On this edition of Wellbeing, Guy Murphy interviews Dr John Elfers about the relationship between grief and gratitude.
It’s true that grief and gratitude are rather odd bedfellows. They’re not often talked about together, or even in the same sense. And part of that, if you think about it, is one is primarily positive emotion, you know, gratitude, face all these wonderful feelings; whereas grief is the source of, you know, it’s challenging, painful emotions.
So what do these two things have in common? Even though they have different emotional profiles, they’re both really complex multi-dimensional experiences, so they involve emotions, they involve feelings in the body, they involve kind of a way of thinking, a way of expressing a way of behaving.
– Dr John Elfers
Dr. John Elfers, a core faculty member in the Transpersonal Studies program at Sofia University (formerly the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology) — has been a key researcher in exploring how grief and gratitude intersect, especially within a transpersonal (beyond the ordinary self) psychological framework. His work, often in collaboration with Dr. Patty Hlava and others, suggests that gratitude isn’t just a pleasant feel-good emotion — it can actively shape how people cope with loss.