I don’t think that when I was younger, I was especially grateful or ungrateful.
I grew up in a family that didn’t say graces before meals because it’s not common in France. But I was taught to say thank you after receiving something, and I diligently did.
It was ten years ago, while working in Dubai, that a gratitude practice entered my life. I attended a lot of spiritual and energy-healing workshops. During one of those, a teacher mentioned the benefits of a gratitude practice.
“Every evening, write down three people or things you’re grateful for,” the teacher said.
I was launching a business, and by the time I got to bed, past midnight, I had zero energy left to grab a piece of paper and write. Instead, I lay in bed, fighting against the sleep falling over me, and thought about the three things I was grateful for.
I was also taught I should pick new things to be grateful for every day. I was not lazy, but often, I was grateful for the same things over and over again: my health despite the lack of sleep, relationships with loved ones, a long relaxing swim in the sea at sunset…
Over the past decade, training as a coach and learning everything related to mental health, mindfulness, performance, and well-being, I have learned many practices to increase well-being and happiness. They came into my life. And most of them left.
But, the gratitude practice I learned in Dubai stuck with me.
A few evenings, I was so tired that I fell asleep as soon as I got to bed. Only to wake up in the middle of the night, with the first thought coming to my mind being, “Oh my! Forgot my gratitude practice!” and, half-asleep, I thought about three things I was grateful for before falling asleep again.
This simple gratitude practice has become ingrained, like brushing my teeth. A day without it would feel off.
A year ago, when I started thinking about integrating a gratitude tool in Akesa, I dove into the scientific research on gratitude. The results of scientific studies are unquestionable. Being grateful is beneficial for physical, emotional, and mental health (more on this in a future post).
Being grateful doesn’t mean forcing ourselves to see adverse events in a more positive light. It means training the mind to notice the good that has been imparted upon us. Even in tough times, we can always be grateful for someone or something. Finding the positive helps us break negative thinking cycles that only drag us further downward.
A gratitude practice doesn’t need to be complex or time-consuming to reap its benefits. We just need to spend a few minutes to write or think of three people or things we are grateful for. Studies show that we don’t even need to do this every day to reap its benefits.
Recently, as I dove back into my memoir about death and healing, gratitude showed up again.
My mother died when I was eighteen months old. My brother died when I was ten. My father was so grief-stricken that he was unable and refused to talk about my mother and brother. Except for two photos on the TV set in the living room and my father’s bedroom, my mother and brother disappeared from our lives.
It wasn’t until I started therapy in 2010 after my father had died, that I realized how much was unprocessed, unhealed, and never talked about.
I wished I had been more daring in my younger years to ask my father to share about my mother, brother, and the past. I was angry for all the silences that had created so much pain.
Therapists, healers, teachers told me to forgive and move on. I tried. But I wasn’t very successful.
My father was a farmer, and, like my sister and me, he was fortunate to have inherited healthy genes. He was rarely sick despite smoking nasty Gauloises cigarettes that yellowed his fingers and living on a diet of charcuterie, butter, and cheese, which were staple foods in Brittany.
But he retired, became less physically active, and continued smoking and eating way too much butter. He put on weight.
He survived two heart attacks while I was studying in Singapore. He was recovering from a third one when I visited for Christmas a few years later.
My sister and I tried to get him to eat less butter and stop smoking. My father didn’t change an ounce.
I couldn’t understand why he was giving up on life.
It was last year when I dove back into my memoir, revisited the past, and put myself in my father’s shoes, that I came to a place of peace and… gratitude.
My father lost his wife, my mother, whom he never ceased loving until his death of brain cancer. Nine years later, he lost his only son, my brother, to an accident. A few years later, his only sister, my aunt, also died in an accident, and his only brother, my uncle, and his father, my grandfather, committed suicide.
When I started therapy and wanted to unearth the past, I was fortunate to find an aunt who eventually told me what I had never been told.
“Your father stayed under the blankets after Marie-Madeleine’s death. Your grandmother raised you until she died when you were three,” my aunt said.
It took me a while to understand what my aunt referred to. My father suffered from depression. My aunt, who thinks therapy is for losers, would never have mentioned the word depression.
But eventually, my father emerged from under the blankets and raised me.
I don’t know what went into my father’s head while he lay in bed. But I can imagine that with a history of depression running on his side of the family, the thought of ending his life crossed his mind.
But my father didn’t take his life.
He stayed. And he raised me, a young child who looked exactly like the woman he had lost.
My sister inherited my father’s blue eyes and blond hair and looks exactly like him.
I inherited my father’s tall genes, but I look exactly like my mother.
Every day, my father saw a copy of the woman he loved and had lost.
We can’t predict the present if the past had taken a different course.
However, I am almost sure that if my father had killed himself, I would most probably have ended up in foster care, and my life would be very different from what it is now.
When I realized this, the anger at my father and the past that had created so much pain, vanished, almost miraculously, and was replaced by not only a deep feeling of peace and gratitude but also… love.