#141 - Gratitude, But Not The Toxic Kind

Let’s be real: sometimes, being told to “just be grateful” when things are hard feels… gross. We get it. Gratitude can be helpful, but not when it’s used to slap a smiley face sticker over real pain.

In this episode, Allie and Ellen talk about what taking a descriptive approach to gratitude looks like. It’s the kind that helps you carry the hard stuff, not erase it. Allie shares what she’s learned while recovering from a serious fall (and yes, her therapist will be proud of this one), and Ellen dives into why “good vibes only” doesn’t help us or our clients.

Whether you’re a pet parent knee-deep in the messy middle or a pro helping others through it, this episode is your reminder that you can say “this sucks”… and still find the tiny glimmers along the way.

TLDL (too long, didn’t listen):

1️⃣ Gratitude isn’t pretending it’s all fine – You can acknowledge hardship and find small things to appreciate; both can be true.

2️⃣ Little glimmers matter – Whether it’s a client breakthrough, a funny pet moment, or a small win, collecting and revisiting these moments helps you stay grounded when things get tough.

3️⃣ Build your support system – Surround yourself with people who help you see the light when you’re ready and know when to just sit with you in the dark.

For the full episode show notes, including the resources mentioned in this episode, go here.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Allie: my therapist is gonna be so proud of me, y'all, one of the skills that I had to learn in order to be able to do this was using and in my sentences, and obviously like I can use the word and in like regular sentences, like I, you, but specifically saying like, this is hard.

And I'm grateful that it's not harder or, or whatever it is, you know, for, for, for my particular situation. Um, It sucks to not be independent and mobile and I'm glad I'm alive. So like, yeah, that's, both of those things can be simultaneously true. 

Welcome to Enrichment for the Real World, the podcast devoted to improving the quality of life of pets and their people through enrichment. We are your hosts, Allie Bender...

[00:00:54] Emily: ...and I'm Emily Strong...

[00:00:56] Allie: ...and we are here to challenge and expand your view of what enrichment is, what enrichment can be and what enrichment can do for you and the animals in your lives. Let's get started.

Thank you for joining us for today's episode of Enrichment for the Real World, and I want to thank you for rating, reviewing, and subscribing wherever you listen to podcasts.

Gratitude does not have to be forced or fluffy. In this episode, Ellen and I unpack how appreciation can help lighten the emotional load of pet care without ignoring how hard it can be.

[00:01:28] Ellen: I don't know about you, but there have been multiple times in my life where people say that I should be expressing gratitude and it just gives me the absolute ick. And so today episode, we're talking about gratitude, which I think is I don't know what the word to put in here happens to be given what has happened to you recently, which we will share some of that. But I think it's a good thing to say we're not going for the IIC factor here. We're not going for toxic positivity. We are going for a genuine practice that is to help you through some of the darker times. 

[00:02:03] Allie: I think the, this topic is appropriately timed. Ironically timed. I don't know. There's, there's an adjective in here that is correct and I'm not sure which it is. But I recently had an accident. I, I fell during rock climbing and broke a whole lot of bones. I'm fine y'all.

It's, it's all good. I've been cracking jokes from the beginning in addition to cracking bones from the beginning. So like, we're all good. But I spent a month in. Well, two weeks in the hospital, two weeks in inpatient rehab, all of that. So I've had to tell my story to many, many people during that time.

And it was really interesting on a, on a day-to-day basis, based on how I feel and how people reacted of first, there's like the shock of like, you did what now? Because I fell 35 feet and that's a lot of feet. But then i, I watch people go through, I'm gonna call it this. Gratitude rollercoaster where their first thing was, oh my God, that's terrible. And then it was, oh my God, I'm so glad that you're alive and your brain and spine and all of that are okay.

And then. They would look at me again and be like, oh, but you also broke a bunch of bones, and that sucks. And so I think that's like what we're talking about today is there are a whole lot of feelings and emotions that go with the sucky parts of your life. And I talked to my therapist quite a bit about how to navigate feeling gratitude for the things that are good in that situation, but also like. Not dismissing the things that do suck about that situation. So yeah, this is a, an appropriately timed podcast episode for my life. I.

[00:04:01] Ellen: I think the thing that always gave me the ick was this, like the way that people leveraged the idea of gratitude was to make the hard go away, and that wasn't like the heart is there. The heart exists. The heart is real. I don't need to pretend that everything's fine when it's not fine, and I can also find some things that are good happening. Maybe not in the experience itself, but in the world in general. I think knowing how that term or the idea of that practice has been leveraged makes it really valid that some people get the ick, like, how, how dare you in this dark time? You tell me that I need to be, have gratitude for this. This very specific thing, like that's very invalidating. It's not, it's not helpful. It's in fact quite harmful. And that toxic positivity is, I think, really counterproductive to behavior change and wellbeing. It doesn't help us in any way, shape, or form.

