Grief and Gratitude?
After losing a loved one, finding gratitude can seem impossible, unjust and even disrespectful towards our experience. How can I be grateful, they’re gone? We can get trapped in the unfairness of loss because it is unfair. In the grips of grief, at any time, life is lived with a dark cloud hovering over us and there seems to be no escape from this despair. Where is the light?
After the death of my parents, I learned that allowing multiple realities to exist gives space to hold more truths at once. One truth doesn’t negate or diminish the other. I learned that gratitude and sorrow can live alongside each other. They can co-exist and even intertwine as they grow from and through each other. Suffering from deep loss (whatever your loss may be) is the most profound, touching-every-layer-of-your-being, kind of pain. It invades everything, even the way the world around us is perceived and experienced. The more, however, we may feel defeated and betrayed by the Universe or the more we question “What is the point?,” the more we need to consider finding gratitude where we can.
It doesn’t mean needing to find the silver lining in every situation or diminishing the amplitude of your current reality. Starting a gratitude practice isn’t meant to add something else to the “List of Shoulds” we carry in our life. It’s also not there to FORCE you to be grateful or to feel shame if you can’t find gratitude today, gratitude in the past or in future days to come. Considering gratitude amidst sorrow is also to not create the platform for “at least,” or “but” but instead to acknowledge the pain, heartache, unfairness AND gratitude. Appreciation can be helpful in finding the little cracks of light between the clouds that exist and may exist forever.
Gratitude and the Autonomic Nervous System
From a neurological perspective, when we are in the grips of grief, distress and other effects of trauma, our autonomic nervous system (sympathetic + parasympathetic systems) can become dysregulated and in chronic states of physiological defense (flee/fight/freeze/shutdown) for survival which can perpetuate more experiences of anxiety, hypersensitivity, hypervigilence, sleep disturbances, exhaustion, depression and apathy (to name a few). When we are in these states, the ability to access states of relaxation, connection, trust, restoration, receptivity and hope are thwarted in the body, mind and in relationship, and therefore, healing and integration cannot occur. More and more research is suggesting that a high heart rate variability (HRV)- the variation in between heartbeats which is controlled by the autonomic nervous system- is attributed to resiliency and flexibility within the system. Our ANS is highly adaptable which means there are actions we can take to support a more robust system that is able to dampen the defense response when not needed but also increase the capacity to handle and tolerate stress as it arises. Studies done by the Heart Math Institute show that feelings of appreciation can actually create a higher HRV (see blue graph), which not only can support you in a moment of distress but to strengthen the system’s ability to naturally come back to homeostasis more readily to support well-being.
Practicing Gratitude
“Gratitude is not an attitude, it is a practice.” -Brené Brown
Finding gratitude can become an anchor within the whirlwind of grief. This practice can help slow down the chaos and be in the spaces in between the pain, between the unbearable and between the unpredictability where little moments of reprieve, appreciation, joy, hope and abundance can be seen, felt and revealed.
Gratitude Journal:
Having a tangible gratitude practice can be helpful. It also provides something to refer back to when needed. (However, even just saying it out loud or in your mind can be helpful.) Whether you write it or say it, consider trying to feel in the body how the words of gratitude resonate with you.
1. In the morning and/or at night write/say 1-3 things you are grateful for:
“I am grateful for my bed.” “I am grateful to my friend for calling me today.”
2. Both/And Formula: My reality is AND I am grateful for:
“This is so painful, I don’t know how I’m going to live without them.” AND “I am grateful for the friends/family I have in my life who make the loneliness that loss leaves not feel so lonely.”
I cry every time I hear their favorite song” AND “I’m grateful for the road trip we went on when I first heard the song.”
“I feel so alone in my experience. I miss my old life.” AND “I feel grateful to the stranger who smiled at me today on the street. It made me feel seen in some way.”
The more we can put AND in between our experiences the more we can allow the paradox of two things, or many experiences, to exist at the same time. Nothing being cancelled out, negated or diminished, just what is present.
3. When unable to find gratitude, consider simply writing or saying:
“Today, I can’t find gratitude, and that’s OK. “
“Today, I can’t welcome gratitude in my life but I am willing to be willing to find gratitude.”
“I am willing to be willing to find gratitude in life.”
4. If caught in the spinning of grief or stuck under the cloud of despair, place your hands on your heart and if you can, slow down your breath and consider saying or bringing to mind 3 things you can be grateful for in that moment. It can be ANYTHING.
Finding gratitude is not a practice of trying to miss your loved one(s) any less or force yourself to feel something you don’t in your experience of loss. And it is YOUR choice to consider this practice or not. For me, gratitude has helped soften the boundaries around the container that loss forever leaves. If anything, a gratitude practice has allowed me to form a deeper connection to my life, my losses and all the spaces in between.
“We must couple grief and gratitude in a way that encourages us to stay open to life.”
- Francis Weller, author of “The Wild Edge of Sorrow”
With radical love, empathy and vulnerability,
Richelle