Holiday Stress

The holiday season can bring both great joy, and for some, tremendous pain.

We see on Facebook the commonplace joy of not being able to wait for the famous pumpkin spice anything, and the excitement of decorating early for Christmas. What we don’t see is the quiet pain of loss, difficult family members, no respect for boundaries, financial destruction, and exhaustion with the pressure some have to please everyone.

It’s a very interesting thing that we can be 40 years old with a family of our own, but all of a sudden, when parents come into town, we suddenly become that familiar 13-year-old teenager again who’s arguing with parents/siblings about all kinds of things. The patterns that we revert to happen because “the family system” is still in play and our patterns have not been broken, so they crop right back up.

The good news is that we can alter our responses/behaviors within those family systems! It does take work, but it is possible! With or without everyone else changing…because we know, there isn’t a single person on this earth that we have the ability to change – but we can learn new patterns and change ourselves!

There are many tools that we can learn to help through these stressful situations:

* Focusing on today and not the past is very helpful.

* Realistic expectations is an excellent tool as well. Christmas movies are not a good barometer to go by as to how Christmas ‘should’ be.

* Stepping away when you find yourself reverting to old/familiar behavior and remembering who you are now – even taking a few minutes to write that down.

* Knowing that you don’t have to play the same role that you did in the family while you were growing up (First step is identifying the role you played, as well as the roles others play).

* Participating in assertiveness training and learning the ability to say no without guilt.

* Living within your means.

* Being good to yourself.

* Saying yes to the things that you enjoy.

These tools not only are invaluable at holiday time, but all year. We can all learn new tools to help with communication and relationships. We can enjoy our life – sometimes we just have to learn how.