No matter which holiday you celebrate; Christmas, Hanukkah, or Kwanza, the holidays are an emotional time. The sights, the songs, and even the scents of the season stir deep feelings.
Although it is supposed to be a time of joy, for many people it is a time of sadness.
One reason for this is that the holidays are strongly linked to relationships. In our culture, holidays are family times. The Great American Myth of the Season features a perfect family, untouched by divorce, death, dysfunction, illness or alienation. If you have lost a relationship through any of these life circumstances, you have also lost the dream of The Myth.
One such sense of lost relationship occurs if you did not grow up in a fully nurturing family. If you were not shown love in healthy ways, valued, and protected as a child, you may feel that loss, however unconsciously. You may not be in touch with those feelings of sadness and loss during the rest of the year, but during the holidays, you may feel them keenly.
It doesn't matter in what way you lose a close relationship. If someone you were emotionally connected to is ill, unavailable or unresponsive, or has died or is divorced from you, you are suffering a loss and because of that loss you may experience or re-experience heightened feelings of mourning during the holiday season.
In the first stages of the mourning process — shock and denial — you may try to pretend that the holidays don't exist or aren't meaningful. "It's just another day," you tell people, "Christmas is all in the past for me." Or you may acknowledge the season but deny the impact of your loss; "She's gone, but it's not going to ruin my holidays. I'll have a great time even without her."
During the second stage of the mourning process, anger and depression, you may be outraged and hurt that the world is festive while you are forlorn. "How can everyone else be so happy and enjoy the season while I am in such pain? It's not right and it is not fair," you think.
As difficult as these feelings may seem, it is healthy to express them during the holidays. By doing so, you begin to heal by assimilating your loss. Assimilation, used in this way, means that you fully acknowledge your loss and the accompanying fears and feelings. Assimilation helps you to move to the next stage of the mourning process, which is understanding and acceptance.
In this stage, you recognize that all of your feelings about your loss are appropriate and will come to the surface during the holidays. You also realize that repressing any joyful feelings is not something that anyone who loved you would want you to do. You take care of yourself by doing whatever it is that you need to do for yourself - some of the time being alone and sometimes being with others. You allow yourself to fully laugh and fully cry, to be sad about the past and to enjoy the present.
In the last stage of the mourning process — healing and growth — you begin to realize that, although you are in pain, you can make it through the holiday season and gain something positive out of it. You remember that what made the holidays of the past wonderful was not just the presence of the person now lost, but also the presence of you. You are still here able to create new and joyful holiday experiences based, not on myth, but on your own meaningful reality.
Based in Rockport, personal coach Susan Britt, M.Ed., helps accelerate personal growth by turning conflict into compassion for couples, individuals, families and co-workers. Questions and comments may be addressed to her at susanbritt1@verizon.net.
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