Episode 38: How to Feel Real Gratitude (Without Falling Into Toxic Gratitude)

Gratitude is everywhere this time of year... on journals, Instagram posts, Pinterest boards, and inspirational mugs. Everyone talks about how important it is to "practice gratitude," but what happens if that becomes toxic gratitude?

Real gratitude doesn’t require you to pretend. It doesn’t demand a smile or erase your struggles or silence your truth.

If you’re tired of being told you "should be grateful," or you’ve ever felt guilty for not feeling thankful enough, this episode will feel like stepping back into your own skin.

🧹Housekeeping note: the show will be on temporary hiatus until Tuesday, December 9th so that I can enjoy the Thanksgiving holiday and have some time to focus on Simply Dag.

Subscribe to my weekly newsletter, The Unicorn Dispatch, here: https://sara-causey.kit.com/2d8b7742dd

Sara's award-winning biography of Dag can be found on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Decoding-Unicorn-New-Look-Hammarskj%C3%B6ld-ebook/dp/B0DSCS5PZT

Her forthcoming project, Simply Dag, will release globally on July 29, 2026. 

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

In Episode 38 of the Decoding the Unicorn podcast, host Sara Causey discusses the difference between genuine gratitude and toxic gratitude. She announces a two-week hiatus due to the Thanksgiving holiday and her work on a nonfiction manuscript. Sara emphasizes that true gratitude involves presence, awareness, and truth, without denying difficulties. She criticizes the pressure to express gratitude under duress and highlights the importance of recognizing one's emotions without judgment. Sara also discusses the social conditioning and cultural expectations that contribute to toxic gratitude, advocating for a more authentic and expansive approach to gratitude.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Gratitude, toxic gratitude, holiday hiatus, nonfiction manuscript, leadership style, team credit, introvert pressure, performance review, spiritual gaslighting, social conditioning, hustle culture, spiritual bypassing, gratitude journal, emotional alignment, holiday season.

Welcome to the Decoding the Unicorn podcast. Here's your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, Hello and thanks for tuning in. Welcome to Episode 38 of decoding the unicorn the podcast, I appreciate you joining me today. In this episode, I want to talk about how to feel real gratitude, as opposed to toxic gratitude, or gratitude under pressure. And on that note, I want to pull the curtain back and do a little bit of housekeeping. The podcast will be on temporary hiatus for the next two weeks. Next week in the US is Thanksgiving. And full disclosure, I am up to my eyeballs in work to do for my next nonfiction manuscript, Simply Dag. That is absolutely 100% a tremendous passion project, and I'm so committed to not only making sure that every i is dotted and every T is crossed, but that it really feels the way it's supposed to feel. So between the holiday and wanting to make sure that I'm present for friends and family, as well as having this extra work to do at the moment, it just makes sense to give myself a couple of weeks off. So with that being said, new episodes will resume, looking at the calendar here on Tuesday, December the ninth, but for the two weeks in between now and December the ninth, we will be on temporary hiatus. In the meantime, stay tuned, and let's talk about gratitude,

Political intrigue, Cold War drama, cloak and dagger maneuvers. Read 2025. Most intriguing book about one of history's forgotten figures. Pick up your copy of Decoding the Unicorn: A New Look at Dag Hammarskjold today.

