Three Ways to Use Gratitude to Ease Emotional Pain

Three Ways to Use Gratitude to Ease Your Emotional Pain on a Difficult Day, and it’s NOT “happiness is a choice.”

I often say, “Don’t save gratitude for your good days. Gratitude is most powerful on your worst days.”

But people have difficulty putting this in to action. You might be thinking, “This is a terrible time to be grateful,” or “I’m not grateful for anything right now. I’m suffering!”

I’m not suggesting that you ignore your emotional pain, or pretend that everything’s fine. Rather, gratitude can help you move through that emotional pain. Gratitude can help you not get stuck in that emotional pain. These are methods to use after you have begun to allow yourself to feel.

Then when you’ve tried these gratitude methods just once and realize that they help you to feel better, you’ll be less afraid of feeling your pain in the future. You’ll feel your emotions on a deeper level and have better control over them rather than them controlling you.

You may have been taught that the path to happiness is to “be strong” and ignore your feelings. Or been influenced by constant unhelpful messages on social media that “happiness is a choice.” But the truth is that the constant pursuit of happiness may be what’s contributing to misery. The truth is that you cannot heal what you don’t feel. And when you’re so busy chasing happiness and don’t allow yourself to feel emotional pain, you’re unwittingly closing yourself off to the fullness of joy. This is why so many people are reporting feeling emotionally numb. Paradoxically, a truly happy life means allowing yourself to feel emotional pain.

Here are three ways that you can use gratitude to help heal emotional pain.

1. What is the “silver lining?”

What is one positive aspect of your painful experience? Maybe there’s something beautiful that you’re witnessing within this painful experience. Maybe there’s one simple positive outcome. Sometimes it’s there, and sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it’s not immediate, but reveals itself later. If you cannot discover a “silver lining,” try one of the other methods below.

• What is the lesson? How are you growing?

Often, it’s in the painful experiences that we learn life’s greatest lessons and grow. Maybe you’re learning about empathy. Maybe you’re learning how to turn trauma into growth. Maybe you’re learning how strong you are. Maybe you’re learning how resilient you are. The pain isn’t creating the strength and resilience. You already had it in you. The painful experience is helping you to realize that it’s already within you, and that you had it all along.

• What is the “positive value?”

Uncover the positive value, and then connect with it. What is one way that you can be that value? We often cannot control the painful circumstances that come our way, but we can control how we respond. The positive value may be difficult to uncover, but it’s always there. You simply wouldn’t have the emotional pain without the positive value being “violated” in some way.

For example, if a loved one has passed away and you’re experiencing grief, you wouldn’t have that grief if you did not have the positive value of love. Then connect with that love, and do something loving toward yourself or another person.

If you are feeling betrayed by a friend, you wouldn’t be feeling betrayed if you didn’t have the positive value of trust. You cannot control that someone violated your trust, but you can control how trustworthy you are. Cultivate trust.

The next time you’re feeling emotional pain, resist the temptation to push it aside. Forget the social media messages to “choose happiness.” Instead, allow yourself to feel the pain. Then to help you move forward and ease that pain, you can use one of these gratitude practices to feel better. Living a truly happy life is not “choosing happiness” all the time, but rather involves embracing the full range of your emotions, and then healing. And gratitude is one powerful method to do that healing.