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Healing through GRATITUDE
As we express our gratitude, we must never forget
that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but
to live by them. -- John F Kennedy
In a spiritual environment, gratitude is used as a
healing modality in itself. According to Wikipedia, the
definition of gratitude, thankfulness, or appreciation is
a positive emotion or attitude in acknowledgment of a
benefit that one has received or will receive. Gratitude
is an emotion that occurs after people receive help,
depending on how they interpret the situation.
Specifically, gratitude is experienced if people
perceive the help they receive as (a) valuable to them,
(b) costly to their benefactor, and (c) given by the
benefactor with benevolent intentions (rather than
ulterior motives).
According to M.S. Greenberg (1980), A theory of
indebtedness and K. J. Gergen, M. S. Greenberg & R.
H. Wills (Eds.), Social exchange: Advances in theory
and research: New York: Plenum, "Gratitude is not the
same as indebtedness. While both emotions occur
following help, indebtedness occurs when a person
perceives that they are under an obligation to make
some repayment of compensation for the aid. The
emotions lead to different actions; indebtedness
motivates the recipient of the aid to avoid the person
who has helped them, whereas gratitude motivates
the recipient to seek out their benefactor and to
improve their relationship with them."
A large body of recent work by M.E. McCollough, R.A.
Emmons and J. Tsang (2002), A.M. Wood, S. Joseph,
and J. Maltby (2008), along with T.B. Kashdan, G.
Uswatte and T. Julian (2006), has suggested that
people who are more grateful have higher levels of
well-being. Grateful people are happier, less
depressed, less stressed, and more satisfied with
their lives and social relationships. Grateful people
also have higher levels of control of their
environments, personal growth, purpose in life, and
self acceptance.
These authors have also suggested that grateful
individuals have more positive ways of coping with the
difficulties they experience in life, being more likely to
seek support from other people, reinterpreted and
grow from the experience, and spend more time
planning how to deal with the problem. Grateful
people also have less negative coping strategies,
being less likely to try and avoid the problem, deny
there is a problem, blame themselves, or cope
through substance use. Grateful people sleep better,
and this seems to be because they think less
negative and more positive thoughts just before going
to sleep.
So when you find yourself criticizing others or feeling/
saying that, "It is never good enough," look at how your
thoughts parallel your relationship with your body, your
perfectionism and perhaps your unrealistic
expectations of others. Coming back to a sense of
gratitude can help put things in perspective.
Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what
we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into
acceptance, chaos into order, confusion into clarity.... It
turns problems into gifts, failures into success, the
unexpected into perfect timing, and mistakes into
important events. Gratitude makes sense of our past,
brings peace for today and creates a vision for
tomorrow.-- Melodie Beattie
Special thank you to Daniela Filimon, Dietetic Student
at Madonna University who compiled information for
this article and volunteered for Reconnect with Food in
Fall of 2008
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