Recognising the parts of your life and the world that are thriving and beautiful is an excellent skill to possess. Practising gratitude has been linked to improved wellbeing. Not only can gratitude help you to recognise positives in your life, it can also help boost mood, relationships and even physical health.
However, it can sometimes be challenging to feel grateful when things are going wrong, or we are physically or mentally struggling. Some mental health issues such as depression can even leave people guilting themselves that they ‘should’ feel better because of the good parts of their life.
It’s important to not just be thankful for what we have, but to also validate when we are in pain. Read on to learn how to balance gratitude with self-validation.
What is gratitude?
Gratitude is being grateful for what you have. This could include:
Being physically healthy, ways your body is working well
Having friends and/or family
Having financial security, a home to live in, food to eat
Having certain talents, capacities and skills
A job and/or hobbies that give you a sense of purpose
Gratitude can also be about the world around us. We can be thankful for:
The physical and manmade beauty around us
Acts of kindness we witness or hear about
The resources our world provides
Sometimes gratitude can be about looking for positives and choosing a reference that helps us feel hopeful. For example, studies have shown that when individuals are seriously unwell their mental health is improved if they reference their experience to others who have more severe illness, as opposed to healthy individuals. Thus, looking at the positives within a difficult situation, or recognising that it ‘could have been worse’ can be adaptive.
When is gratitude helpful?
Gratitude can be useful on a daily basis. We can use gratitude in combination with mindfulness, where we recognise beauty around us in that present moment and engage our senses to fully experience life. The brain has a negative bias given that its job is to keep us alive and identify threats. Gratitude can help us to consciously see the parts of our life that are going well.
Why gratitude can be difficult?
Being grateful can be challenging for several reasons:
Habit – long-term patterns of focussing on the negative or difficult parts of life
Tendency to take the positive or easy parts of life for granted – after all, these aren’t things
we need to change or problem solve, so can seem to need less of our attention
Unhelpful thinking patterns – ways of seeing the world that make it more difficult to identify
positives
Struggles with mental or physical health – it can be hard to adopt gratitude when we feel like life is difficult and painful.
Environment – being around others who lack gratitude can challenge our ability to be thankful.
Having a day where nothing seems to go right can also make gratitude challenging.
Belief systems – our beliefs, sometimes unconscious, about how the world works can get in the way of gratitude. For example, believing that others are not trustworthy can impair your ability to see kindness, or feelings of entitlement can make privileges seem like rights.
Emotion and fatigue – when we are very emotional and/or tired, gratitude can feel more
difficult.
While gratitude has its use, it should never be used to dismiss or minimise difficult feelings. Self-validation is a complementary technique to gratitude that you can use to acknowledge and empathise with your own emotions and experience.
What is self-validation?
Self-validation is about recognising, naming, and directing compassion towards our experiences. Often validation is considered as being from an external source – someone who can tell us that what we did made sense, or that how we feel is understandable, or to confirm that we have worth.
External validation can be comforting but may not always be possible or optimal as:
Others may be too busy or not in the right frame of mind to offer us the validation we
desire.
Sometimes other people can be invalidating of our experiences, intentionally or
unintentionally.
You may not be able to articulate or be willing to share emotions or thoughts that you would
like validation for.
Excessive reliance on external validation can be problematic for self-esteem.
When we validate our self, we engage in self-talk, possibly what we’d like a supportive friend or family member to say to us. Essentially, we are telling ourselves that it is ok to feel how we’re feeling.
When is self-validation helpful and how can we balance it with gratitude?
Self-validation can be especially helpful when we are experiencing difficult emotions. Many people have experienced invalidating messages about emotions such as sadness and worry. Some of these messages may even have been presented as gratitude, for example, being told to focus on the positives or others pointing out good parts of our life. But just as we need to notice pleasure and beauty, so too should we recognise and make space for difficult emotions. Here are some tips for balancing gratitude and self-validation:
In some moments it may be easier and more appropriate to validate your difficult
experiences – to recognise that something sucks and be gentle with yourself, rather than
pushing yourself into gratitude.
Take it day by day - Some days gratitude may come more easily and on other days it can be
challenging. Gratitude doesn’t have to be overly positive; it can be a small acknowledgment
of some sort of light in the darkness.
Self-validation can be used to validate not just difficult emotions but also pleasant, enjoyable
experiences (such as validating how significant an achievement is and feeling pride in
yourself).
Remember both gratitude and self-validation are skills – we need to practise applying these
ways of thinking and do so repeatedly. Practising these ways of thinking when you feel calm
or only mildly distressed can help make this thinking more accessible when you are feeling
distressed.
It’s complicated - We can sometimes feel gratitude at the same time as more difficult
emotions, for example feeling grateful that a loved one was in our life but also feeling a
sense of injustice or anger that they have passed away.
Summary
Learning to consciously appreciate beautiful parts of our life and the world can boost our well-being. Having the capacity to validate our own emotions can also improve mental health. By balancing both these skills we can improve our mental flexibility, a primary goal in many therapies.
Erica South, Psychologist
