Journaling Gratitude

​I have written about the gratitude journal before. If you missed that episode, here are the Cliff  notes: angry client complains about everything under the sun for several sessions. Therapist suggests that journaling things client feels grateful for might make client feel better. Client vehemently rejects notion of not just journaling gratitude, but the concept of gratitude itself and proceeds to give a view of the world that would make even the most enthusiastic goth feel a bit overwhelmed.
 
The gratitude journal incident was many things, but primarily it was a point of deep contention because it rose out of what felt like a fundamental misunderstanding of who and what I was. Granted, it was an easy mistake to make. Going into a therapist's office and listing all the things wrong with the world from sick kittens to road cones might reasonably be interpreted as a fixation on the negative which could be addressed with some kind of shift in thinking.

​There can be no doubt that at that time I felt broken. But more than that, I felt that the whole world was shattered, to the very core of creation. One of Douglas Adams' books contains the following opening lines:
 
“The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”

​Douglas Adams wrote that as a joke, but sitting in the therapy office his words rang true for me. It was all bad, it was all broken, it was all wrong. Hand me my towel, I'm ready for the hyperspace bypass to come on through. 

​(This is a snippet of a piece written by an anonymous client of Lucid Psychotherapy & Counselling. This piece is a part of a new series of writings on counselling/psychotherapy; a client's perspective.)
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