#31 Gratitude Over Toxic Positivity: Emily on Holding Pain and Joy at Once

Gratitude does not wipe away your pain.

It doesn't wipe away your anger.

It doesn't wipe away your grief.

Real scientifically backed gratitude is about dual processing, the human capacity to hold heavy truths in one hand and in the other hand, hold something else, something very beautiful all at the same time.

And I really do think the human experience, I speak about this a lot with my clients, the human experience is about being able to hold multiple things all at the same time and having emotions and feelings that can coexist.

You can feel so happy about something, and yet you can also feel disheartened and sad, too.

Or similarly, you can feel so much gratitude around something, but you can also feel disappointed, or you can feel angry but also feel elated.

You can feel, you know...

There's just so many emotions that can coexist together, and this is what this episode is all about.

It's about coexisting emotions and finding gratitude even in the hard moments because it's not about denying how we're feeling.

It's not about denying what our pain is expressing within us, whether that's emotional pain or physical pain, psychological pain or, you know, stress.

W- whatever it is that's within us, it's not about denying it.

It's about letting it coexist because all of these things can coexist at the same time.

On this episode, I really, really, really am so passionate about this topic because emotions don't have to cancel each other out.

You don't have to fully feel in your gratitude.

You don't fully have to be in your hard emotions and not be able to laugh.

All emotions can exist and live side by side without ever one being more important than the other.

The timing of this episode is deliberate because inside the Live Well With Arthritis course and coaching program, my current cohort, spring cohort, is heading into week five, which is all about stress management and mindfulness.

And over this week of lessons and coaching, we go in deep how stress actually shows up in the bod- in the body and how it shows up in your body particularly, the biology of how stress, pain, and inflammation feed one another, and then a whole toolkit of breathwork, meditation, and somatic practices to calm things down.

And right at the end of that method, there's a lesson on the positive side of the equation, the joy, connection, awe, and gratitude, not as, you know, whimsical, fluffy extras, but as genuine evidence-based parts of your care.

And today's episode is really a gift for everybody that's listening, whether or not you are on my course, and here's what we're going to cover.

We're going to look at the biology of both/and and why your brain finds it so much easier to notice what is wrong than what is right and what gratitude is actually doing to your nervous system.

Second, what I call the myth of emotional monogamy, [laughs] so the idea that you can only feel one thing at a time and why that is simply not true.

And then thirdly, my practical toolkit for what I call micro-gratitude or mini gratitude and being thankful every day for the little things that you can actually reach for when you're in the middle, in the middle of a flare-up.

And finally, a real question I get asked again and again and again on my one-to-one coaching, plus an invitation for you to try something for yourself this week when it comes to gratitude.