Discover How to Practice Gratitude in Your Life After Divorce

Today, we’re talking about how to practice gratitude in your post-divorce life. I can’t wait to unpack this.

Happy People Attract Happy Things

Gratitude is all the rage in the world of healing. We understand that from the vibrational place of gratitude, we can attract all the things that we want, especially in our life after divorce. And by that I mean, happiness, amazing friendships, great partners, good jobs, and well-behaved children—you name it!

Happy people attract happy, good things into their lives.

Now, I have spent more of my life unhappy than happy, so this is something that I’ve been very intentionally living into over the last decade or two. I’ve had bouts of depression and resentment, even in these last handful of years, where I had to work hard to be grateful.

When I was going through my divorce, I was in Al-Anon, and I was working the steps with a sponsor and always had a gratitude list taped to my mirror. It was always a nudge for me to do it.

What is Gratitude?

I recall that gratitude came fairly easily to me. At that time, I was in such a space of feeling free that gratitude was easier, even though I was hurting about so many things. Gratitude came easier for me in the immediate days and months post-divorce.

At a basic level, gratitude is a feeling of thankfulness that we experience when we recognize and appreciate the good things in our lives.

It involves acknowledging the kindness of others, the beauty around us, and the positive moments we encounter, helping us cultivate a sense of happiness and emotional well-being.

Gratitude is not only a mindset. It’s an entire vibrational experience. It’s a way of being.

But many people have tried, genuinely tried, to feel and acknowledge their gratitude, and it doesn’t feel accessible to them.

Now, what’s interesting is that as I’ve become a trauma-informed EMDR therapist, I have learned that there are times when trauma is activated, so you can’t force it out of the way. You cannot mindset yourself out of trauma.

The Meaning of Gratitude When Experiencing Trauma

What is EMDR?

EMDR therapy, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, gently helps individuals process and heal from painful memories.

By guiding you through eye movements and recalling past experiences, EMDR aims to ease the emotional distress linked to those memories, helping you find comfort and emotional relief.

EMDR helps heal structural changes in the brain, so that the brain comes back to being a more fluid, flowing system.

Trauma creates these little walls in our brains where it starts to keep secrets from us about pain.

This happens so that we women can keep going without having to carry the awareness of all that pain every day, day in and day out.

Our brain has all this information walled off.

So when you’ve got enough walls thrown up in there, it gets harder and harder to feel.

When you get triggered a whole lot, and your amygdala is on fire, it gets harder and harder to bring water to that fire.

What is the Amygdala?

The amygdala are small, almond-shaped structures in the brain that play a key role in processing emotions, especially fear and pleasure.

They help us respond to emotional experiences and form emotional memories, ensuring we women stay aware and reactive to things that are important for our safety and well-being.

It’s part of the lizard brain where we feel the most primal emotions. When you’re in a recent post-divorce situation, maybe you were like me, where you felt initially free, but then there are these triggers that just take us out. We feel like things are on fire.

I want you to know that if you’ve tried things like journaling, gratitude, exercise, or tapping and you feel like you are not seeing results in your post-divorce life, you also need stabilization.

You need to get a little more stable before you can go there, or you need a different technique to help process those traumas.

Just know that there is every reason to believe that you can heal those traumas.

So, for those of you who have tried gratitude and felt like it’s just not moving the needle, you’re not doing anything wrong. That’s where homeopathy can come in.

What is Homeopathy?

Homeopathy is a natural form of medicine that aims to stimulate the body’s own healing processes. The more I read about homeopathy, the more I’m floored that they don’t teach this in graduate school to therapists.

The whole root of homeopathy, which is an ancient wisdom about nature and natural medicine, is that there is a remedy for everything in the mind-body and that our mind, body, and spirit are linked together.

Releasing Trauma Through Homeopathy

Many homeopathic treatments help stabilize the emotional effects of trauma so you can release them.

Imagine if trauma healing didn’t have to be so hard or you didn’t have to sit on a waitlist for an expensive therapist to do it.

How to Show Gratitude

I want you to see this blog about how to practice gratitude as a call to action of empowerment.

Do not abandon things like gratitude because they’re not working for you. What that means is you need a more strategic approach.

If you call on many of these tools I’m talking about, you will see amazing results. When you’re first starting, take a more general approach to gratitude with things like, “I am grateful for oxygen, coffee, and sunshine.”

Be General with Gratitude

The more general you can be with your gratitude, the easier it will be to not get triggered and not feel shut down. You’ll be able to get some momentum going in that good, positive-feeling space.

Do Gratitude Subtraction

Sometimes, you have to do gratitude subtraction.

Let’s say you are feeling cramped in your new living space, and you’re like, “This sucks. It’s not fair.” But then you think about it and ask yourself, “What if I had nothing?”

I think this is a mental habit I’ve relied heavily on over the years when I felt dissatisfied with certain things in my life. At least I have running water, heat, a roof, and relative safety. And I’m so grateful for that.

If you’re still not connecting with it in your life after divorce, that’s okay. Just know that you probably have some activated trauma going on or are feeling disconnected from your power. We women need to change from feeling helpless, hopeless, or disempowered.

And if you haven’t done the Post-Divorce Roadmap Journaling bit, I want to encourage you to do that.

The reason these things work is because journaling connects pieces of yourself with your true self.

So much of the pain we women feel is because trauma and chronically feeling disempowered have caused us to be disconnected from our true internal source of power, both spiritually and just psychologically.

Takeaway

There are parts of you that are unaffected by this divorce. There are parts of you that are unaffected by the traumas you’ve experienced. There are parts of you that are true to your soul and yourself. They’re in there, they are whole and they are well, and they are just waiting for you to reconnect the wounded pieces with the whole parts.

When you consistently journal, go to yoga, meditate, feel gratitude, go to therapy, or when you do EMDR and practice gratitude, you’re connecting up those wounded parts with the parts that are true and well.

The more we can connect those parts and the more we women can love those wounded parts, the stronger we will feel and the more unstoppable we women will become.

Then, the results will just build one on top of the other.

I know you’re on the right track to learn how to practice gratitude. If you’ve already been doing a gratitude practice, you already know the power that it has for you.