Gratitude alone does not heal

It needs to work in tandem with forgiveness

“Forgiveness unlocks gratitude and gratitude unleashes love”

(Erwin Raphael McManus in “Uprising: A Revolution of the Soul”)

Gratitude has received wide attention in the self-development literature as one of the pillars of personal growth. Gratitude heals and uplifts us spiritually. A grateful mindset helps us to reduce stress, navigate relationships better, and infuses positivity into our attitudes.

However, to harness gratitude’s benefits, we will have to complement it with forgiveness. Gratitude and forgiveness enjoy a synergistic relationship. One amplifies the other. Also, the absence of one weakens the other.

If you practice gratefulness while nursing hatred and resentment against those who have harmed you, your mind will struggle to reconcile the contradictory impulses. The poison of unforgivingness will contaminate the positivity of gratitude. The bitterness of hatred will cancel out gratitude's soothing and liberating impact.

When you forgive a tormentor or a cheat, you should not treat the exercise as closed. Those who harmed you made you suffer, and in the process, you learned some lessons of life. They indirectly helped you to grow. Therefore, thank them in your minds for unknowingly teaching some hard facts of life. Here, forgiveness has worked in synergy with gratitude.

Between forgiveness and gratitude, the former is harder to practice than the latter. Forgiveness is wrestling with the negative and achieving a positive outcome by letting go of the grudge. Gratitude is a reiteration of the positive things that we already have in life or experience in our daily lives. It is easier to accept the positive than it is to reject the negative.

It is easier to progress from forgiveness to gratitude than it is to switch from gratefulness to a state of letting go. Forgiveness includes self-pardon, which leads to self-compassion. The total absence of any grudge against oneself or the outside world prepares the mind to welcome gratefulness into our lives. Therefore, practicing forgiveness must precede embracing gratitude.

By combining the healing powers of forgiveness and gratitude, we can easily tap into the wellspring of well-being.

Thanks for reading.