We're definitely in the time of the year when it feels like gratitude is everywhere, all over your social media, on Pinterest, boards, Instagram, reels and people telling you to just be thankful. But what if that's not organic? What if that's not where you're at in your life right now? Should you really feel that you're forced into expressing gratitude or saying something in gratitude when it's not matching your experience. Should you be forced to give thanks for experiences that feel truly heinous in the moment? What if you're angry, frustrated, afraid, concerned, nervous about the future, angry over something someone said to you, and it's justifiable anger. Should you really have to say, I give thanks for this experience that's making me want to tear my hair out. Isn't that where we start to diverge from gratitude that's healthy and should be expressed, as opposed to toxic gratitude? And I put I'm thankful. I'm white knuckling my way through life right now, but I'm sure thankful for it. I put that squarely in the toxic gratitude category. Bringing this back to dag for a moment, because that's important. This is a podcast dedicated to him. After all, one of the things that I really admire about DAGs leadership style is that if there was a boo boo, if there was a mess up, Dag said it's on me. I take responsibility for it. I'm the one that's leading this organization, and if something went off the rails, that's on me. But if it was time to take a victory lap, Dag would always give credit to the entire Secretariat. He wouldn't say, I did this. Look at me. I'm so impressive. I'm so mighty and powerful. It was we all did this. This was a joint effort. It couldn't have happened without the team. And that wasn't something that he only did privately, either. It was about expressing thanks to the team in private and in public. And I think both of those elements are so important, it's good to be congratulatory and warm inside the organization and outside the organization as well. Something that I would add about this time of the year in particular is it can feel like those of us who fall into the introvert or HSP category, it's almost like we get more pressure placed upon us to feel serene and grateful, where the more extroverted people might be running around at Thanksgiving, talking to everybody and drinking and hooping it up. It's almost like, if you want to read a book in the corner, or you want to step outside get a breath of fresh air and center yourself, to get away from the yelling and the screaming and the craziness, it's like, well, what's wrong with you? You need to be grateful. You need to get in here and eat this food and be with the family. And it's like, Can I hear my own thoughts for five seconds? Why is that a bad thing? Sometimes gratitude feels less like a feeling and more like a performance review, whether it's a performance review from friends and family that are all gathered around. For the holidays or a performance review from the universe, almost like is God testing me? Is Source Energy testing me? If I'm not conducting myself with the utmost grace and poise in this moment, am I going to be cursed? That's a lot of pressure to me. Real gratitude involves presence, awareness and truth. It is not about denying difficulty or like the meme of the dog where everything is on fire and he's like, I'm fine. This is fine. That's just a version of lying to yourself. You can still recognize even small moments of goodness without lying to yourself, but in my mind, you don't have to real gratitude, it seems to me, is quieter. It's like the Scriptures about the still small voice. It's a quieter kind of emotion, as opposed to something that's theatrical, like I'm performing gratitude, because I feel that it's expected of me, but it's not a genuine feeling inside my heart. A few indicators that can show that you're slipping into what I would call toxic gratitude, some of the things that might go through your head in that situation, well, other people have it worse. I shouldn't complain, because other people have a worse reality than I do. So if I say something negative, then I'm being bad, or I'm inviting negative karma. I should be grateful, even though this situation is harmful. If you're in a situation that is abusive, criminal, etc, why on earth would you sit back and say, I guess I better grin and bear it. I guess I better say I'm grateful for it. No another one is I have to stay positive or something bad will happen. I will manifest something bad. God will curse me. Something bad will happen if I if I ever slip out of a positive vibration and feel, you know, human, something bad will happen to me. And last but not least, I'm fine. Really, everything's fine. I'm fine, like the dog meme. This is fine. Everything's fine. It's very robotic. That kind of toxic gratitude, basically, is a form of spiritual gaslighting. It could be self inflicted. It could be religious or spiritual trauma that was placed upon you in childhood. An authority figure may have told you that. You may have been told if you ever say, I'm frustrated, I'm mad, I don't like this, I don't want this, I don't deserve this, then you'll be punished by the universe, by Source energy, by God, by Jesus, by whomever. You'll be punished if you ever have a human emotion. Sometimes it also comes upon us by people who are well meaning but oblivious. I'm thinking now of that scene in office space where the lady's like, somebody's got a case of the Mondays, like, oh my god, lady, we're not always going to come to work or sit down at our desk to do whatever tasks we have feeling like Suzy sunshine. That is not a realistic goal for a human being in a flesh suit. So where does toxic gratitude come from? One part of it is social conditioning, and I would say especially for women, because I'm thinking now about my childhood. I was born toward the end of Gen X, and that was still in the period of time where we got some of that sugar and spice and everything nice. That's what girls are made of. Boys are supposed to be competitive, they're supposed to be aggressive. They're supposed to have a backbone. But if a woman behaves that way, she's going to be ostracized. She won't be liked other girls will not like her. Boys will not like her either. She will be ostracized from the herd. I think introverts and HSPs also get it too, because we're not always jazz hands and super social. You get this messaging of, be pleasant, be grateful. Don't rock the boat like my experiences in corporate America. You don't have to go and hang out by the water cooler and do a lot of chit chat, but it would really be nice if you did. You don't have to give up your Saturday to come and play cornhole with us when you'd rather be with friends and family and taking care of your own private business after you've worked all week long and been Uber productive, you don't have to come and do this for us, but it would really be good if you did. There's also hustle culture in modernity. Feel grateful for the work you you have. Feel grateful even if you hate what you're doing because some people don't have a job, or you're trying to build a business, you don't get to take a day off. You don't get to enjoy Thanksgiving. You don't get to enjoy Christmas or Hanukkah. You're supposed to work and work and work, because if you don't, your competitor is coming for you. Another one is spiritual bypassing. And that is this weird construct that we have sometimes, that gratitude will override any kind of negative emotion, and vice versa. If we slip into something that we have branded as a negative emotion, then we'll curse ourselves, or we'll bring negative karma upon ourselves. Gratitude, really, in my opinion and in my experience, does not come from forcing it. It comes from greater alignment. Anytime in my life where I've started to do rehearsed gratitude assignments, whether that's using a gratitude journal or getting up in the morning and saying five things that you're grateful for, it was always because I was out of alignment. I was in a sort of Dysthymic period in my life where I didn't feel good, I didn't feel like things were going the way that I wanted them to, and I was trying to force myself to be grateful, like, maybe I'll feel better, maybe I won't feel like Eeyore if I get up in the morning and I'm like, Well, I'm grateful that I have air to breathe, I'm grateful that I have a glass of water. I'm grateful that I have a bed. At some point, it's just like recitation. You're not even saying anything that you're connecting to. You're just putting words out of your mouth to say that you did it.

