Gratitude within Reach

It’s that time of year when the days are short and dark, and the few remaining colored leaves are barely clinging to their branches. With the cold, dark days and the Thanksgiving holiday upon us, I have been pondering the topic of gratitude. Why express gratitude? To whom? What makes it difficult to be grateful? What helps us feel more gratitude? While I make no claim of being an expert on the science and research of gratitude, I have incorporated gratitude practice in treatment (models such as DBT and other mindfulness-based approaches in particular) and have witnessed its benefits. There is a growing body of research that strongly supports the finding that gratitude is correlated with and likely causal in producing/enhancing well-being, both emotional and physical. (See Jans-Beken, et al, 2020 for a review).

In my work with patients who have often endured extensive and severe childhood trauma, I have observed firsthand both the potential transformative power of gratitude and the significant barriers to connecting with a sense of gratitude. Let’s face it, life is hard and inevitably includes suffering at some point. While life hands each of us a different deck of cards, nobody is exempt from feeling loss, sadness and other forms of pain. Furthermore, conditions such as PTSD, depression, and anxiety (to name a few) can wreak havoc on our capacity to feel and sustain positive emotion of any kind. Depression is strongly correlated with a tendency to skew our appraisals negatively. Things are just gloomier and darker when we’re in a clinical depression, and vice versa: some people have an inherent negative perspective that may contribute to depressive states. One could imagine that an infusion of gratitude might shift things at least a bit, and research has shown this to be the case. How, though, might we attain a feeling of gratitude when hardship or loss befalls us or when we are selectively attuned to the negative in life due to depression? Gratitude in the face of trauma, tragedy, and even day-to-day stress can feel out of reach, even artificial.

My first suggestion to those of you who are in pain or who are skeptical about this whole gratitude thing is to identify and validate whatever emotions you are actually feeling BEFORE embarking on any gratitude focus or practice. It is crucial to emphasize that a practice of gratitude is not about denying your pain or being inauthentic. The difficult but essential task is to figure out how to make room for both pain and gratitude in our emotional lives. It’s understandable that we may feel enormous resistance to identifying gratitude when things feel unfair, unjust, when the world seems unkind, or when we struggle to find meaning. This is also when we most need it.

So what else might get in the way? I have seen many people highjack gratitude exercises and use them as an opportunity to judge and shame themselves for not being grateful enough (e.g. “I have so much, what is wrong with me that I feel so sad?”). I work with patients to counter this temptation with gentle acknowledgement that one can have a lot to be grateful for, while also feeling valid and powerful emotions such as sadness or anger.

How can we find gratitude amidst suffering? What does this actually mean? I recommend looking for small things, taking note of them mindfully, seeking them out with intention. Everyday occurrences can be a source of gratitude (a smile from a stranger, the feeling of a child’s hand in ours, the warm blanket on a bed, the roof over our head, the mere existence of music and art, the smell of the ocean). Seeking these opportunities to notice what we have, what is good and potentially pleasurable, can incrementally retune the mechanisms of our thinking. This may allow us to more readily notice such things in the future. Gratitude will likely not counterbalance the pain and suffering in an exact way so as to cancel it out. Rather, the practice and experience of gratitude can grow and expand alongside the inevitable painful parts of life. Accessing a state of gratitude can require effortful practice. Repeatedly calling your attention to that which might bring gratitude, lingering on those things a bit longer, writing them down and reviewing them, expressing your gratitude to someone else so that connection is strengthened. There is no single “right” way to experience gratitude, but there are many ways to work towards noticing and enhancing it. Your gratitude may look different than anyone else’s, and that is perfectly fine.

And some days, when we are too heartbroken, too injured, too angry and alone to have any motivation to look for and feel gratitude, that’s okay too. This doesn’t make you “ungrateful”. It just makes you human. It’s never too late to try again.