Be grateful for THIS?! Not necessarily.

Here are some ongoing thoughts from my interview with Anthony Silard, in which he discussed gratitude as an important step in moving from suffering to love.

I heard this Bible verse a lot as a preacher’s kid: "In everything give thanks." And if you've spent any time in church, maybe you’ve heard it used as a kind of spiritual instruction to be grateful for whatever happens to you. For the job loss. For the diagnosis. For the betrayal.

I used to struggle with that framing. And honestly, I still do.

Because if you're sitting in the middle of what infidelity has done to your life, your marriage, your sense of self, being told to feel thankful for it can feel like one more thing being asked of you that you simply don't have to give. Or worse, it can feel like minimizing the seriousness of the damage—like someone is silver-lining their way past your pain.

So let me offer a different reading of that verse. One that I think is actually more honest.

There's a difference between being thankful for every circumstance and being thankful in every circumstance. One asks you to pretend the bad thing wasn't bad. The other asks you to stay open, even inside the bad thing, to whatever is still good and still possible.

That's a much harder ask, actually. It doesn't let you off the hook. It doesn't minimize what happened. It just refuses to let the worst thing become the only thing.

In his book, Love and Suffering, Anthony Silard calls this gratitude. And in his model, it's the third step on the path from suffering to love. Not the first step. Not something you're expected to feel in the early days of raw pain. But something that becomes available, gradually, after you've done the work of acceptance and forgiveness.

Gratitude, in Anthony's framing, isn't about the affair itself. It's about what you've learned. About yourself. About what you actually need. About the kind of person you want to become and the kind of relationship worth fighting for. It's the ability to look back at one of the hardest seasons of your life and say, honestly, "I am not the same person I was before this. And some of what changed is worth keeping."

Post-traumatic growth is real. Research consistently shows that people who move through serious trauma, rather than around it, often report profound shifts in how they see themselves, how they relate to others, and what they value. The suffering didn't diminish them; it stretched them.

I know that's true in my own life. My affair is not something I would choose to relive. It caused real harm to real people I loved. But I can also honestly say that I eventually became a better person on the other side of it.

I'm not thankful for my failure. But I am thankful in it. For what it taught me. For where it led.

If you're still in the middle of a mess, that may sound impossibly far away. That's okay. You don't have to be there yet. Acceptance comes first. Then forgiveness. Gratitude finds you later, when you're ready.