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I don't quite understand gratitude journaling. First of all, gratitude is the same thing as gratefulness or thankfulness, right? If yes, it means, you are glad because you got stuff you did not really earn, you got stuff that was not yours by right, was not owed to you, right? Because when a debt is paid or you get paid for your work, you don't feel grateful, this is yours by right.
So to me gratitude journaling seems to drive your focus on the things you got without earning them. Is that supposed to help people who have self-esteem problems? SSC wrote how most depressed people feel like a burden, how the heck does feeling grateful for things one does not really earn or deserve make one feel less of a burden?
What am I missing here?
If anything, I would experiment with achievement journaling.
This is (I think) an extension of mindfulness practice. So the ultimate point of the exercise is to help you conscientiously notice and assign weight to a certain class of experience. Your feeling of entitlement is opposed to that in the sense that humans tend not to notice a well-functioning machine. So if we put a dollar in a vending machine and candy comes out, we might enjoy the candy, or be sad about not having a dollar any more, but we rarely take any time to be excited about how great it is to have a machine that performs the swap. Same with getting a paycheck.
Ideally, gratitude journaling expands the class of things you have to be happy about. It adds the vending machine as an object of joy, rather than an 'inert' object that catches our attention only when it fails.