In addition to learning to love, I believe another goal of therapy is discovering gratitude. Not “shut up and put up with it” gratitude, but something deeper: gratitude for the bare fact of being able to experience. Gratitude for your existence, in other words. To cherish, at some gut level, that you exist and have a subjective life, that there is something rather than nothing, and that you get to experience it. Even the suffering.

Viktor Frankl understood this as foundational. In Man’s Search for Meaning, he shows how even in extremity, a person might be able to find a stance toward their suffering that dignifies it. Gratitude isn’t about liking or accepting what happens, but sensing that one’s capacity to register anything at all (beauty, pain, longing, connection…) is itself a gift you didn’t have to receive. Therapy is a place where that recognition could get some help in emerging, not because a therapist could ever instruct it, but because the work might clear space for it to be felt.

Albert Camus comes at it from a different angle. If the world is absurd and offers no guarantees, then meaning isn’t found but made. Gratitude is a rebellion against meaninglessness: a refusal to collapse into the idea that suffering negates the value of existence. Camus’s image of Sisyphus relentlessly pushing the boulder up a mountain, alive to the sun on the rocks, suggests that the point isn’t escaping difficulty but locating a way to affirm life inside it.

Without this deeper gratitude, what exactly are we hoping therapy will deliver? More comfort? More control? Those are ok. If you’ve never had them, they’re golden. But gratitude for existence itself gives shape and point even to the harder aspects of living; it makes the good things intelligible and the painful things survivable. In that sense, it is both a goal of therapy, and perhaps one of the better goals for human life.