On Feeling Grateful
The other night I had a nightmare. I was driving with my husband when all of a sudden a giant flood engulfed our car. We survived but my parents and sister were swept away. The entire dream after that was me not believing it had happened and searching everywhere for them and then realizing they were dead. I woke up in a panic after experiencing wild grief in my dream, reminding myself in the middle of the night that it was just a dream. In that moment of imagined loss, I knew on a visceral level how important my loved ones are to me.
Sometimes its hard to appreciate someone when you’re sitting in the same room with them. Especially family, but old friends too. How many time have I heard them tell the same story, how many times have they heard my stories? There can be emotional mine traps, unprocessed emotional pain that will never be healed, unresolved issues forever unacknowledged. These are the people who know all of your buttons and are really good at pushing them.
Sometimes it’s very difficult to feel grateful for anything. You’ve gotten the shit end of the stick, something has happened that is just horrible, like the election of a politician that you fear or the diagnosis with an incurable chronic disease. Most people’s reaction to something shocking is… shock. That can last anywhere from a few moments to hours or days. And when the shock wears off, what remains is a reservoir of emotion. And there are many different ways that people then deal with that.
The healthiest way to manage your emotions, recommended by every psychology source you can find, is to feel your feelings. And by this they mean feel your negative feelings because who needs to be told to feel happiness? Of course we are supposed to feel all our feelings, why else do we have them? We cannot stop our emotions from being triggered, they originate from a part of the brain that is not under our conscious control. Emotions exist to show us what we want and don’t want, they alert us to danger, they connect us to the people in our lives
When we have intense feelings, it can be scary to let yourself feel them. First of all, it is painful - physically painful. Sometimes after I’ve cried deeply and a lot, my body gets sore. Secondly, I don’t know about you, but I don’t like to really let myself go, emotionally, unless I’m alone. Other people’s presence can be inhibiting because it can be really upsetting to some people to be around a very emotional person. They just can’t deal with it, so then you have to comfort them.
You can’t force yourself to be grateful anymore than you can make someone love you. Before you can feel true gratitude, I think you have to acknowledge to yourself that the bad things that have happened to you are really bad, something everyone would agree truly sucks. This exercise has encouraged me to have greater self compassion and to be kinder to myself. By allowing yourself to feel grief, sadness, disappointment, you can create an emotional flow and become more open to positive feelings.
One of my favorite advice columnists is Carolyn Hax from the Washington Post. After the recent presidential election, a reader wrote in and asked her for advice on how to navigate the overwhelm from the results. Carolyn responded “Something that worked for me when everything was shut down for the pandemic: Zoom really far out or really close in… For some reason the vast and the mundane can help us reset.” By zooming out and thinking of the vaster world and by zooming in, and savoring the small, good things in life, we can gain perspective and therefor see our lives in context better.
A gratitude practice is all about perspective. By focusing on gratitude you bring yourself back into the moment, to look for the positive things that are actually in your life. There are different ways to incorporate a gratitude practice into your daily life. Personally, I like to make lists in my head. My first memory of doing this was in my 20’s when I had a crummy job and not enough good friends, no money and no boyfriend. I was really low and I can’t even remember where I got the idea to make a gratitude list, but I do remember one of the things I was grateful for: That I could read - which made me laugh because it was such a stretch.
Sometimes when we are glum we need some way to get out of our heads. I find that humor is another way that I can shift my perspective about this difficult and yet ridiculous life. I don’t know how many of you are Seinfeld fans, so many funny phrases came out of that show, from No Soup for You, to Yada, Yada, Yada. But my personal favorite is one that I actually think of embarrassingly often, Frank Costanza’s “Serenity Now!” exclamation. It always makes me smile when I am in a moment that is making me lose my cool but I really don’t want to lose my cool. Godammit! I need some fucking serenity now!
Mindfulness can also help us regulate overwhelming thoughts, feelings and emotions. A mindfulness practice may even rewire our brains and change our reactions. From my purely subjective experience, I would say its like a muscle that’s been exercised or a skill that’s been long practiced. I have been doing it so long that now it weaves its way in and out of my days. Its a great check-in with yourself and the effort to appreciate the here and now has brought greater emotional equilibrium into my life. When you can’t do anything about something on the most basic level, acceptance is fostered by perspective.
To live the good life, I think we need to learn the habit of appreciation and try to savor what is right in front of us. We cannot make our lives longer but we can make them richer and deeper. Living each day as if it is your last is a lovely idea but hard to keep up. We easily become complacent so maybe a terrible thing happening every once in a while is ultimately good for us because by shaking us up, it can keep us focused what is really important to us. Although for myself, I prefer my life lessons about loss to come in dreams!