How to Keep a Positive Attitude While Injury Healing?

I think the topic of gratitude is interesting because it appears to be a virtue that often eludes human beings.

My first thought is to examine the word gratitude. Let us see how many definitions we can find for this word:

1. A feeling of thankfulness or appreciation.
2. The quality of being thankful; readiness to show appreciation for and to return kindness.
3. The state of being grateful; readiness to show appreciation for and to return kindness.
4. Pleasure in the welfare, happiness, or success of another; warm interest and satisfaction in the good fortune of others.

I think gratitude is an important virtue in any culture but perhaps even more so in Western society where we have been raised on an ethos of individualism and self-reliance. To feel grateful toward others for what they have done for us or given to us requires an ability to empathize with them, which means seeing oneself from their perspective.

Gratitude requires the ability to understand that someone else has done something good for you. It's not enough to simply have a feeling about it, but rather, one must be able to step back and reflect on what was done and how it impacts your life.

It's actually quite easy to see how this ability has been degraded in modern Western culture. We are bombarded with advertisements, so much so that it becomes difficult to not only understand the perspective of the advertiser but also to analyze their motivations which may be completely unrelated to your interests and needs.

For example, a car advertisement may show a smiling family in their new car. The implication is that if you buy the same make of car as they did, then perhaps your life will be filled with happiness and joy as well. What they don't tell you is that there are many other factors involved such as how long it took to pay off the loan or possible costly repairs.

Advertisers try to play on gratitude but do so in a way that presents the illusion of doing something good for you while actually trying to sell you something. This is one example of how the virtue of gratitude has been degraded by modern Western culture and why it's so important to recover this virtue.

The culture of individualism has also led to a decline in our ability to empathize with others. Empathy is the capacity to understand and share feelings of another person. It's easy for us to imagine that if we were in their place, we would feel exactly as they do.

Shades of gratitude

There are different types of gratitude, and they can each be very powerful. I like to think about three main kinds:

One kind of gratitude is the basic recognition that you are alive and have a life. That's what I call 'basic' gratitude.

A second kind of gratitude is the feeling you get when something good happens to you. I call this 'good fortune' gratitude.

A third kind of gratitude is the thankfulness you feel when someone does something nice for you that has a beneficial impact. I call this 'beneficial' gratitude.

Expanding on the meaning

Other broad categories to consider would include gratitude as an emotional response, and gratitude as a personality trait. So let us consider each type of gratitude separately.

Gratitude as an emotional response is characterized by a feeling of thankfulness for the receipt of some benefit or gift. It may be that one feels grateful to another human, or possibly even non-human, such as God.

Gratitude as a personality trait is characterized by an individual's general tendency to feel and express thankfulness for some benefit or gift received. It would seem that this type of gratitude can be beneficial in human relationships, when it leads the grateful person toward positive feelings and actions towards those who have conferred benefits upon him.

There are various mechanisms by which gratitude may be elicited. In humans, the benefactor of a benefit or gift is often someone with whom one has a close relationship such as a parent, child, spouse, friend or lover.

A child who receives a gift from a parent is more likely to feel, and express gratitude toward the parent. This type of sense of indebtedness may engender feelings of love or affection in the child for the benefactor, which will tend to lead him towards favorable behavior toward that person.

A person who is in a close relationship with the benefactor of his benefits may feel more compelled to express gratitude toward that person than would be the case if he had received similar benefits from a stranger.