Can we find thankfulness and gratitude in the negative and painful life experiences? On this Thanksgiving 2023 holiday week, I, like many of us, pause to list the things I’m most thankful for and practice gratitude for the positives in my life. As I get older, the things I’m most grateful for are focused on the important people, including my husband, family, friends and mentors, the enjoyable experiences and new memories created together. However, this year, I’ve also started thinking about how we can be thankful and practice gratitude for the negative and painful experiences in life.
I don’t mean being thankful for the actual negative experience itself. Instead, try not rushing through the discomfort and shift our perspectives to see the positives that are linked with the negative experiences. The trigger for my reflection was the realization that to reach many of my personal and professional goals, I need to get comfortable being uncomfortable, meaning changing my relationship with discomfort.
So many positive things in life are made possible through some amount of discomfort or pain. And in some cases, we need to look for the humor in the painful situation. I think back to my childhood experiences. I remember one time when I was staying with my grandmother Hazel, or Sis as everyone knew her, and Great Aunt Alma. I was watching the circus and trapeze artists on TV, and I wanted to imitate the trapeze artists and do a back flip off of a swing. I decided to try the back flip while swinging from the backyard clothesline t-post. I pulled the metal garbage can up to the clothesline post and climbed up. Then, I got a good strong swing started. When I swung back and released to start my back flip, I immediately knew it wasn’t right. I didn’t get enough height in the rotation, and I slammed my face into the top of the metal garbage can lid, bloodying my nose! I quietly walked into the house with my hands cupped underneath my nose filling with blood. They rushed me to the ER and as the emergency doctor and nurse were patching me up, Daddy, who was always the jokester, arrived with a smile and put his arm around my shoulder saying, ‘How’s my boy the acrobat?” I smiled and laughed through the pain, and still laugh thinking about it. I learned to find humor in that painful moment, and it helped me to look for the humor in other painful moments in life. As Dolly Parton says as the character Truvy
in one of my favorite movie lines from Steel Magnolias, “laughter through tears is my favorite emotion.” It was a valuable positive lesson that I took from a painful moment.
Also, when kids are in puberty and start to hit growth spurts, they refer to the physical pain experienced as “growing pains.” Another example, when we learned to ride a bike, we sometimes fell off and experienced a little pain. The discomfort or pain was part of the learning and growing process, and we experience similar discomfort when we learn other things in life. If you are trying to lose weight and gain muscle, you have to exercise, make changes to your diet, and experience some level of discomfort. As the saying goes “no pain, no gain.”
But in our culture today we are conditioned to quickly medicate and eliminate any discomfort or pain. If you hurt yourself as a kid, here’s a cookie to make it better. If you’ve had a bad day as an adult, have an alcoholic drink. We often self-medicate with food or alcohol or other things to alleviate the pain. Perhaps we would be better served by acknowledging the negative and discomfort, get curious about it, and look for the positives and humor that are associated with the negative experience before we try to medicate or move away from it. Or as my Marine Corps friends say, “embrace the suck” and lean into the pain and discomfort instead of running from it. So, this Thanksgiving, while I continue to be thankful for all of the positives in my life, I’m also thankful for the negative experiences and discomfort. Because they often pave the way for reaching my goals in life, remind me of the blessings of time together with those loved ones who are no longer with us, and empower me to successfully navigate transformation in life and thrive. I encourage each of you to consider ways you too may find gratitude for the negative things in life and look for the associated upside, including humor and inspiration to help you thrive as well. I’m thankful for each of you who read my blog posts and wish you a very Happy Thanksgiving and Holiday Season.