Mind Moves: "Count your blessings" must be one of the least comforting and most irritating clichés. To anyone in the throes of loss, whether the loss of health, wealth or relationships, the advice to do so is always unwelcome.
Its subtext says that regardless of the affliction that has befallen you, you ought to be grateful for what you have.
Gauge the gifts, do not engage with the losses, it advises. This is a "repellent strategy" according to Carol Shields's character in the novel Unless, as if "dramatic loss can be replaced by the renewed appreciation of all one has been given".
Not only that, but failure to count blessings hints at ingratitude. It implies unworthiness to have received all that you have, when you are so churlish as to grieve for what you do not have. It is the ultimate guilt-trip inflicted on the already distressed. It plunges those who are depressed deeper into self-deprecation. It exacerbates what it attempts to alleviate.
In summary, "count your blessings" is the most miserable, maladroit, malodorous, odious expression against which there ought to be some law on grounds of incitement to self-hate. Because we cannot but feel bad about ourselves if someone thinks we have nothing to feel bad about.
When there is a trivial setback in one's life, being advised to count one's blessings may be experienced as an innocuous irritant enunciated by the less socially adept.
One can forgive it and ironically count amongst one's personal blessings the possession of the insight never to say something so clichéd to anyone else.
But there are times when suggesting that someone count their blessings is not just a faux pas. Times when it is a comment of such stupefying crudity that it borders on cruelty, as in one circumstance in which parents who lost a child were reminded to "count the blessing" of the other children they had.
What a thing to say! This, alongside other chestnuts of comfort, is not comforting. Silence and sympathetic presence are what we need most when we are most needy and emotionally depleted.
Amongst the many victims of the enjoiner to "count your blessings" are mothers suffering from postnatal depression who are reminded of the blessing of their beautiful baby, as if failure to do so is failure as a mother.
Bad enough not to be able to live up to the images of idealised motherhood depicted on "new baby" cards, but not to count oneself blessed by new motherhood is an indictment, indeed, that too often prevents depressed mothers seeking help.
It does not help the young man who feels that his life has no meaning, the past unhappy and the future hopeless, to be told that this is the time to appreciate the "blessings" he has. Such admonitions deepen despair.
There are no immediate mental remedies for a man or a woman when a long-term relationship ends. This is a major disappointment, an experience of rejection, an attack on self-esteem, adaptation to life without that companion and alteration of future plans.
It is hard to count blessings when one is counting losses.
There is no space for creative enumeration of blessings at the moment an exam is failed, a job not attained, when someone is ill, a spouse dies, a child is sick, a young person injured or an adult receives a terminal diagnosis.
Absorbing bad news is an emotional process that needs time to adjust to what one has lost, before being able to appreciate again the good things one has.
In psychological terms, blessings and afflictions are unrelated. When tragedy strikes, one does not counteract the other in some mathematical way.
Creativity knows no bounds when it comes to inflicting the phrase "count your blessings". It suggests to children who will not eat their dinner a connection between world starvation and clearing their carrots and peas. It says that at least the crashed car is insured, that the house that is flooded is adequately covered and for the missed flight you were lucky you could book another. It's a reminder that your lost possessions will benefit the finder. It tells those who have lost their wealth to be grateful for their health.
Therein lies the problem. There are times when it is advantageous to remember how lucky we are. There are times when we might actually benefit by reminding ourselves that, indeed, if we have our health that is sufficient wealth; that we eat when others starve; that we buy goods when others are dispossessed; that the unfortunate burglary at the Spanish holiday home is not the "misfortune" of the homeless.
But we also need to recognise that there are no immunities to human suffering: times when no quantifying of blessings will disqualify acute pain, that suffering occurs in a vacuum, a vortex from which people emerge in their own way, with time, understanding and loving support.
Our role, if any, is not to advise others to count their blessings, but to be a blessing that they can count on.
That is what counts.
Marie Murray is director of psychology at St Vincent's Hospital in Fairview, Dublin.