Reading Emmons book on gratitude Thanks, he discusses people that have neutral or negative gratitude. Paraphrasing greatly, being an ingrate or ungrateful is a close spiritual equivalent to a crime against god.
I recently interacted with some people that were incredibly ungrateful for significant help from others. It was a flashback to hanging out with people in active addiction & alcoholics that are still drinking. There was no sense of responsibility for the negative events they had recently experienced and little meaningful thankfulness for the support they were getting from others. In other words, there was no pleasing them no matter what was done for them.
People with a Narcissistic Personality disorder were also found to have (much) less gratitude than others. Since the NPDs think so much of themselves and so much time thinking about themselves, they had little time to think of others or have empathy for them.
In thinking about my teenage years when my family was falling apart made me realize how ungrateful I was for the gifts that I had. I was an angry young man and mad at the world. There was little room for gratitude in my spiritual toolkit. The reasons why that was true matter little in hindsight. Even the missed opportunity of many potential good memories, while tragic, matters little at this time. What does matter is that I know now how to be grateful for the gifts I have. It took me a long time to learn this, but thank god that I did finally a strong sense of gratitude in my life.
I strive to focus on the good stuff with my gratitude blog posts. Tonight's reading about the lack of gratitude struck a chord reminding how it used to be. All the more reason to be grateful now.
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