Nov 23, 2021 | Anxiety, Easygoing, Holidays, Over Responsibility, Social Anxiety
Coping with Difficult People This Holiday Season
This is what my client Andi told me this week. Like so many others, she is very grateful that she will be able to get together with family and friends for the holidays this year. Last year had its own set of stressors, but it had fewer frictions that naturally occur during holiday get-togethers. Whether it’s friends or family, there are always people who rub us the wrong way.
What triggered Andi was when her mother suggested how Andi could do things just a little bit better. These suggestions were particularly distressing when it came to her parenting. Just this week, when her mother was over for dinner and her son was having a meltdown, her mother said, “When you did that, I would put you right in your room!.” At that moment, Andi felt like putting her mom in her room, not her son. Instead, she snapped at her mom, telling her she did not want to hear it. Her mom looked hurt. Andi felt even worse, thinking she was not a good enough mom or daughter.
Andi’s goal for therapy was to be more patient, loving, and compassionate with her mother at Christmas. These are beautiful goals, but they are not realistic. The gap between how we think we should feel and act and how we do, causes more stress, shame, and blame. We cannot just will ourselves not feel triggered by friends and relatives. But we can learn to respond to our triggers differently.
Expect and Accept you will get triggered. It helps to realize that it is normal to get activated. When we expect this to happen, we position ourselves to respond to our triggers differently.
Learn to relax rather than react to your triggers. When we get triggered, our bodies contract, and we tense up. By practicing labeling our feelings and training ourselves to relax our bodies, we become much less reactive.
Rehearse ahead of time. A powerful tool we use in cognitive behavioral therapy is called imaginal exposure. By picturing upsetting situations, we can generate similar feelings and sensations when they are happening in real-time. By practicing relaxation during an imaginal exposure, you are much more likely to remember to use them at your next get-together.
Listen to this imaginal practice at least one time before your next planned gathering. Be patient, loving, and compassionate towards yourself! Becoming less reactive takes time.
Nov 20, 2020 | Anxiety, Children, Coronavirus, Holidays, Uncertainty
Last night I called my kids to let them know we would not be visiting them this holiday season. The call broke my heart. All three of them live in Washington State, and we had planned to rent a house up there for a couple of weeks so that we could have some cozy time together, making meals and playing games. The loss of not seeing them made me sad. I was also anxious making the call because I didn’t want to hurt their feelings. Maybe they would think we were overreacting, or worse yet that we did not care about them enough.
This holiday season, we have hard choices to make between our personal health versus our family and tribal bonds. We need both to survive, but right now you can’t have one without risking the other. Faced with decisions like this, we long for the normal holiday stress of the “good old days” before COVID.
Find your truth
The first step making decisions about family gatherings this year is to check in with ourselves and define our personal desires and boundaries. Who do you feel comfortable seeing if anyone? What restrictions are necessary to allow you to feel safe? …to keep your loved ones safe? Find your own truth with regard to these questions before you enter into any conversation with others. For help identifying your desires or where your boundaries lie, you can use a pros and cons list.
Express your truth
If you have boundaries that will require keeping loved ones at a longer distance, or perhaps not gathering together at all, the fear of disappointing them will arise. I knew I could not control how my kids felt when I told them we were not coming to visit; I could only control how I said it. It is useful to review the three steps to assertive communication. I define assertiveness as speaking my truth as clearly as possible, while being sensitive to the others person’s feelings, without taking responsibility for them. This can be a balancing act. Here are three steps to assertive communication.
Step 1. Start out with empathy and validation. For example, I could begin by saying, “Kids, we were really looking forward to visiting you for the holidays and I know you were looking forward to it as well.”
Step 2. State the problem. For example, “With COVID on the rise, we don’t feel comfortable traveling and possibly increasing our risk of contracting the virus.”
Step 3. Define clearly what you want to do. For example, “We have decided we are not going to come up during the holidays this year. We can plan a special get together once a vaccine is available, or we could plan a shorter visit once COVID in better under control.
