the form of assumptions of agency. I know that I’ve had painful moments in the past accidentally dredged to the surface by innocuous actions from others, and I desperately want to avoid causing that pain in others.
Since I can’t know at the start of any interaction whether a person contains generational trauma or not, I prefer to completely change my internal and external language away from ‘Showing Gratitude’ and towards ‘Showing Appreciation’ whenever uncertainty of agency is at play.
I feel healthiest in my own emotions when I make these attempts to see people for who they are in their truest sense moment to moment. That doesn’t mean letting anyone use anger or hate to bully me. It means understanding that their anger and hate might be completely unrelated to me, even while trying to understand how I can learn something new about myself from their anger.
Going further, it feels like trying to appreciate each person for who they are in each moment, without assumptions about their agency or person, allows me to forge a genuine connection that isn’t trapped within either my past or theirs. This allows me to take responsibility for creating healing opportunities for as many people as I interact with.
I can’t take back the actions done by humans in the past. I can’t stop the extinction machine that is humanity. I can’t get back the missed opportunities or connections I once had. I can’t heal anybody else’s pain.
But I can show them appreciation for their truest self, acknowledge that I have very little knowledge of their unique self, and strive to learn from them in any way that I can. In that way, I can try to create opportunities for healing while accepting that I can’t create change in anyone but myself.
I appreciate everyone attending my service. Regardless of your intentions, I feel like I have learned about myself through my interactions with you.
Now, together, let us say our closing words.
Go in peace. Believe in peace. Create peace.