[00:04:59] Allie: A hundred percent like we need to. Acknowledge all of our feeling. My therapist is gonna be so proud of me for this episode. We need to acknowledge all of our feelings in order to be able to work through them and, and toxic positivity, just like shoves those, some of those feelings under a rug. And, and that's the, we're just repressing it and that doesn't help.

[00:05:22] Ellen: Yeah, and I think to tie, like tie things all together where. Podcast about enrichment. Enrichment for the pets, the people that care for them, the professionals that help, the people that care for them. For anybody who doesn't have a pet, like enrichment is for everyone. But to tie it into our little area, when we're working with clients, our goal is not. To dismiss all of the hardship that comes with caring for a living, being particularly caring for a living being that has really high support needs or really strict constraints on what life can look like and be safe for everyone. Safe and ideally comfortable for everyone. And so like we try really hard to find those small celebration points because when you are in the swamp, like the big ugly. Swamp of despair in my head, it looks like the bog of unbearable stench. Is that what it's called in labyrinth? Like this is, my labyrinth was very critical to my developmental period. I have a lot of references to it. Ally's dying. It's great. I think having an outside perspective on those little things that doesn't say, forget all that darkness. This is what you should latch onto, but. Even in this, all this darkness, when you are ready, here is something else that you can appreciate is really important.

[00:06:41] Allie: I think one of the. Most helpful, impactful things that we can do as consultants, especially at the very beginning of somebody's journey, is to acknowledge that yeah, that sucks, and I'm sorry that you're in that position. 'Cause I know they're probably hearing a lot of different things ranging from, the shame and guilt side to the toxic po toxic positivity side and all of that. And I know that for me as a consultant, once I. Acknowledge that my client is in a less than ideal situation.

I can just see like the shoulders drop and the sigh of relief and they're like, it does suck. And now that we've acknowledged it, cool, let's figure out how to move forward. And I think we don't do that enough for ourselves. I know that, I don't know if this is true for you, Ellen, but it's definitely true for me where I, I practice toxic positivity more with myself than I do any other human being.

[00:07:46] Ellen: Oh yeah. I'm also in PT right now and I can't tell you the number of times I have. Been able to convince myself of things that my medical care professionals are like, nah, nah. Their eyes get all big. They hold their breath and I'm like, I, everything's great. And they're like, no, it's not. No. So, yes, I think it's hard to do for ourselves, there are a couple of things that I had to learn to be able to do this. One is back to we're not trying to banish the dark. We're not trying to pretend it does ex We are trying to just say, yeah, a lot sucks right now, and look at how cute my dog is when he sleeps. Like it can be something really, really tiny.

Just those little glimmers. your day. The other thing I had to do, because language matters so much, is swap gratitude for something else. And so when we work with our clients, it's essentially a practice of gratitude, but we, they find things to celebrate sometimes they're really, really small. Sometimes it is. See, here's the thing. When things are really dark, those really, really small, no longer feel really, really small. And so like it's, it's hard to come up with something that to the outside world, it would feel like nothing because I know all of the context and all of the things, but sometimes it's as much as like you saw your dog hold its breath. When you have a dog that went what feels like to immediately snapping and lunging, a dog hold its breath and give you a second to be like, oh my bad. Hands up. Everybody stop moving is a really big win. So whether you wanna call it a win, a celebration, something that you appreciate, just an acknowledgement. I think what's important is to go for the practice of the thing, not the label of gratitude.

[00:09:34] Allie: It's almost like you should take the descriptive pro approach instead of prescriptive approach.

[00:09:41] Ellen: I don't have a witty retort to that. I wish I had a witty retort to that, but I, but I don't. So there's that, it's almost like these, things that we learn are applicable in so many different environments that we never think are applicable. And generalization is a thing and that's a different podcast for a different day.

[00:10:01] Allie: Yeah. But it's a great segue into the next next point of this, of remembering that this is a skill and all skills are learnable, teachable, doable, practicable, whatever Hubble you want to add to that, words are hard. It's fine. Um. But yeah, like I, I think we get so caught up as a society about like optimistic people and pessimistic people, and like if you're a glass half full person and all that, it's like y'all, we can all learn how to do those things.

And also I will tell y'all, Ellen, I would not label you as a pessimistic person. I'd label you as a realistic person and. Reality, just, has a tinge of pessimism to it, just as, as it is. Like this is the bad place. And and you do the skill beautifully of finding the, the wins and celebrations for people in any situation. Like I've, I've seen you do it in so, so many different ways. So like, if you. Listener are like, nah, I can't do this 'cause like, my brain doesn't work that way. I am a pessimistic person, et cetera. Like you can, it's a skill and you can still keep your, your firm grip on reality, which is dowsed sometimes heavily in the negative and still find little glimmers of happiness and, and gratitude and wins.

