How To Feel Gratitude, Even When You Feel Like There’s Nothing To Be Thankful For!

Episode 149

When you are suffering the loss of someone in your life and you are genuinely and completely buried in grief, it's pretty damn hard to find anything to be grateful for.

When we feel the overpower of grief, we can get into a gratitude slump.

Here's a way to uplevel your gratitude game and REALLY feel the emotion of gratitude again!

Wanna talk about more important "widow" topics? Get into the WidowSquad and let's chat! We're running a promotion this week where you get 2 weeks FREE! There's no better time than now, when the holidays feel stressful, than to get in here for some amazing group support!

Go to https://widowsquad.com

If groups aren't your thing but you still need some help this holiday season, get a copy of my book The Widow's Holiday Guidebook today! It's 45 days of self-reflection, self-compassion, and self-care! AND it's only $7! Go to https://www.widow180.com/books

 On Today’s Show:

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Episode Transcript:

Good morning, Widow. 180 listeners!

Well, we just had our weekly Widow Squad meeting yesterday, and of course, the topic this month is the holidays. We were talking about plans and holiday anxiety triggers and things like that, things that might come up. And we were just checking in with everyone just to see how everyone was feeling about this week. Are you starting to feel anxious or sad? Of course. Or frustrated with yourself or with your family or with all of it?

If you are struggling right now and you don't have have anyone to talk to about this kind of stuff, this is the perfect time to join the Widow Squad. You can join for one month, give it a try. If it's not for you, no big deal. You can cancel with a click of a button. It's so, so easy. We're actually doing a promotion for this week only. It's going to end on Monday, where you can get two weeks for free. So if you're not in there yet, go on over to widowsquad.com that's widowsquad.com to come in and join us. We would love to have you there.

I also wanted to start today's episode with a message that I got from a listener, and here's what Maddie had to say. She says, I just want to let you know how much your podcast has helped me since I lost my husband. I have practically binge listened to all of your podcasts and gained so much wisdom. The strength of these women in the midst of their pain has inspired me, and I know I, too, can do hard things. You are making an impact, and I don't want you to ever forget that. Oh, wow, Maddie! Thank you so much for that.

Each week when I release a podcast, I usually get a lot of DMs. I get some comments on emails and social media from you all, just telling me how much you enjoy the podcast, how it's been a positive light for you during hard times, how it's helped you grow, how it helped you navigate through this horrific and trying time in your life. And I am so grateful, so grateful to hear the feedback from you guys. I really feel like this community has become like my extended family almost. I am so grateful for the opportunity to meet so many of you. It's really incredible.

This episode is dropping the week of Thanksgiving, so it's timely and appropriate, of course, to talk about gratitude. I want to share with you something that Tony Robbins said. He says, “the first step I go to is appreciation. The minute you appreciate, you get out of your own self. You stop obsessing trade your expectation for appreciation. Your whole life changes in that moment. Suffering ends in that moment.”

I want to do a deep dive into and really talk about gratitude because it's very, I don't know, I guess “trendy” in the personal development world right now to talk about gratitude and why it's important. It's almost like it's become this surface word, if that's such a thing. Like it's just a word we kind of throw out there at people who are suffering, at people who are hurting and feeling the pain of loss. You know, people love to talk about gratitude journals and you see all these beautiful gratitude journals to buy, like they're so pretty because when life is so wonderful and everything's going great, you can write down so many things to be grateful for, right? Everything is sunshine and roses and happiness. Some people even keep a gratitude jar. I've seen things like that before.

And look, I'm not trying to poopoo on gratitude or anything, but, when you are seriously suffering the loss of someone in your life and you are genuinely and completely buried in grief, it's pretty damn hard to find anything to be grateful for. I'm just saying. I've been there. Does anybody else feel this way too?

I'm going to share a little story here that happened to me. So I know you've heard me talk about this before, but Brent was killed on October 15 and one week later we had the funeral. So we had tons of our friends that came in town, out of town friends that we hadn't seen in several years. And after the funeral, everyone went, um, back to my parents house. So we had a bunch of people in there. My dear, sweet friend Kelly was talking to me and she had never met Claire before because Claire was only two at the time that he was killed. So a lot of our friends had never met her before. But anyway, Kelly was talking to me and Claire was standing right next to me at my side and Kelly said, thank God you have her, Jen. It's something to be thankful for. Thank God you have her. And let me tell you, I don't remember much from around that time. I m don't remember too many conversations that I had with people around that time. But I remember her words very clearly because my response to that was nothing. I felt NOTHING. I did not feel thankful for my daughter at all. I felt nothing. And I think in my zombie state I managed to nod my head in fake agreement because I knew that was the proper response. Like yes, I'm so thankful that I have her. But y'all, no, I wasn't not even thankful for my own daughter. I was in the most emotional, extreme pain I had ever been in before. So I saw nothing to be grateful for. I was buried. And I know so many of you have been there and felt that way too. And maybe not many of you would come on a podcast and publicly announce to the world that you couldn't care less about your daughter. But y'all, at the same time, in that season. At that point in my life, in the height of the pain, gratitude is damn near impossible. At least it was for me.

I'm not here today to cram gratitude down your throat and tell you that it's this magic cure for everything, because it's not, especially in that state of grief. What I can tell you is that over time, the pain lessened. The pain stopped becoming the focus. Things shifted, things lightened. And of course, I am grateful for my daughter. Of course. My God, I can look back now at that time, and she is the reason why I'm still here. She is my reason for being. She is my everything. And of course, even at that time, I had so many other things to be grateful for in my life. I have the freaking best parents on the planet. My family has had my back every step of this journey. They have all been here for me. My friends, my family. I had the means to keep paying my house and not work for a while. So I'm so incredibly grateful for all of that. But at the time, it was hard to think about the good because the bad was too prevalent.

