Valerie Bertinelli Credits Betty White’s Gratitude Wisdom During Her Darkest Months
By Maya Rivers. A wistful whisper: I am a poet stumbling through celebrity confessions, scribbling sunlight into the margins of someone else’s grief.
Call it a small gospel of living: Valerie Bertinelli, in a recent appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show, credited her late Hot In Cleveland co-star Betty White with teaching her an all-consuming gratitude that has become a lifeline during some of the toughest chapters of her life. Bertinelli’s words, gentle and candid, landed like a bell—simple advice, enormous consequence.
On the daytime set this spring, an audience member asked Bertinelli what the best piece of advice she’d ever received was. She answered without hesitation: it was Betty White’s example of gratitude. “She really taught me about gratitude,” Bertinelli said, explaining that while she thought she already practiced appreciation, White elevated it into an art form—living, breathing gratitude in every moment Bertinelli spent with her. The actress praised White’s ability to be thankful for “the good, the bad, the ugly, all of it,” a philosophy Bertinelli now leans on as she navigates emotional turmoil.
Those remarks did not come in a vacuum. Valerie and Betty shared six seasons together on TV’s Hot In Cleveland from 2010 through 2015, where White played Elka Ostrovsky, the feisty homeowner who anchors the four women’s newfound suburban life. Their onscreen chemistry and offscreen warmth have been well documented, and Bertinelli has repeatedly called White “magical” and expressed gratitude at having worked with her for five years.
What makes this praise more than nostalgia is context: Bertinelli has been unusually forthright about her personal struggles throughout 2024 and into 2025. On Instagram in May 2025 she described enduring “some of the most emotionally excruciating eight months” of her life, a phrase that reads like a small, blunt confession. She added that while she does not feel sorry for herself—“Nobody has the market cornered on grief and heartache”—she is doing the work, examining strength, weakness, patience, resilience and worth.
Two months later, she posted again with an admission that underlines how raw her situation remains: she is fighting the urge to drink to numb overwhelming feelings. “I want to drink. I want to numb it,” she wrote, describing the internal tug-of-war between the impulse to avoid pain and the rational plan to sit with feelings, cry, and move through them. She did not disclose precise causes for this sorrow, though public records and media coverage confirm a November 2024 breakup with boyfriend Mike Goodnough after ten months together, which may have contributed to her emotional strain.
Bertinelli framed White’s influence as practical and spiritual. The actress said that embracing gratitude for hardship has taught her that suffering, unwanted as it is, often shapes the lessons we need. “It’s sucked, and I wish I didn’t have to go through it, but there was no other way for me to learn a better way,” she said, adding that mistakes seem purposeful in teaching what not to do. In short: be grateful, even—especially—for the parts that sting.
It is an unflashy, resilient creed: learning to grieve and to grow publicly, without the theatrical shield of social media pageantry. When a television legend teaches emotional survival, the lesson can be both simple and seismic. Bertinelli’s invocation of White’s gratitude feels less like celebrity fanfare and more like a spiritual tool passed from mentor to friend.
There is tenderness in the admission that gratitude doesn’t erase pain; it reorients it into meaning. Bertinelli’s social posts, her candid talk-show moments and her repeated praise of White stitch together a portrait of someone trying to honor the past while excavating strength. For fans of Hot In Cleveland, this is a reminder that offscreen bonds sometimes become lifelines. For anyone watching a public figure grapple with private suffering, it is a rare, unvarnished lesson in emotional honesty.
And so, with Betty White’s small, bright compass in hand, Valerie Bertinelli walks forward—grateful for the easy laughs, the sharp lessons, and the hard nights that teach her to stand. The end feels like a punctuation mark, not a period: what will gratitude teach her next?
In closing: gratitude, it seems, is not a feeling but a practice—one Betty White perfected and one Valerie Bertinelli now keeps alive in plain, steady sentences.
And so, the tale softens, then lingers.
Sources: Celebrity Storm and The New York Post, The Drew Barrymore Show, Valerie Bertinelli Instagram
Attribution: Creative Commons Licensed