[00:11:32] Ellen: Yeah, there are a couple of things that I think went into me being able to develop this as a skill. One, I surround myself with people who also do this, so I think that that's a really important part of it. Is having it modeled, having it practiced and seeing how small those little glimmers can be. The second part is in my undergrad I took social psych and there was, I. I don't know. I can't give you a reference for it, but they were looking at the practice of gratitude, specifically within social relationships, generally romantic relationships. And one of the things that they found is if you gave individuals who were in couples counseling the to practice gratitude for the other individual.

So they were supposed to come up with X number of things that they. Were grateful for in their partner, and they were having a bad day and they couldn't come up with any. leap in logic wasn't, I'm having a bad day. I am not in the brain space to find gratitude for specific things. The leap in logic was, oh, I can't find anything I'm grateful for. I must not like my partner. Knowing that there was that cognitive bias means that on a day where I am irritable and cranky and all of those things, if I'm having a hard time coming up with something to be grateful for, my thought process is, oh, it's not that I don't love my dog, or I don't love my partner, or I don't like my partner or like my dog. 'Cause those are too wildly different things for me. It's none of that. It's I'm having a hard day and I probably have some foundational needs that I am not meeting in some way, shape, or form.

So to bring it back to a pet parent, it's hard. Caring for living creatures is hard, particularly in a day and age where there's a lot of chaos happening. routines are abnormal and all of those things, and I always try to snap pictures of my dogs being cute, and so for me, it's like when I smile or when I want to tell my partner to come look at how cute my dog is, I try to take a picture so that when I'm having a hard day, I can go through and just scroll all of the pictures of the times that my dogs looked absolutely ridiculous, but brought me joy.

[00:13:44] Allie: Yeah. Yeah. I, so. Again, tying this further back into Pet Parenthood and, so I think y'all have heard me say that I love animals who are jerks. Like that's very much my type of animal where like they're soft and squishy and marshmallowy on the inside, but on the outside they're just kind of a jerk. And that is Oso to a t. Anybody who knows him knows that this is true. And one of the things that we've noticed as he is getting older, he's 13 this year, like he's a big dog that is an old age for a big dog, is on days where he is not feeling as well.

He's just this kind of sweet snugly dog and it's like, oh, you're not my dog anymore. So I. Actually love now. Like I, I always loved it 'cause that's the type of animal I love. But there, there was a lot more like, why are you frustration feelings around those behaviors Now they delight me so much because it's.

Him being him. So I think, whenever he's, he's a jerk in the house to me and Alex in the moment there might be frustration, but underlying, it's like, Aw, yay, you're feeling good.

[00:15:01] Ellen: Yeah, and I think that's the, it, it is dual sided, right? , It's sad when they age, and there's a lot of anticipatory grief that comes with that. So like a, her entire, she, say she's like a cat because she has a lot of cat-like behaviors including the like. She arches her back and rubs her back like a cat on your face, which is very cute. She was partially raised by a cat, so I think she picked up some mannerisms. But the one thing that is super Cat-like is how she interacts with us when we're trying to make the bed. So all of the videos of cats like diving into the covers and running around and doing all the things, she does it every time. And the first time she didn't do it. It was like, oh, this is gonna be one of those things that I miss. At the end of the day, usually worked all day, did all the laundry, and that's a lot of laundry and all of the things. I just wanna make the bed and get in bed and go to sleep. And Leica is here, running around, having a great time.

But boy does it add a lot of time to the thing. And now it's one of those things that I look forward to every week because. When she feels good, she wants to run around and play and dig and be like a terrier cat thing, and it's very cute. 

Allie and I have talked about how we practice this with our pets. Acknowledge when you're having a hard time, first of all. Very valid. Very real. We do that for our clients. We try to do that for ourselves. We're less good at that, but we do it for each other. So find people who are. help you with that element of it. If you figure out how you like to document, if you're a journaler, then included in your journaling practice. I have video and photo on my phone so that when I'm having a hard day, I can put videos of my dogs making me really proud or things that I'm grateful for. Again, it's not about do you have to feel grateful? It's, I appreciate them. I find joy in them, all of the little things. I have that.

And then for my professional side, pet professionals, here's a little, a little tidbit for you. I have a folder in my email that I called. You really can do this because even though I've been doing this for more than 15 years are still days where it feels like I'm not doing a great job and it's really hard.