The right decision
After reducing the increased risk of contagion, I was left with the risk of my children’s disappointment over our decision. We so often get hung up thinking that the right decision is one where we can eliminate all risk, guarantee a happy ending. But there is no “right” decision between the risk of getting sick and the risk of hurting people’s feelings. Everyone’s situation is unique to them, and the “rightness” of our choice depends on whether we’ve examined ourselves enough to know our truth and found the courage to express it.
For me, the right decision was to speak my truth and keeping an open heart, even though it hurt. This pain is what makes us human. It is what we have in common. And ultimately our capacity to feel it will keep us connected to one another, whether we can see each other this holiday season or not.
Dec 1, 2019 | Anxiety, Control, Holidays, Perfectionism
When I read this headline on the front page of the Press Democrat this morning, I assumed that it was a mental health crisis line to deal with the increased depression and anxiety that many of us experience around the holidays. I was mistaken. Or was I?
In fact, the hotline in the article was dedicated to holiday anxiety and depression—in nervous cooks! One newlywed phoned in from a closet, “paralyzed by fear” because she did not want her mother in law to know she did not know how to cook a turkey.
The reason we get more anxious, stressed and worried around the holidays is we have been hijacked by our limbic system, which slams us with fight-or-flight neurochemicals whenever the possibility of being judged or criticized arises. It’s the monkey mind’s call to action: Woo-woo-woo! No mistakes! So we try to cook the perfect meal, create a sparkling clean house, get all our gift shopping done, then finally we can relax and enjoy the holidays. Nothing could be farther from the truth. What this does is feed the monkey, guaranteeing that next year will be as stressful as this one.
But you can break free. It’s not too late! Here’s what to do at the first sign of holiday trouble.
Jennifer’s Holiday Hot Tips
1. Identify the values you most want to cultivate this holiday season. Circle the ones that are important to you.
FUN CONNECTION SPIRITUALITY LOVE COMPASSION
2. Redirect yourself to a more expansive mindset, one that supports your true values. Circle the statements that you would like to believe more.
If things do not go exactly as planned, I can practice flexibility.
My self-worth is not tied to a perfect outcome.
Allowing for mistakes makes me human and vulnerable, which fosters true connection with others.
It is more important to live this holiday season fully in the present moment, than to succeed at making things “just right”.
3. When you feel yourself getting stressed and anxious, stop and take ten deep breaths.
4. Now think about something that you can take off your holiday plate right now!
Examples: Limit gift buying time; get a prepared meal or take out; delegate holiday tasks and let others do things differently than you would; don’t clean the whole house.
The Turkey Trouble Hotline in the newspaper article provides nonjudgmental, solution-focused therapy for cooks in trouble. My Holiday Hot Tips does the same for the rest of us. This holiday season, give yourself the gift of self-compassion and do less, not more. This is how we cultivate those values that are most important to us, not just during the holidays, but any time of the year.
Dec 21, 2018 | Holidays, Social Anxiety, Time Management
Four more days, and It’s not too late….
…to take something off your list!
This morning my client came into our session exhausted. She hadn’t slept well, and she is going through some health issues. Her grown children are arriving later today from out of state and she had a plan to make their favorite holiday cake and cookies, but she simply didn’t have the energy for it. With much regret, she bought scones and cookies at her local market instead. She sounded so defeated.
I, on the other hand was cheering for her! I told her this was so skillful, given her energy level, to do less instead of more. If she burned herself out making cake and cookies, by the time her children arrived she would have no energy to connect with them.
The holidays are supposed to be a time of reflection, when we can attune to what is most important to us. This might be family, or self-compassion, better self-care, or a spiritual connection. Hard things to do, when we are running around trying to get everything that we think we need to get done.
So I challenge you to do one less thing. By consciously doing less, we are making room for things that cannot be checked off a list like connection, fun, pleasure and peace.
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