Holiday Feelings
HOLIDAY FEELINGS
How do you prepare for the holidays? Do you decorate your home? Do you buy gifts for family and friends? Do you cook special foods? Do you have specific religious rituals? Do you travel to see others or do others visit you?
People have many different ways to celebrate their holidays, as individual as our cultural experiences, our religions (or absence thereof), our family traditions, and our own personal situations. How you choose to prepare can result in feelings of joy, anxiety, excitement, depression, uncertainty, happiness, and exhaustion! Maybe you are a person who tries to do everything and you want it all to be just right. Maybe you're facing a holiday without your family due to COVID restrictions. Maybe you have experienced a loss (it could be recent, or even many years ago) and your grief is much worse during the holiday season because you are without your loved one. Maybe you are in a new situation and don't really know how you want to celebrate the holiday now.
It is common to have some painful or difficult feelings occur during holiday times. There can be a sense around us of “forced merriment” as we are expected to be joyful all the time. It isn't always possible, especially if you already have emotional problems or you are dealing with a family crisis. You may just want to stay home and not acknowledge the holiday at all. You may want to avoid certain family members and have a gathering of a couple of your “chosen family members” to prevent added stress. You may feel isolated and unable to reach out to others at all. You may have a history of past trauma that gets stirred up when you hear a certain Christmas carol or see a certain holiday movie. Other triggers can be completely unpredictable.
Taking care of yourself is extremely important to your own mental health. If you are trying to do the decorating and shopping and cooking all at once, take breaks! Delegate what you can. Use short cuts – buy some prepared foods to go with the homemade ones, use gift bags rather than wrapping everything, use simple tricks to make things as easy as you can. Get children or other family members involved in doing things. Take time for self-care: get some exercise, take a relaxing bath, go for a walk with a friend, listen to some calming music, whatever helps to reduce your stress.
If you just can't do it all, scale it down. Talk with your family and decide what is really the most important part of the holiday for each of you. You may find that the thing you were going to spend a lot of time on isn't even important to your family members and you can skip it, do less of it than you planned, or put it off until after the major holiday days are over!
If the holidays are especially hard for you, you may need a good psychotherapist to help you. For more information about how therapy can help with these problems, contact Martin Noel, LMFT-Associate at Hill Country Family Therapy. If you feel lost or alone, call for help. The Emergency Psychiatric Hotline, 1-800-273-8255, is available for you to talk with a mental health professional at any time. You are not alone!