What To Do When It's Hard To be Grateful

My assigned essay topic was: "How have drugs and alcohol affected my life?"

Without ever trying drugs or alcohol, I had tons of content to write about.

The words flowed out of my spirit and so did the title: "He was supposed to be my husband". 

The paper covered a 10-ish-year span of my off-and-on-again boyfriend. 

We had to present our paper to a group for the final grade. 

After I presented my paper, my peers were shocked. Jaw-dropping stories from their most modest member.

My stories were filled with brokenheartedness and struggle as I tried to make sense of the rejection I suffered at the hand of addiction.

Of falling in love with someone that began to lose their agency to something so much bigger than them.

Little did I know that would be the first chapter of the next ten painful years of my life. 

The guy I wrote about in my paper, “my supposed to be my husband” died 17 days after I presented that paper.

I was asked to speak at his funeral. 

It was devastating lowering his casket inside the frozen ground. The next days, weeks, and months passed away too.

Every color I saw in the world became more vivid and grim at the same time.

A cloak of darkness surrounded me and I could only ask God for strength to seek any type of warmth. 

God reminded me of my purpose. And the core of that was emotional resilience, with an added layer of "deeper purpose through the pain" musings.

This led me to ask:

What if your deepest purpose is found through your pain?

What if you had to suffer to have irreplaceable growth?

When you are swallowed up in pain, how do you find purpose?

You must suffer to grow. And hopefully, no one passes away, but there are no promises.

Finding gratitude while suffering emerged a noticeable gap in my mind and I called it:

Oppositional Gratitude. Deep gratitude is a skill.

It’s used as you endure things in life you didn't ask for.

But it's used for intentional growth too. 

The pain of building and growing muscle. You take on the lactic acid now, for the strength later.

In the midst of difficult times, you can have profound learning moments. 

Oppositional Gratitude: Looking for a deeper purpose and finding meaning in your suffering. It has happened to me over and over again.

You can also find a deeper purpose from your pain in the following 3 steps:

Cultivate Awareness

Acknowledge the difficulties you're facing. Write them down. Write down how the pain you feel. Write down what you believe is out of your control.

Sit with your list. Sit in the dark, or the sun, just sit with it.

Extract The Lesson

How did this experience give you a new perspective? Write it down. What is something you would have never learned if this thing didn't happen to you?

Position Gratitude For The Opposition

What new purpose or meaning did you develop from this pain? What action did you take to find more meaning? Write it down.

Oppositional gratitude doesn’t happen overnight. You have to prompt it out of your mind, into your thoughts and let it overflow into your actions.

You are going to have to do hard things in life, you might as well equip yourself with the emotional resilience to create an impact in your own life and the life of others.

Do I wish “my boyfriend in heaven” (my husband calls him that) was alive? You betcha. 27 years old is not long enough on this earth. He has so much to offer the world.

Do I wish trauma didn’t enter my life? Most days, yes.

Do I regret how this trauma transformed me? Nope. I've made sober peace with it. It still sucks. But it sucks so bad, I'm doing something about it.

What did oppositional gratitude teach me about losing him?

Before this, I never had access to emotional and physical grief until he died. I never knew loss. At 25 years old, I knew how to be empathic to others. I knew how to mourn with those who mourn. I knew how to tap into a deeper sense of gathering gratitude from my opposition. 

How to practice Oppositional Gratitude Often:

Share your stories with others. 

Your stories will unlock others from their own prison.

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