Gratitude and human dignity

What they give to each other

Welcome to this new platform for my writing and newsletters. For those of you who are not familiar with me or my work, one of my strongest passions is harnessing the role of 'deep gratitude' to bring about flourishing relationships and ultimately a more peaceful world. I hope you will join me in exploring the personal enrichment we can find in developing our gratitude and self-awareness in challenging situations and how to be happy with being less than perfect as we do so. One thing is for certain, I’m not there yet.

Recently, I was asked to speak on the role of gratitude at a school that has made ‘human dignity’ their theme for 2024. What a powerful and poignant theme at a time when human dignity is being sacrificed on such a grand scale in the midst of such senseless and tragic atrocities. I welcomed this opportunity to be with the school leaders. I have the strong belief that our own individual acts, our conversations, our thoughts, our feelings, can have a transformative and positive impact if we consciously direct them in ways that we think the world should be going – towards compassion, kindness, love and a profound respect for human dignity.

So how can gratitude give a person dignity and conversely how can the pursuit of human dignity enhance our awareness of the meaning of gratitude?

I have witnessed this interrelationship most profoundly in the efforts of teachers and leaders who are trying to practise gratitude in tough schools. When I offered a gratitude workshop at one such school the staff recognised that there was a lot of gratitude flowing from the teachers to each other and to the students, but it was very difficult for them to be grateful to the parents.

At the time, the participation rate by parents in school activities or events was very low, with only a small number regularly helping out on canteen duty, reading activities or excursions. Many children were in the third generation of welfare dependency and often their parents had not been successful at school themselves, and some were traumatised at the thought of having any interaction with the teachers. In the school district there was a higher-than-average crime, drug and alcohol-abuse rate, as well as a high incidence of abuse and neglect of children. Many students came to school without having breakfast and with no food to sustain them during the day. Sometimes teachers were subjected to verbal abuse from some parents.

As the workshop progressed, I was asked how I could possibly think that gratitude could have a place towards parents who neglected and abused their children, and on the whole, resented the school and the teachers. Some of these teachers were most upset at the very thought of practising gratitude towards such parents.

Gratitude has an illuminating power to show us areas where it is hard or isn’t working. It didn’t take long for the burning question to arise (like it does in most other contexts where I have worked): How can we be grateful when we feel so resentful?

The principal of this primary school was only prepared to explore gratitude as a practice if all the teachers came on board. Despite their reticence and scepticism, they bravely decided to unite around her and take the whole year to practise gratitude towards the parents. However, practising gratitude straightaway was a stretch too far for some of them. As I explore in Untangling you: How can I be grateful when I feel so resentful? they first needed to address their resentment.

In the space of that year, the situation went from little or no communication and a huge amount of collective resentment from the teachers to the parents and vice versa, to that of the teachers holding a gratitude breakfast for the parents at the end of the year!  Accepting an invitation to attend, I was very moved by the high number of parents who came, but more than that by how many of the teachers mucked in and helped with the barbeque, serving bacon and eggs to the parents. This was a celebration of improved communication – many more parents coming into the school grounds and attending parent-teacher interviews, and many more teachers attending to their gratitude for these parents.

Gratitude gave the teachers and leaders dignity, and it also gave the parents dignity. In the end, it gave the whole school a greater sense of dignity. So what was it about the power of gratitude that generated this result?

Even though it was natural for these teachers to hold on to their resentment as a way of making a statement about the injustices and abuse they had witnessed, they were able to see that this did nothing but diminish the parents, and also their own dignity by the way they had thought and publicly talked about these parents.

When we feel that people are resentful towards us, we shut down, we have our radars up for where we feel judged, we judge ourselves, we even become paranoid. We don’t bring our best selves to our interactions with others so our resentment tends to repel others and it’s actually really hard to be with or listen to someone when they are in that state.

The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas has argued that a sense of interconnectedness is required if we are to assume the “radical responsibility” for the other that is needed to make us act ethically and behave truly as a human being should. I feel that the same radical responsibility is required if we are to enact a sense of human dignity. In a school context, this means that we focus not only on the relationships that are easy, but also take on the challenge of working on those that are difficult.

What these teachers needed was a way to find their gratitude, a way to access and remember what they received from the parents, and to rediscover the goodness in them. Resentment makes us forget whereas gratitude helps us remember. Gratitude will help us to be with the person and look beyond the resentment, and that is such a gift to both parties. It can be life-saving for the relationship.

Gratitude is a crucial way of acknowledging the value of the other person by recognising what they give to us. When these teachers practised looking at what they received from the parents rather than being resentful about what was taken away, they were able to enter into a relationship of radical responsibility with them. They were able to develop a sense of interconnectedness rather than complete avoidance and separation. This deepened further when they acted upon their gratitude, for example by writing letters to the parents to acknowledge the joy their child gave them or thanking them for sending them in their school uniform.

Such a shift was no small feat for many of those teachers. Some had to dig deep to find the answer to what they had received from the parent, so that their actions wouldn’t just come across as false praise or empty words. Some also found that they needed to step out of their own privileged upbringing and put themselves in the shoes of some of these parents to ascertain how to express their gratitude in ways that would be meaningful to the parents. What words to use? When and how to say thank you? Should they phone or text? Would it be too intimidating to go and greet them with a heart of gratitude down at the school gates?

I love the quote from poet and author Ben Okri, who says, “To listen is to suffer”.  A powerful act of gratitude is to choose to listen to those people whom we don’t really want to listen to, those who have caused us resentment or whom we feel resent us. To engage in such listening allows us to move beyond our pain. Turning to gratitude helps us to see that the relationship is something that we treasure above all else.

Importantly, this doesn’t mean that we are going to solve others’ problems or that we are therapists or helpers. Nor does it mean that we necessarily want to be good friends with them. Our expressions of gratitude acknowledge and recognise their inherent value, and hopefully help them to acknowledge this in themselves. Herein lies the path to human dignity and to enriching our understanding of the power of gratitude.