How to Be Grateful When Life Sucks

With Thanksgiving happening tomorrow, I often think about how often gratitude is incorporated in many therapies and is well known to improve mental health. However, I often face resistance when I encourage being grateful in therapy. Sometimes they can’t think of anything to be thankful for, and sometimes they don’t want to be grateful for them. Why is that?

Feelings need to be validated first. When a person’s life sucks, most people do not enjoy feeling powerless, hearing that someone they care about is hurting, and realizing that there is little that they can do to help. This leads a lot of people to try to turn conversations away from pain, which leaves the person in pain feeling unseen, invalidated, and feeling like no one understands. They don’t want to be grateful because it feels like everyone else has that handled, and they are the only ones really noticing those hard feelings. Practicing gratitude can feel like just sweeping the hardships under the rug, ignoring the real problems that exist.

So, the first step there is really spending time having that pain validated. This can be with others who get it, or just even taking the time to feel it yourself. Let yourself cry. Write it all out and tear it up. Make art embodying those feelings. Honor the hardship. Give it space to exist.

That step can be really hard if you aren’t used to giving your emotions the time of day. This is where having a therapist can help, because the genuinely want to hear your pain and fully understand it. They will often voice how it makes sense for you to feel the way that you do. Sometimes, this is one of the biggest ways that therapy helps, just giving someone space to have their feelings, without denying them, sweeping them away, or otherwise avoiding them. By having someone who isn’t a family member or friend, the therapist doesn’t feel so attached that they can’t stay with your pain. They can hold space for the hard feelings.

When you are ready to try searching for gratitude, sometimes it is easy to get stuck. All of the big picture things in your life are going terribly, and so finding things to be grateful for isn’t easy. This is where looking smaller can help.

Your family relationships are strained, or you’ve lost a loved one, it can be hard to be grateful for family. So, look at the gratitude you can find in past memories with them, or with found family. Even in solitude, there can be peace and simplicity to be grateful for. When you’ve got medical problems, it can be hard to be thankful, but you can certainly recognize the smaller ways that your body is functioning that you can appreciate. When life feels so bad that you want to die, you might be grateful for possibilities, small signs that others care about you, or even just for the memes you laugh at online. You can even pause and be grateful for the pinks and purples in a flower, the way the sunlight shows them off, the soft feeling of the flower’s petals, and the delicate smell they share with you. Sometimes you can just enjoy life’s most simple sensory pleasures.