Appreciation and Gratitude: One Thing I Bet You Never Considered
- The Center of Love and Acceptance
- Aug 1, 2022
- 3 min read

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Being "thankful for what you have" is touted as the thing to do when you wish you had more, when your parents didn't know what else to say, or when church leaders wanted to keep their members from losing faith. However, this post is NOT about those things. Yes, it's about gratitude and appreciation, both emotions that fall on the positive side of a scale of emotions that run the gamut from bad to good. Yes, it does mean being thankful. But, no, not because "you should" or "God will approve" or "others have it worse". Instead, let's look at it from a different perspective.
Have you ever been pregnant, and all of a sudden, you notice pregnant people everywhere? Or, have you ever started looking at buying a certain car, and you start to see that car all the time on the roads? Or have you noticed a certain breed of dog you have never seen before, and you start to seeing that breed of dog all over? It's called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, which names frequency illusion. In reality, the number of pregnant people (or that certain car or breed of dog) has not changed at all. You now just notice it more. Let's apply this to gratitude and appreciation (or any emotion), as well as complaining (or any behavior).
First though, let's consider another idea. In cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), there is something called a CBT triangle. Here is a visual.

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