Lifestyle / These Are The Reasons Why It’s Important To Balance Grief & Gratitude

These Are The Reasons Why It’s Important To Balance Grief & Gratitude

Lifestyle Jun 24, 2021

by Rachna Sethi

When it comes to human nature, sometimes it can be a challenge to balance grief and gratitude. With the current state of news, grief may want to completely take over, but it’s really important for the sake of your mental health to be able to recognize and celebrate with some gratitude. Here are the reasons why it’s important to balance grief and gratitude.

As much as we wish we could all merrily row, row, row our boat through life, life does not always take us gently down a stream. Despite our efforts to ensure we are smooth sailing, sometimes we can get hit by waves so rough, we feel like we are drowning. Several experiences and emotions can make us feel our boat is capsizing and one of them is when we experience grief.

Though most often thought of in the context of death, grief can be experienced at the end of a relationship, after a loss of employment, while navigating through an illness and/or during any period of life-altering change that causes pain and/or sorrow. As mentioned in last week’s article, A Mindful Guide to Understanding the Grieving Process, grief is a unique experience that may (or may not) involve going through several mental, emotional, spiritual and even physical stages.

In case you haven’t read that piece yet, the key takeaways are the importance of giving ourselves permission to feel grief without guilt and/or shame and the reminder that grief can be a slow process (sometimes it takes longer than we anticipated). Experiencing grief isn’t easy but we need to honor our emotions to help ensure we aren’t avoiding, burying or projecting them into other areas of our life. After acknowledging our emotions, one of the coping mechanisms that can be helpful as we grieve is having a gratitude practice.

When referring to gratitude, we are talking about the feeling of thankfulness and/or appreciation for elements of our life. Gratitude can be experienced as a spontaneous sensation but also be cultivated with conscious effort (for example writing in a daily gratitude journal is a gratitude practice). Research demonstrates that a regular, consistent gratitude practice (identifying three things we are grateful for over a minimum of 21-days) can help shift out mindset. The more we begin to look for things to be grateful for everyday, the easier it becomes to find things to be grateful for. This mindset can increase the likelihood of experiencing the positive emotions that accompany gratitude more spontaneously.

These Are The Reasons Why It's Important To Balance Grief & Gratitude — **These Are The Reasons Why It’s Important To Balance Grief & Gratitude: A gratitude journal has several benefits – try it out!** Photo Credit: www.unsplash.com/ Gabrielle Henderson

Practicing gratitude can have several benefits including make it easier to navigate through our grief however it’s important to remember that acknowledging our grief is also beneficial; though one involves happy sensations and the other suffering, they are not at polar ends of the emotional spectrum. When we grieve, it doesn’t mean we are not grateful and when we are grateful it does not mean that we are not still grieving. This is an important understanding as it can help reduce feelings of guilt and/or shame that may accompany grief and prevent us from getting into a space of toxic positivity (the belief and/or mindset that we should be focused on positive emotions and experiences all of the time). Gratitude is a powerful, healing practice, but it’s imperative to ensure that it’s not driven by guilt, shame and/or being used to avoid our grief.

Let’s explore a few examples to help demonstrate how we may experience both gratitude and grief:

Take the experience of the COVID-19 Global Pandemic that’s led to so much change, suffering and loss around the world. People are not only grieving the loss of loved ones but there’s been loss of employment and a sense of a loss of “normalcy.” All these losses are valid, but we may feel guilty expressing the last one.

For example, if you’ve remained employed but find yourself grieving the ways things used to be, you may feel guilty about and shame yourself. That shaming self-talk can sound like “what’s wrong with me? I shouldn’t feel isolated at home alone, I should be grateful I’m safe.”

Alternatively, if you live in a busy household, the shaming self-talk can sound like “what’s wrong with me? Why am I feeling so overwhelmed by COVID-19? Why do I miss when my kids were able to physically go to school? I should be grateful to have this extra time with them. So many people are out of work, I should be grateful I’m still employed and juggling both work and the kids from home.”

Feeling grief about the life-altering changes arisen due to COVID-19 doesn’t mean you’re not aware of all there is to be thankful for, it just means your human – there’s been a lot of change and it’s not all easy.

Another example of the intricate relationship between grief and gratitude could be with the diagnosis of a serious, life-altering illness like cancer. Imagine being in recovery (more formally known as remission) and adapting to changes physically that are taking their toll on you mentally, spiritually and emotionally.

Examples may an increased, constant state of fatigue and loss of hair as a result of treatment. The shaming self-talk about your grief may sound like “I shouldn’t cry about being tired, I should be grateful I’m still alive. I shouldn’t feel insecure about all the ways my body has changed, it’s just hair, I’m lucky that my hair can grow back”

Again, feeling grief doesn’t mean you’re not aware things could be worse, it means that cancer is a traumatizing experience full of a range of emotions; grieving how your life used to be doesn’t mean you’re not happy to be healing, you can mourn how your life was while being grateful to still be alive.

There are endless examples in which experience feelings of grief and gratitude. Neither emotional states need to be labelled as “good” or “bad”, but both should be accepted as part of the human experience. When you’re grieving, give yourself permission to grieve; acknowledge and take a moment to sit with it. After that acknowledgment, after you’re certain you’re not avoiding or burying your grief, bring in a gratitude practice to help you cope. View gratitude as a life jacket; it may not help prevent you from getting thrown overboard during rough waves, but it can help you stay afloat and eventually support you getting back to rowing merrily down the stream.

Main Image Photo Credit: www.unsplash.com

Rachna Sethi

Author

Rachna (@thesassyspiritual) is a graduate of the Applied Mindfulness Meditation program from the University of Toronto, a certified Educator with two bachelor degrees and a diploma in Art Therapy. She's dedicated to living with a compassionate approach. Committed to helping people integrate Mindfuln...

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These Are The Reasons Why It’s Important To Balance Grief & Gratitude

by Rachna Sethi

Rachna Sethi

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