What’s Your “Holiday Story”?
November 12th, 2009 |
By Peggy Gold, MS, NCC, LMHC, Narrative Therapy Topic Expert Contributor
Click here to contact Peggy and/or see her GoodTherapy.org Profile
What’s your “Holiday Story”? For some, it may be about connecting with friends and family, eating hearty meals and treats, singing songs, or getting in touch with one’s spirituality. For others, it may be laced with groans and moans, trepidation, loneliness, frustration, angst, and bouts of depression and anxiety. Often both “stories” can somehow co-exist.
I used to spend quite a bit of time worrying about the holiday season and what it would hold. With increased obligations, people really are in demand this time of year! With so much more on our plate (literally and figuratively) it’s easy to feel overloaded and disconnected from what the holiday season is supposed to mean. Combine that with mandatory or obligatory time spent with relatives or coworkers that may not normally spend time together, and it can be a recipe for STRESS. All of a sudden our holiday stories are about shopping, traveling, running from place to place, and making small talk. They are frenzied and lack depth and feeling. I call this type of story a “thin story” (lacking depth). When life gets taken over with thin stories, we can start to retreat inside ourselves, which only feels worse. It can become a very vicious cycle.
You can re-write or even pre-write your holiday story as an antidote to a woefully thin holiday story that tries so hard to keep you on edge. The story you create needs DEPTH so that it has better staying power than the old story. The way to create depth is to get in touch with what you give value to in life. Here’s a step by step example of pre-writing (or re-writing, if it has already gotten rough) a holiday story:
On a sheet of paper, write down the following…
Step One: Describe the thin story. Ex: Rushing around, complaining about not having time, dreading family get-togethers.
Step Two: Identify what living out the thin story does to you. Ex: It makes me not want to do anything. I don’t enjoy any of the holiday season, and if I go to my family with a bad attitude I know that it will surely turn out badly.
Step Three: Answer the question, “Why does this bother me?”
Ex: It bothers me because I really want to connect with people and the spirit of the holidays. I remember how wonderful the holidays felt when I was a child and I want to have my own children feel that too. I eat too much and then I feel bad about myself and my body.
Step Four: Looking at your answers to step three, write down three words or phrases that describe what really matters to you. Ex: Connection with others, Being a good mother, Taking care of myself and my body.
NOW, in four steps you have created the beginning of a holiday story that at its core contains what matters most to you. Hold onto it in all that you do this season. If the thin story starts to take over, give yourself three seconds to remember the three phrases you came up with in step four. Wear these phrases like armor – they are there to protect you from anything that wants to take you farther away from who you are and what matters most to you. Even if you can’t do everything in the holiday season that you might want, remember that you can still be you and stay true to what you hold most dear. And THAT feels good, even amidst the chaos of the season!
©Copyright 2009 by Peggy Gold, MS, NCC, LMHC. All Rights Reserved. Permission to publish granted to GoodTherapy.org. The following article was solely written and edited by the author named above. The views and opinions expressed are not necessarily shared by GoodTherapy.org. Questions or concerns about the following article can be directed to the author or posted as a comment to this blog entry. Click here to contact Peggy and/or see her GoodTherapy.org Profile
This is so true…in between all the maddening rush and celebrations and get togethers, we start feeling like we connot go on any longer and as most of us dislike some members of our extended family, spending time with them due to obligatory reasons becomes a real pain in the neck.
My family hardly interacts with other relatives, its usually just the four of us taking off to a new place every holiday season. This, I guess, is the reason why we are a lot more relaxed than most other families…atleast we don’t have to ’stand up’ to show our love and care when we host our relatives ;)
I just love the holiday season because I get to go back to Wichita and be with my family and friends. I really do miss them. But the worst part is when its all over, am back to work and am looking forward to the next holiday season!
There have definitely been years in the past where I have allowed me and my family to be stretched too thin. Too many dinner committments, too many dinners to throw together at my own house. After a while we all just got so burned out that none of us were really enjoying the holidays any more. After my husband and my kids all sat down to talk about it we decided no more traveling headaches or entertaining for us on either Thanksgiving or Christmas. We decided that we wanted to use that time to spend as a family, our family, and now we do simple things at home on those days. It really gives us the time and the energy to appreciate what we have at home, with typically enough left over for us to share with other family memebers and friends on another day.
My younger brother underwent a lot of bullying by my cousins whenever they came over for the holidays… I would protect him, but whenever I wasn’t around, they would all bully the poor guy like crazy… the bullying gradually stopped as he grew up but then something hit us… he must have been twelve years old when he broke down in front of the whole family as to how the earlier bullying had pushed him into a scare forever and how he dreaded the holidays everytime… it was then that we realized that he was actually withdrawn during the holidays from all of us…we had not noticed this in the past… luckily, this fear of his went away gradually with good interactions and family celebrations during successive holiday seasons since then and he, in his teens now, loves the holidays… :)
I’m enjoying that many comments posted on my story at this point are ones of happiness and making choices that preserve the meaning of the holidays for people. It’s heartening to know that even with tough old “holiday stories”, we are able to re-write them and get to what we want from this time of year. Reading these comments has me wanting to take back my own version of the holidays as well. Thanks for the inspiration!
Peggy