And who am I to be helping all of these things. People with their bets and all of the dark thoughts that many of us in the industry have. I made a, you really can't do this folder so that when clients send me updates with those little celebrations, I'm able to put it in there. And what melted me my very core, and it is back to that find, find community or people or. Create an environment where this is an easy thing to practice, is one of my mentees that I had collaborated on collaborated with on a case, sent me an email that said, I got this update from a client. It's going in my celebration folder. I thought you might wanna put it in yours too. And I melted. I couldn't believe that somebody thought one enough about me. To remember and think that like, maybe I share this glimmer with somebody else too, congratulations on the, the actual glimmer itself. She worked really hard to help that family get to point, that gratitude grows in good company. So finding people who will do it for you help you find it when you are having a hard time, I think is so incredibly important.

[00:18:35] Allie: And to, to add to that, finding people who know when and when not to do that for you. I, I think a lot of people in my life. Are good at asking me, do you need to just like wallow for a moment or do you need to find the, the glimmer in this? So I think that's really an important thing too, of recognizing that, only the learner decides what's reinforcing in that moment and, and just feeling comfortable asking the people that you're with. In addition to all the things that Ellen just said of like ways that you can do this, ways that you can build this into your routine one of the things that, again, my therapist is gonna be so proud of me, y'all, one of the skills that I had to learn in order to be able to do this was using and in my sentences, and obviously like I can use the word and in like regular sentences, like I, you, but specifically saying like, this is hard.

And I'm grateful that it's not harder or, or whatever it is, you know, for, for, for my particular situation. Um, It sucks to not be independent and mobile and I'm glad I'm alive. So like, yeah, that's, both of those things can be simultaneously true. Having that particular practice throughout my day, I just like, whenever I have like one thought of like, this sucks.

Now that I've done it so many times, like the next thought that comes into my head is, and, and I can find, that silver lining. So for those of you who struggle with a practice like this that is what really helped me to, to do that.

[00:20:20] Ellen: Yeah. So to recap, gratitude is not about ignoring pain. It is not about. Stuffing the darkness down. It's not about any of those things. It's about finding counterbalance so that you can wade through the darkness and come out the other side. The second part of this is it helps both you and the individuals that you are caring for, whether that is you as a pet parent or you as a professional supporting a pet parent who is supporting a pet, it really is important for you to be okay in order to support others as best as you possibly can. There are times, again, where you're not gonna be okay, and that is also valid and real. And. That's not what this one is about. This is not about that, it helps you feel supported. So if you are a pet parent, to try and find those, those glimmers, the acknowledgements, the appreciation, the gratitude, the celebrations, whatever language works for you. And if you are a pet professional, do that for your clients. Help them because when they're coming to you and they're drowning. It can be really hard for them to do that for themselves.

[00:21:29] Allie: And so if this is something that you would like to incorporate into your own daily life I think one of the easiest ways to do this is to create a place, digital or physical, where you store your glimmers for a dark day. Ellen has her email folder I, because I'm a luddite and this should surprise literally nobody who knows me, I have a physical place where I keep all of the things that people have sent me that says that I can do my job. So start creating that place.

 I hope you enjoy today's episode and if there's someone in your life who also needs to hear this, be sure to text it to them right now. If you're a pet parent looking for more tips on enrichment, behavior modification, and finding harmony with your pet, you can find us on Facebook and Instagram at Pet Harmony training. If you're a behavior or training professional dedicated to enrichment for yourself, your clients, and their pets, check us out on TikTok and Instagram at Pet Harmony Pro.

As always, links to everything we discussed in this episode are in the show notes. Thank you to Ellen Yoakum for editing this episode and making us sound good. Our intro music is from Penguin Music on Pixa Bay. Please rate, review, and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. That helps more pet lovers and professionals find us so they can bring enrichment into their world too.

Thank you for listening, and here's to harmony. 

[00:22:52] Ellen: I am actually very grateful for the shenanigans that Oso pulls in your life because I get to watch and observe them, and I don't know that listeners will be able to see it. But the entirety of this podcast episode, Allie is still in a wheelchair. Oso keeps going over to her office door. We can see him. Through the crack trying to come in because the door was closed because we were recording a podcast episode. He got into the office and then he was like, no, I don't want in the office. Let me out of the office. And then Allie just took the time to go, let him out of the office and then also came back and was like, no, but I want in the office.

I just don't want that door closed. What is so hard about this for you? Humid.

[00:23:30] Allie: It's

[00:23:31] Ellen: clear.

[00:23:32] Allie: a beautiful example of the importance of agency.

I just wanna be able to come in and out of this space at any point in time.

[00:23:41] Ellen: Yes. How dare you thwart me

[00:23:44] Allie: Very.

[00:23:45] Ellen: thumbs

[00:23:46] Allie: How dare you. 

[00:23:48] Ellen: and now he's leaving again.

[00:23:49] Allie: Now he's leaving you.

[00:23:50] Ellen: Shenanigans.