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Since ‘tis the season for sending out cards with
quotes on the front that really capture the holiday spirit, I nominate the
following quote for this season's card. I think it really nails it.
It was the best of times, it was the
worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was
the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of
Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the
winter of despair...*
I suppose it may be a bit cynical to attribute to the holidays what Dickens said
of the French Revolution. But isn't this
closer to our experience than something that captures only one side of the season's
sentiment: Happy Holidays or Bah Humbug?
After all, it's the season where we look around with deep gratitude at our
friends and family, or kinda wish they would go away. It's the season where we give graciously out
of the bounty we've received and wonder
if we can satisfy that coworker we don't like with something under $10. It's the season where couples sip eggnog in
front of the fire and singles get to be the 3rd wheel, the 5th,
the 7th, sitting at the end of the table as a reminder that once
again, they're not coupled. It's a
magnifying glass season. Whatever
happiness or sadness, joy or loss that has been lurking in the background comes
into HD clarity, paving the way for celebration, despair, or resolutions for
change on the other side.
Holidays:
The Extreme Sport
How do we handle such confusion? There
are lots of ways, many of them extreme. We might go all out, putting out 40 boxes of decorations and buying presents
for every person whose name we know. Or
we boycott the whole thing, avoiding parties, turning off the phone ringer,
vacationing to places where no one knows we're exhausted or miserable. We drink too much. We stay so busy with work or helping others
that there's no down time to feel hurt or disappointment. We write extended holiday letters informing
the people in our lives about just how happy and perfect we are, carefully
editing out the ugly breaks and failures that occurred along the way.
But like trite holiday cards, extreme coping strategies don't honor the full truth
that this season is a mix of good and bad, just like so many other seasons of
life. And whatever side of the emotional
spectrum we've been avoiding-joy or heartache-keeps knocking at our door,
asking us to let in whatever we are forbidding ourselves or numbing during this
time.
So in answer to the mixed-up-edness of this season, this year I'm selling two
Holiday Mind Games to help us through, one fold for the good stuff and one for
the bad.
Expanding
Our Joy Tolerance
Brain researchers have found that our brains dedicate increasingly greater energy
and space (numbers of neurons and strength of neural connections) to whatever
emotions we spend the most time on. Whatever
feelings we focus on tend to grow and get more and more of our time and
attention. That's why it's not a good
idea to repeat or vent anger over and over-it just keeps getting bigger! On the positive side, this brain trick can give
us a certain amount of power to increase our ability to feel good. By intentionally dwelling on whatever good does occur in our lives this season,
even if this is our hardest holiday season yet, we can expand our current capacity
to take in joy and stay in joy longer than we could if we simply let the
sadness or frustration have all of our attention.
This season, by dedicating some time each day to listing those things that we
are grateful for or that brought us joy that day, we can increase our attention
to any good things that do come along and expand our ability to feel good more
often. Plus, anyone can do it! See:
Shifting our attention daily to whatever is good, even in a hard situation, or
to the sheer abundance of good in a great situation trains our minds to step
back from negative thought ruts and make room for the good in the mix.
"Depression,
I'll Be with You in a Minute!"
Now before you accuse me of going all "Pollyanna" on you with the Glad Game,
let me also tell you about the Containment Game. This one's for sadness, anger,
disappointment, loneliness, dread-all the yucky stuff.
Basically, these emotions are here for a reason. Their job is to tell us that something's not
right. And until we stop and let them
have their say, they're gonna keep stalking us till we do. If we keep busy or numb, always shutting them
up, we are adding the fear of feeling the
emotion to the intensity of the emotion itself. Fear is like Miracle Grow. It makes other negative emotions grow larger. So to get the emotions back down to their
actual size, we need to appease them by really hearing the message they are
sending, while not letting them take over the whole season and cut us off from
any joy that comes our way.
We can do this by scheduling a limited time to really feel any emotions we've
been dodging. Maybe 15 minutes once a
day, one hour every other day, two hours once a week, or whatever works. During that time, we might journal about the
feeling, lock ourselves in the bathroom and scream about it, call someone to
talk about it, buy some cheap-o plates and drop them while thinking about
it-whatever! How we choose to enter the
feeling is not as important as the choice to really feel it.
Choosing to feel what we've been avoiding, but for a limited amount of time, lets
us know that we can be in the feeling we've been avoiding and it won't suck us
into The Eternal Vortex of Misery. Going
in for awhile and then out again over and over gradually decreases our fear of
the feeling so that it does not get to stalk us all of the time and take over all of our holiday experiences. It's like
we're telling the part of our brain whose job it is to let us know we need to
mourn or scream: "I hear that you're hurting and I will be mad and sad with you
tomorrow from 9-9:30. But right now, I'm
focusing on this good experience and the people I am with right now. It's okay. You can wait."
Disciplining our minds to express emotion and to contain it, or to attend to
good things that we normally miss in our hurt or frustration is not easy! But neither are the holidays! These "mind games" are like time we spend
doing pull ups in the gym so that when we fall out of the raft, we can pull
ourselves back in and not drown. Even
though setting aside time for these things is downright annoying, it can be the
difference between an awful holiday season and an okay one, or an okay one and
a great one.
If you or someone you know would like some help navigating the holidays or the
new year, feel free to call me at
303-931-4284 for a free 20-minute consultation or email info@jenniferdiebel.com.
To read past newsletters, go to www.jenniferdiebel.com/Helpful_Resources.html.
Thanks for reading!
Jennifer Diebel, MA, NCC
Psychotherapist
303-931-4284
info@jenniferdiebel.com
www.jenniferdiebel.com
3393 Iris Avenue, Suite 104
Boulder, CO 80301
*Opening lines of Charles Dickens' A Tale
of Two Cities (1859).
Jennifer Diebel, MA, NCC is a psychotherapist who works with
adolescents, adults, couples, and families in her private practice in Boulder, Colorado.
For more information about her areas of expertise, background, and methods, as
well as additional helpful resources and past newsletters, go to www.jenniferdiebel.com.
Please Try This at Home is a monthly newsletter containing tips for
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