I have been practicing gratitude for a very long time. I’ve been doing daily gratitude lists with friends and my husband for years.

As my children have been growing up, whenever something “upsetting” happened to them, we had a ritual where they would share three things they were grateful for in the aftermath of that “negative“ circumstance.

For example, my daughter’s car was hit by a neighbor’s car and after she explained what happened I encouraged her to find three things she was grateful for. We’ve been doing this for so many years, that it’s become our “thing”.

But with my SCS work I’m starting to see that spackling over a negative emotion with gratitude might be misusing gratitude.

Is it just a form of escape to try to find three things to be grateful for when a thought creates a negative emotion?

Can you expand on this?