SUNDAY GRATITUDE EXTRAVAGANZA: The Gratitude Edition
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I’m grateful for a gorgeous sunny morning. I’m grateful for understanding. I’m grateful for feeling better. I’m grateful for what’s in front of me. I’m grateful for peace and calm. I’m grateful to be sober today.
The Gratitude Edition
Welcome to the Sunday Gratitude Extravaganza. One of the things that made me such a versatile alcoholic was my ability to ignore things directly in front of my face. It’s not an eyesight thing. As I was flailing around for possible themes for the Extravaganza (they were uniformly bad this week), I had to pause to write one of those silly gratitude lists that I do every single morning, and the thought suddenly occurred to me,
“Why don’t we dance with who brung us?”
As will produce no surprise, this topic has been broached before here and probably stomped pretty flat:
How it Works: Gratitude
If the thing at the center of alcoholism and addiction is a dysfunctional ego, the alcoholic sense that we’re never quite getting what we should be getting, gratitude seems to be one of the forces that helps neutralize it.
Obviously, I’m a very big believer in gratitude. I will say, flat-out, gratitude is the most important thing, attribute, whatever you want to call it, that I’ve learned in sobriety. Even more flat-out,
Gratitude is responsible for my sobriety.
When I started writing the gratitude lists, in November of 2020, I thought they were exercises in estimating salvage value. Meaning, instead of the once fabulous things that adorned my life, I was now reduced to finding value and meaning in a cup of coffee, or the sun on the horizon from the back porch of the sober house. The old views about sobriety being a punishment, a long-term stint in the quiet study hall, were still very much front and center. The early gratitude lists were about re-setting my expectations for this sobriety-reduced life. Other people can be grateful for a glorious sunset on Mykonos, I’m going to be grateful for that spoonful of peanut butter and we’ll call it square.
I read the early gratitude lists and they certainly reflect elements of “force,” being applied to the process. The sentiments didn’t exactly roll off the tongue and I was grateful for a lot of very wordy things as well.1 But never mind, the point was to do them, on a daily basis. Let me pause here for a couple of ground rules I’ve developed for myself:
I do them in the morning, usually after sitting on the pirate balcony for a few moments, coffee in hand. I need a little time for the gratitude and coffee to percolate. Some people like evening and I can see how that works, too. I’m a morning person.
They are short. When I read my long gratitude lists, I think I was trying to convince someone else or myself of something.
I like to do them with sentences that start with “I’m grateful.” Some might consider this redundant and I get that. A bulleted list could work just as well, I think.
The point is not to produce profound realizations, the point is to take a snapshot of me asking myself, “what are we grateful for right now?”
Repetition is encouraged. A jillion of mine mention coffee. That’s because I’m super grateful for coffee. Every.Single.Day. When the same thing comes up in the gratitude list over and over, that’s usually worth noting.
They need to be about more than waking up alive. Obviously, I’m grateful for waking up alive, also things like breathing and still having my own hair, but expressing those things doesn’t really move me. If it works for you, that’s very cool, I probably still have more material attachments to release.
They need to be daily and they need to feel hard sometimes. Otherwise, in my experience, they tend to not be true.
They need to be true. There are some things I will never feel grateful for and saying I’m grateful for something before I feel that way is a form of self-dishonesty.
Those are not rules, just things I’ve learned that help keep the practice of writing a daily gratitude list productive for me.2 Now, the bigger question, why does it work? How can it be connected to sobriety? Here’s what I’ve come up with so far.
Alcoholism is driven partly by the belief that life will never get better, and also by the frustration and resentments generated by people never seeming to do what we alcoholics want them to do. A gratitude list provides at least a temporary respite, a glimpse into the things that are right with the world this morning for these few moments. Here’s my list of things that I think gratitude helps accomplish:
Gratitude lists forced me to be present. What am I grateful for right now? That’s the question I answered each morning.3
Gratitude lists showed me I had what I needed. This alcoholic was driven to lunacy by the belief that there was always more to be had, that I would finally be happy if I just could add x, y or z to my life. Writing a gratitude list every morning exposed that lie.
Gratitude lists helped me see myself. As I saw what emerged on my gratitude lists, it wasn’t the stuff I’d been chasing or that I thought was necessary. I started to see what was really important to me, the things that actually produced real gratitude, real happiness.
Gratitude lists let me reframe the hard things. There are things in every life that produce hurt, disappoint and fear. Gratitude helped me see that even in the hardest moments, there was something of value in the pain. Usually something I needed to learn. Learning to see that then let me see the beauty in that moment and in the pain I was feeling.
