Grateful and grieving at the same table: reading your feelings this holiday season

Every November the message gets loud. Be thankful. Count your blessings. Go around the table and say what you are grateful for.

I believe in gratitude. I have watched it change people. But I have also watched a lot of people sit at a holiday table and say "I'm thankful for my family" while something else was going on inside them that nobody asked about. An empty chair. A phone that did not ring. A relative they still have not made peace with. A person who is home this year after a long time away, and does not know where they fit yet.

When gratitude gets used to cover those feelings, it stops being gratitude. It becomes a rule: do not bring that up today. And any feeling that is not allowed to be read does not disappear. It just goes looking for another way out.

Gratitude is a feeling, not a performance

In our Emotions A to Z, gratitude is described as the warm recognition that you have received something good, from a person, a moment or life itself. You can feel it in your body: a softer face, warmth in the chest, a sense of being full.

That is the real thing. It is not a speech or a duty. It is often confused with debt and obligation, the feeling that you owe someone a smile because of what they did for you.

Emotional literacy starts with reading what is actually there. In the 10P system that is the first step: Read the feeling, Understand where it comes from, Respond with the right tool, and Repeat until the new response becomes natural. You cannot respond well to a feeling you are pretending not to have.

So before you say what you are thankful for this year, ask a quieter question first: what am I actually feeling right now?

Two feelings can sit in the same chair

Here is something I teach in every circle. You can feel more than one thing at once, and both can be true.

You can be grateful your family is together and still feel grief for the person who is missing. You can be thankful for a second chance and still feel guilt about the years it took to get here. You can love the people at the table and still feel loneliness because nobody there really knows what you have been carrying.

Grief, in our glossary, is love with nowhere to go. It does not move in a straight line, and holidays tend to bring it to the surface because they are built on memory. The urge is to stay busy, stay cheerful and act fine. The choice is to make room for it on purpose, a little at a time.

When you make room for the hard feeling, the gratitude gets more honest, not less. "I'm thankful we're together, and I miss Grandma today" is a more powerful sentence than "I'm thankful for everything." It tells the truth. It gives everyone at the table permission to tell the truth too.

What the holidays bring up for people coming home

The holidays carry extra weight for families with someone who has been incarcerated, whether that person is still inside or recently home.

For the person inside, the season can bring sharp loneliness and a sense of being forgotten. For the person who is home, the table can feel strange. Everyone expects joy. What they may feel is overwhelm, embarrassment or a quiet fear of saying the wrong thing. For the family, there may be resentment that has never been spoken, sitting right next to relief.

None of that makes anyone ungrateful. It makes them human. No one is born bad, and no one is born knowing how to read a room full of mixed feelings either. That is a skill, and skills can be learned. You can read more about this in Emotional literacy in prisons and reentry and Emotional literacy for families.

Make your thanks specific

When gratitude is real, the way to respond is simple: say it to the person, and say it specifically.

"Thanks for everything" bounces off. "Thank you for driving me to every appointment in September. I don't think I would have kept going without that" lands. Specific thanks shows the other person that you actually saw what they did, and being seen is one of the deepest needs we have.

This matters most with the people who are easy to overlook: the aunt who keeps the family together, the friend who wrote letters.

This week's practice: the two-part thank-you

Try this once a day for the next seven days. It takes about five minutes.

Pause and read. Before you thank anyone, use The pause. Take one long breath and ask yourself what you are feeling. Name it with a specific word. If more than one feeling is there, name them all.
Write the honest sentence. In a notebook or your Feelings journal, finish this sentence: "I am grateful for ___, and I am also feeling ___." Do not fix the second half. Just let it be true.
Say one specific thank-you. Pick one person. Tell them what they did and what it meant to you. A text counts. A call counts more.
Close it kindly. If grief came up, give yourself one small act of care before you move on with your day.

By the end of the week you will have seven honest sentences and seven people who know exactly why they matter to you. That is what gratitude was supposed to be all along.

If you want to see where your own emotional reading is strong and where it needs work, take the free Emotional Literacy Test. It takes about five minutes. And if you would like a place to check in with yourself every day through the holidays, the 10P app is there for that.

Wherever you sit this season, and whoever is or is not at your table, I hope you give yourself permission to feel all of it. You are allowed to be grateful and grieving at the same time.

— Samual Nathaniel Brown