When The Holidays Are Hard

The holidays are here, and it's a difficult time for some people. There are lots of ideas about what the holidays should be like: a loving, supportive family all gathering together to celebrate, sharing family time, all getting along well. Just add snow and something wonderful cooking in the kitchen. We want the Norman Rockwell view of the holidays.

As it turns out, even Norman Rockwell didn't have that happy family. I recently read American Mirror, a new Rockwell biography by Deborah Solomon with a psychological look at the artist's life and work. His childhood years weren't that happy. His mother was a hypochondriac, self-involved, and they lived in a boarding house for many years because she was too overwhelmed to cook or care for the family. As adults, he and his brother stopped any contact, with his brother writing to lament the fact that he didn't know anything about Norman or his family. In his own adult life, happiness and close family relationships were elusive. Norman was married 3 times, worked 7 days a week until he got dementia, and wasn't that involved as a husband or father. Appearances aren't always what they seem: even the families portrayed in his paintings were usually assembled groups of strangers.

There is pressure during the holidays to have a close family, decorate your home, buy meaningful and expensive gifts, cook excellent meals, and feel happy inside.

What if you don't feel happy?

Not all families are close. For some people, the holidays underscore the gap where meaningful extended family relationships don't exist. You may have had an emotional cut-off in your family, with some family members not speaking to you.

This might be your first holiday season after the death of a family member or person close to you.

This could be your first year coping with the changes and loss of a divorce. Maybe you share custody of your children and will be without them for some or all of the holidays.

You might be coping with depression. For people with Seasonal Affective Disorder, these short winter days can be extremely challenging, even before you add in holiday tasks.

How can you rethink the holidays if it seems overwhelming or difficult?

1. Give yourself options. You can keep the usual traditions, or give yourself permission to change things up.

2. Do extreme self care. During the holidays, keep up your exercise, your healthy eating plan, and schedule some alone time.

3. Do something different. If you have never volunteered before, starting now might really give your mood a boost and put things in perspective. No matter what your loss or difficulty, there is always someone who needs your help.

4. Give yourself permission to say no. Several of my clients that have become sober this
year are opting out of party situations that might put their sobriety at risk. Great choice! You can also take your own car to visit family, and shorten up the time frames on visits with family members who stress you out.

5. Carry your own holiday boundaries. In family gatherings and work events, seek out the people you enjoy and resonate with. Focus on the people you enjoy. Minimize the contact with the Debbie Downers, and other toxic people in your family. Be pleasant but brief.

6. Take your inner adult with you to visit the family. Even the famous family therapist Murray Bowen wrote in an article called "Going Home" that when he went home to see his parents for the holidays he struggled to keep channeling his inner adult and stay differentiated in a healthy way. There is something about that primordial soup of undifferentiated ego mass that tries to suck you into feeling powerless and 8 years old. Don't go there!

7. Consider making plans to invite people you know who might be alone at the holidays to join you.

8. Show flexibility. If the children aren't with you on Christmas, have some fun making another day Christmas. It's your mood and spirit they will remember, not the date.

9. Take the focus off of buying stuff. Focus instead on experiences and relationships. It's not about stuff, or creating debt for January.

10. Use this holiday season to listen to music that inspires you, develop your spiritual side, and begin envisioning what you would like to create in the new year as we wrap up 2015.

11. Reach out for more healthy support: people who care and are a good influence on you.

12. Avoid alcohol if you are feeling down. Alcohol is a depressant. It will make you feel worse.

Create a holiday season that suits you. Don't give in to the pressure, hype and expectations to do things that no longer work for you. It's time for your own kind of holiday, and you're just the person who can make that happen. The first holiday season following a loss can be difficult. You can choose your response to the loss, and find ways to be kind and gentle to yourself through a challenging holiday season.

Are You Committed?

There’s a big difference between being interested in something and making a commitment to it. Whether it's making healthy changes to your diet, how often you exercise, making new friends, changing jobs, saving money or the decision to be a better partner or parent, it’s making a commitment to yourself and to others that really counts.

You can tell a lot about a person by looking at what their schedule says. What are your priorities? Adjust your schedule to reflect what you say you value. I am often working with my coaching clients on setting and reaching their most important life goals. It is sometimes useful to ask, “How is doing what I am currently doing helping me to reach my goal?” It might not be.

For example, if your partner is unhappy because you are working too much and you continue that behavior, and yet you say you value the relationship, you have a dilemma. A true commitment to being a more responsive partner will take setting boundaries around work, halting the people-pleasing of unreasonable clients or your boss, limiting your perfectionism about finishing everything in your emails and on your desk before you leave, and redefining your ideas about what it means to be truly successful at home as well as at work. Interest in being a better partner is a feeling, but leaving the office on time as a sacred ritual to preserve time with your partner is a repeated, new behavior.

Interest is passive, and it might be fleeting. Commitment is continuing to keep the faith, and do the hard stuff even when you don’t necessarily feel like it. Commitment takes the long-term view, and recognizes that most things that are really valuable take some sustained effort.

Parenting comes to mind as a perfect case for the need for commitment. It’s common to be interested in having children. Most prospective parents picture a sweet and loving baby or small child who loves you back. As I coach parents through some of the unanticipated and difficult chapters in parenting, that’s when I call for commitment. I’m thinking about when your teenager is rude, defiant, and testing all the boundaries.

Commitment is also needed to have the tenacity as a parent to hang in there for answers when your child has learning disabilities, physical challenges, ADHD or ADD, depression, anxiety, or chemical abuse problems. This past week, I was moved by an NPR interview with David Sheff, author of a new book, Clean, about what he has learned about addiction treatment in the US through trying to help his son, Nic, now 30, and sober for 5 years, through his addiction to heroin and crack cocaine. Sheff never gave up on Nic. That’s commitment. What a lucky guy Nic is to have a father with that level of care and tenacity.

In marriage, commitment translates into listening to your partner, making a decision to do loving and thoughtful behaviors (even when you don’t feel like it), closing the exits by deciding to go direct with courage towards your partner about any concerns rather than passively complain to someone else, and continuing your own journey to bring your best self to the relationship. Being committed in relationships means making a positive decision to create regular time together for fun and for play. This takes being aware of the energy you bring into your closest relationship, and taking some effort and care into keeping things interesting and setting new goals.

It’s okay if you don’t want to be committed to something, but own it. Take responsibility for not just being interested in the people, causes and changes closest to your heart. Making a real commitment can inform your daily choices and behaviors, and that can make such a difference. Interest is passive and transitory. Commitment is more solid, fixed, and has some muscle and follow through behind it. With the things you want in your own life, stop to reflect on whether you are interested or whether you are committed. Make sure to check that your behaviors match up with your most important commitments.