Since that time, I did begin to practice gratitude actively, I would even say, and with intention. And when I do get into that place of gratitude, I find that it really does help me in many ways. It helps my stress levels go down. It lifts my spirit. Even if my spirit wasn't that low on that day when, uh, I focus on things to be thankful for, it does make me a happier person. So I do think that gratitude is one of those practices that can change your life and change your attitude on micro levels anyway. But I also think it can be very trendy, and we can start to use gratitude against ourselves, kind of. I mean, what do I mean by that? Well, you know, as would of going through loss, we have all kinds of emotions, many of which we haven't even really felt before. And sometimes we try to push down the negative emotions, the extreme emotions like grief and sadness, because you think that you're not supposed to be having them. Like you say to yourself, well, I shouldn't be feeling so bad and so sorry for myself because I have so much to be thankful for. And then you try to push those sad feelings down by covering them with gratitude. Does that make sense?

This actually happened in one of our group meetings not too long ago with one of our members in the widow squad. She said. “I know, I know. I'm having this pity party, and I shouldn't be feeling this way because I have so much in my life to be thankful for.” And we were all like, no, uh, no, it's okay to feel everything that you're feeling.

I am all about feeling this full spectrum of your emotional life and feeling what is present for you and understanding it and acknowledging it and letting it happen. It's OK to be sad. It is. It's part of the grieving process, and you need to give yourself the time and space for that. Then you can open yourself up to gratitude again. But what can we do when we get into a gratitude slump? You know what I mean? You're just going through the motions of being grateful for things and writing down the things in your gratitude journal every day, the five things that you're grateful for. I'm thankful for my family, I'm thankful for the food on my plate, I'm thankful for the roof over my head. But you're not really feeling it. You know you're doing it right? You're writing the things down, but you're not feeling the gratitude at all. You're just kind of going through the motions. You're not feeling the emotion of gratitude. And that's the whole purpose of a gratitude practice, right? It's to generate the emotion of gratitude.

So I want to talk in this episode about this one way to get out of a gratitude slump, where you feel like you're just going through the motions, but it's not really working the way that you want it to, where you can feel gratitude even when you don't think there's anything to be thankful for. So we can think of gratitude as an affirmation of the goodness of one's life. But what about gratitude during challenging times? It's tough, it's not easy. Well, here's something you can do to up your gratitude game. When it comes to gratitude, you can think about it in terms of quality, not quantity. It's not about the number of things that you're grateful for, but the depth of the gratitude that you have for some things.

Like I was saying earlier, you can pull out your little gratitude journal and you can write five things that you're grateful for. But I want you to ask yourself, is it generating the emotion of gratitude, or is it just something that you're doing to jump through the hoops to say that you're a grateful person, I've done it. I've tried that magic cure, that trick, and it doesn't really work. Deep gratitude is when you get into the emotion of gratitude. And the way you can do that is to think of one thing and go deep into why you are so grateful for that person or that thing. For example, I could write in my journal, I am grateful for my daughter, and then list four other things that I'm grateful for. But it's so much more effective and impactful on me to go into depth as to why. I'm grateful for my daughter. I'm grateful for her spirit, for her tenacity, I'm m grateful for how she makes me laugh, for her kind heart. I'm grateful for her strength. I'm grateful for who I am, that I get to be her mom. I'm so grateful for her smile. I'm grateful that she's curious about life and places and people. I'm grateful for her brilliance. And then I just go on and on, and I will go on with these gratitude rampages like I just did for like, five minutes, and it starts to compound and build up.

It's a different level of emotion within me that happens that wouldn't have happened if I had just simply written her name down on a piece of paper. When you stop and you pick just one thing to be grateful for, and then dig into why, that's when you feel it. That's when you feel your heart actually swell with joy and love. And it's not surface gratitude. You know, it's not just saying the words. It's a deep gratitude. It's not overlooking the small, simple things that we take advantage of. It's going deeper and giving so much thanks for having them in your life. Just remember, it's all about quality, not quantity. So if you have a gratitude journal, i, uh, want you to consider not just writing down a bunch of things that you're grateful for and not really feeling it, but choose one of the things and really deep dive into it and really look at why you're grateful for that thing. Write down why and then ask again, what's another reason why I love this so much? Go deeper into that emotion of gratitude. It's an incredible, helpful and amazing tool to help you heal.

I hope this helps. I am so grateful for all of you who listen to this podcast every single week. I hope you can find some calm and some peace this week as we go into Thanksgiving.

Remember, if you need some extra help this holiday season, consider joining the Widow Squad community, especially right now. And, um, we're running this promotion where you get two weeks for free. And that promotion is going to end on Monday. Remember, there's no obligation. You can cancel at any time. We meet every single week and we talk about all of these important topics, and we're all here to support each other in this group. This is not a sad bunch of ladies, you guys. We laugh and we have fun and we encourage each other. Check it out and get more information at Widow Squad.com. That's widow squad.com.

If you prefer not to do the group thing, but you still need some help this holiday season, you can always pick up a copy of my book. That's the widows Holiday Guidebook. It's 45 days of self-reflection, self-compassion, and selfcare. And it's full of helpful holiday tips for widows and how to navigate this time of year. It's got exercises and journal prompts, and it's a great gift to yourself to give you a, uh, mental and emotional boost this time of year. And it's only $7. So to download your book, go to https://www.widow180.com/books

Until next week. Believe in the possibilities.

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