Gratitude lists convinced me there was a Higher Power out there. As I started to reframe things, I began to see a purpose and the connectedness of things. I began to see that life was not simply a series of unfortunate, random events that felt better after a few drinks—I began to see patterns, I began to see the gauzy outlines of the life I was meant to lead.
Gratitude lists showed me being happy wasn’t as hard as I thought it was.
Gratitude lists connected me to other people and taught me empathy.
Gratitude lists showed me my place in the Universe. Gratitude is like a science fiction traction beam; when expressed daily, it literally pulls you to the spot you were meant to occupy.4
And some other stuff. Also, the power of gratitude is not limited in scope to only alcoholics and addicts. It will transform any life it is allowed to enter. All of my lists end with, “I’m grateful to be sober today.” I don’t think that’s a requirement or a necessity. That last sentence every morning is my recognition that gratitude is a big part of what propels the flywheel of sobriety:
Gratitude helped establish the foundations and necessary pre-conditions for my sobriety. Sobriety then produces a shit-ton of stuff to be grateful for.
I’ve had sponsees suggest that the daily gratitude lists have a sneaky power. Some claim, before you know it, you’re waking up in the morning and instead of first feeling that sense of familiar and terrible dread, the feeling you’re typically engaged in hand-to-hand combat with all day, there is a sudden, maybe fleeting appreciation for some random thing, like, that coffee is really f***** excellent today. Thank you. And then it’s something else the next day, or maybe the coffee is just really great again. Then you’re waking up and you actually want to start writing these things down, because there are a couple of them now, because it feels good. Because you maybe want to share it with someone else.
The point is, the sneaky gratitude lists have you accidentally looking in another direction, seeing the things that were always there, but just didn’t get noticed.5 I started seeing the things that were the important things to me. I started seeing that those things, the ones that were important to me, kept showing up on a pretty regular basis.
Is gratitude the secret key to the universe? Maybe. I’ll check back with you tomorrow.
1. The Science of Gratitude is Undeniable.
2. Half-Empty vs. Half-Full; Going Up or Down?
3. Don’t Do it This Much
4. It Turns Out There Aren’t Many Good Jokes About Gratitude
5. Someone Actually Wrote About the Dark Side of Gratitude
The Field Sobriety Guides are Here!
TFLMS Field Sobriety Guide: No. 01 “Am I Lost
I’m excited to announce that Field Sobriety Guide No. 01 is currently ranked as one of the top 585,000 books in the world. You can change that by simply clicking that link!
For us, reading and writing have been a big part of recovery and sobriety. We thought we’d start sharing some of our favorite books on the topic of recovery, addiction and general happiness and telling you how they helped us! If you have ideas, thoughts, comments, suggestions or if there are some books that you’d like to chat about, well, we’d love to do that with you. 6
Now, here’s something new. You may have heard me mention something about writing your story in the style of Bill W’s: and this is where we are going to do it. If you want to write your story and share it, I’ll be happy to put it here for other folks to read. If you’d like to record yourself reading your own story (I highly, highly recommend this), I’ll put it here, too.
The “Anyone Anywhere” Meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous
It’s the “Anyone Anywhere” meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, this Tuesday evening at 7pm. We’re ready to go and hope you can join us this Tuesday! It’s 1/2 AA Meeting, 1/2 Alcoholic Book Club and 1/2 something else we haven’t figured out yet. We’ve been reading the “Stories from the Back of the Book,” and they are all so great. It’s a fun way to learn more about the Big Book and reading these stories out loud is a little like listening to the legends of AA share.
Hope you can join us!
From the TFLMS Archives:
I clearly think writing in volume is a good thing, so I’m not going to suggest otherwise to you, except that the Twitter-enforced discipline of 140 characters did wonders for my gratitude lists.
I know I called them “rules,” but that’s mostly for my own benefit.
The answer has never been “nothing.”
Yes, please note the one above about “reframing hard things.”
Please Note: Trickery and deceit are allowed as part of recovery. I was told, “yes, bring your golf clubs,” by a tricky rehab admissions counselor. I’m very grateful for that particular lie. No golf pun intended.
Seriously, write a book review (or we might expand into movies!) and we’ll probably put it up.
So many great points made, gratitude is definitely not only a feeling but a practice of perspective and acknowledgement of reality. Truly humbling. Thank you for such an in-depth sharing of your journey and process!
Thank you thank you ❤️