Dear Perplexed,
So, your friend confuses you? She claims to value you and you certainly enjoy her cleverness and wit. But the more kindness you extend, the more irritable and difficult she becomes. You listen, you give her gifts, and you include her in your holidays. But she cancels plans at the last minute, gives gifts grabbed from the Target bargain bin, and complains you don’t see her enough. Where, you wonder, is her gratitude? Honestly, you don’t even want her at your Thanksgiving table.
First, congratulations on your honesty and thank you for reaching out. Yes, I’ve got some ideas about her, even some about you! As you know, when people get locked in a troublesome dance, both parties play a part, both keep it going.
Your chief complaint is your friend’s lack of gratitude. Do you know about the connection between gratitude and envy? Melanie Klein, a German/British psychoanalyst, described how early experience establishes this link. The infant, she explained, appreciates the mother’s goodness, her life-sustaining milk and the emotional contact that comes with a good feed. But this richness isn’t continuous, and when it’s absent, the infant envies the mother’s goodness. Helpless envy hurts, so the infant wishes to become the good breast, to not need mother, to always have inside herself such delicious satisfaction. When things go well, the infant’s envy becomes bearable. The mother understands the infant’s envy and frustration; the gaps in contact are neither too great nor too small; and envy balances gratitude. But when mother and baby are mis-attuned, envy gets the upper hand and spoils gratitude. Milk goes sour; there’s nothing left to appreciate.
Now I know it’s a long road from breast-feeding to your troubled friendship. But old envy struggles invisibly persist, searching for chances to re-surface. It sounds like your friend found her chance. You’re a gracious hostess, connected to family and friends, generous in your attention to her, and your friend likely wishes she was more like you. Envy sours her admiration and leaves her bitter and resentful. To express gratitude would only enrich you more. Then the discrepancy between your goodness and her perceived desiccation would become unbearable. A vicious cycle ensues. The more you give, the more she envies, the worse she feels, the more impossible gratitude becomes, the worse she feels for being ungrateful, and the more she envies. It’s a miserable dance that you both want to exit.
For the misery it causes, envy deserves its bad reputation. The Catholic Church considered it one of the seven deadly sins; its indiscriminate attack on goodness makes it the deadliest. Renaissance artists depicted envy as an emaciated old woman with sagging breasts, eating her own heart. Envy gnaws away at love and gratitude, depletes the soul of creativity, and leaves behind a bitter empty shell. Think of Snow White’s Evil Queen, determined to be the fairest, and then—deprived of that—determined to murder her rival. Envy aims to destroy the enviable, and so wipe out the torturous burn. Failing outright destruction, envy de-values to mitigate the pain. Either way, envy breeds chaos and confusion. Nothing admirable or good survives. Your friend leaves you confused about if she values your time together. Her behavior doesn’t match her words.
Now, I promised to consider your role in this envy cycle. Do you know the term “invidious”—to act in a way that incites envy in others? Such actions are rarely conscious. Instead, they flow from our hidden aims to protect ourselves from envy. Your generous gifts make you the “perfect friend.” Your hostessing shows off your culinary talent and your social connections. It’s as if you unconsciously want to make your friend envious. Why? To reassure yourself of your goodness? To spare yourself envy of others? If you weren’t invidious, you wouldn’t overdo it, and the friendship would likely stay more balanced.
Since you brought up Thanksgiving, you’ve also got me thinking about this national holiday of gratitude. The first Thanksgiving, we now understand, was phony goodwill between the locals and the interlopers (as the Wampanoags must have viewed the colonizing Pilgrims), covering over the actual violence. Might envy or attempts to evade envy and limits—which excite envy—have driven this hypocrisy and warfare? There’s a rich psychological story here—the Wamponoag’s self-deception and wishful thinking; the pilgrims denial of greed, rapacity and injustice. But today I just wanted to highlight the role of envy to enlighten your plight.
As you peel potatoes for your Thanksgiving dinner, you might reflect on how envy, our devious strategies to evade it, and our struggles to actually bear it, contribute to so many human difficulties. Perhaps this even explains the devolving state of our culture, which has devalued leaders and heros, and ends in the dearth of the admirable. Then, as you and your guests gather around the table, you might privately consider what you admire in each of them. Acknowledging what is admirable, even enviable, opens space for real gratitude for all that enriches our lives.
Wishing you a thoughtful and gratitude-filled holiday, Dr. Miriam