I think also this time of the year, we have to look out for the gratitude police, whether that is you, yourself, doing it to you, or it's outsiders, friends and family, etc. Gratitude is expansive. It should feel good. It should feel in alignment with other emotions, like happiness, joy, peace, tranquility. It shouldn't feel like you're being policed. It shouldn't feel like a deity in the sky, or your mother or your auntie is standing there like, You should be ashamed. Other people don't have jobs and you're complaining about yours. Other people don't have businesses and you're complaining about yours. Other people have worse health issues and you're complaining about your health issues. Like, okay, but real gratitude isn't based on making somebody feel small, guilty, ashamed, etc, real gratitude can coexist with things like grief, frustration and uncertainty. These various emotions don't erase the other one. It's okay to say I'm thankful to be here, but right now, my life is not what I want it to be. I've never seen, I mean, knock on wood, I guess anything can happen, but I've never seen somebody get hit by a lightning bolt out of the blue for saying that. Some ways that you can cultivate gratitude or feel it without forcing it absolutely you can talk about things that are small and specific to you. It doesn't have to be grandiose things, like, I'll be happy or I'll be grateful when I win the lottery, I'll be happy, I'll be grateful when I have a million dollar month in my business. Like, you can simply say I'm grateful for my dog or my cat. I'm grateful that I have a streaming service that I like, and I can sit down at night and watch television that is engaging to me, or I'm happy that I get to write, I'm happy that I get to create. Gratitude can begin with relief and release, as opposed to obligation. I think you can also evaluate your gratitude by asking a simple question, Does this feel expansive, or does this feel like a contraction? Do I feel like I'm squeezing myself into an uncomfortable girl, or do I feel like I'm free when I express this? Does it feel Does it feel good? And I think that you can also commingle a number of things together that may sound contradictory, but aren't. I hate this. I'm tired, and I'm grateful for my bed. I hate this. I'm tired, I'm frustrated, but at least I get to go to sleep. At least I get to just rest for the night, or I'm not looking forward to work in the morning, but at least for tonight, I can pop some popcorn, hang out on the couch and read a great book or watch a great movie. All of those things can be true simultaneously. Yeah, so in closing, I think it's important to remember that gratitude is not about sainthood. You don't earn magical, cosmic points for pretending that everything is fine when it so obviously isn't. And I think real gratitude should feel like ease. It should feel like, you know, right after you've had a shoulder massage, and it's just the tension melts away. Toxic. Gratitude feels constricting, it feels negative, it feels nasty, whereas real gratitude actually feels good, and it feels genuine and it feels real. So whatever you may be doing this holiday season, I hope that you're in a space that feels good, it feels safe, it feels warm and it feels inviting for you, enjoy yourselves, and I will see you in December.

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