I’m on empathy overload. Another church shooting. Possible wide-scale firing of federal workers. More videos of immigrants being rounded up aggressively, even on their way to scheduled immigration appointments. And hate. So much hate directed at each other.
Some mornings it feels like the air itself is heavy. The ground beneath us unstable. And the weight of all that fear and grief is hard to carry.
And yet, even in moments like this, gratitude has the power to shift something inside us.
I’ve felt that heaviness before. A few years ago, my dad was living with my sister in Texas. His health and memory had declined to the point where it was no longer safe for him to stay at home. We made the painful decision to move him into a memory care facility nearby.
We thought it would be best to give him space to adjust, but life rarely goes as planned. His medication didn’t transfer properly, and we had to stop by that evening to drop it off. It was dinnertime, and as we walked in, the staff were wheeling him toward the dining room.
He looked up. His eyes landed on me. He didn’t see my sister or brother-in-law, who were safely behind a wall, but he was certain I was the one behind this betrayal. He wept. He cursed. He swore he would end his life if we left him there. All I could do was sit with him, absorbing his anguish, until my sister and brother-in-law joined me. We stayed until bedtime, making sure his favorite aide, the one we’d arranged to sit with him overnight, was by his side. Only then did we leave.
By the time we got back to my sister’s house, it was late. The three of us sat around her dining room table, wilted from the October heat, trying to force down food we didn’t want. My chest was tight; my blood pressure was spiking. It was too late to call my husband in another time zone, so I asked if they would join me in my nightly gratitude practice – something I usually did with him.
But as I sat there, I drew a blank. What could I possibly be grateful for? The day had been nothing but stress and heartbreak. I closed my eyes, took a breath, and looked around. A noise caught my attention: whir, whir, whir. I finally said: “I’m grateful for the ceiling fan.”
That small declaration shifted everything. My body softened. The air in the room felt lighter. And slowly, the three of us began to name other things: gratitude for a facility where the staff already knew Dad from his daytime visits, gratitude for the aide watching over him that night, gratitude that my sister and I were united in our decisions.
The grief didn’t vanish. But gratitude walked in and sat with us. And somehow, for the first time in hours, we could breathe again.
That’s what gratitude does. It accompanies you on your journey, giving you room to breathe when life feels as if it’s closing in on you.
But here’s the challenge: you have to first feel the pain. Too many of us find lots of ways to avoid feeling emotional pain. I should know; I used to be an expert in pretending I didn’t feel hurt or angry or sad.
When I was a child, if I was upset and said something to my mom, she say something like, “You’re making a mountain out of a molehill,” or “Somebody always has it worse.”
I think she meant it as perspective – a reminder that the world is bigger than me and that others carry heavier burdens. But what I heard, and what I internalized, was: your feelings don’t count. I internalized a connection that feeling “bad” – in whatever form that challenging emotion came – was somehow wrong. But, after decades of life, much therapy, and lots of classes in psychology and human development, I know better. Ignoring your own pain is a form of emotional bypassing.
That’s one way we dismiss pain: we minimize it — in ourselves or in others.
And there’s another side of the same coin. Sometimes, instead of pushing pain down, we try to get it recognized by one-up’ing. That’s the “You think you have it bad? I’ve had it worse.”
On the surface, it sounds dismissive, but underneath, it’s usually about an unmet need. One-up’ing is another way of saying, “Don’t overlook me. My suffering matters too.”
And it does. Everyone’s suffering matters. But when pain becomes a competition, no one actually feels comforted.
And people of faith have their own version of this pattern too. It’s what we often call spiritual bypassing. Verses like “Give thanks in all circumstances” get misinterpreted as “Give thanks for all circumstances.” As if gratitude requires us to be thankful for loss, injustice, or devastation.
We sometimes minimize our own pain, one-up someone else’s pain, or misuse faith as if “faithful people” don’t feel pain. Different forms, same result: pain gets dismissed instead of witnessed.
But what we long for isn’t dismissal. What we long for is companionship. To be seen in our sorrow. To be told: your pain matters.
That’s where gratitude offers something different, a way to walk through the hard feelings and find a sliver of peace. Gratitude is the quiet practice of noticing what is still beautiful, even as we name what hurts.
And gratitude isn’t just a nice spiritual idea. Research shows that gratitude strengthens resilience, lowers blood pressure, and improves sleep. But here’s the key: research doesn’t say you have to be grateful for everything. Just that you find something for which to be grateful. It can be small. The blue sky after a storm. Wildflowers on the side of the road. A gentle breeze from a ceiling fan.
That’s why, on mornings when the world feels unbearable, I pause and ask: For what am I grateful in this moment?
The answer is often simple: the warmth of my bed, the breath in my lungs, the way light comes in through the curtains. None of it erases the hard realities. But it gives me a thread of perspective, a reminder that beauty and goodness are still here, even alongside the pain.
That order matters: feel first, then reframe.
You don’t have to silence sadness, anger, or fear. You don’t need to minimize your pain because someone else has it worse. And when you allow yourself to feel the complexity of your emotions, gratitude has space to join you.
You don’t have to be grateful for the awful things in your life. But you can choose to find gratitude in the midst of them.
And when you do, gratitude won’t silence your pain. It will sit beside it. It will whisper perspective. It will help you breathe.
If I could go back and talk to that little girl who thought she wasn’t supposed to feel, I’d tell her this: You are allowed to feel. All of it. Your feelings matter. But let gratitude walk beside you, helping you find your way back to love.
Joni Miller, Ph.D., is a writer, researcher, spiritual coach, and speaker who uses her knowledge, education, and love of all things spiritual to help spiritual wanderers find a place they can call home, navigating by the light of Love. www.SpiritualGeography.net
Photo by Johannes Plenio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/reflection-of-clouds-on-body-of-water-1123445/
