Tough Love to Get Through the Holidays with Less Anxiety
No matter which of the holidays you celebrate in the coming months, they all seem to carry the same desired theme “Let’s get together to celebrate and have joyful connection with family and friends.”
But let’s be real for a minute: these holidays can also be riddled with stress, conflict, and anxiety—the exact opposite of how they were intended!
So we can try to plan in advance of how we can make it through the holidays with a semblance of our sanity and our connections with others both intact. We can try to plan who to visit with, how long to stay, what conversations to steer clear from, and how to not screw up the dessert so that Aunt Helen doesn’t roll her eyes and make a rude comment. But despite our best efforts, we can still find ourselves stressing and just wishing the holiday season was over…until next year, when the dreaded season comes around again.
Then comes the tightness in our chest or gut, the headaches, the lying awake at night trying to “figure it all out”, and the irritability that seems to leak out when you least expect it.
If all of those valiant efforts don’t guarantee a holiday season with less anxiety and stress, then what will?
Ok, it is tough love time. Brace yourself, these might feel like a gut-punch before you realize their truth.
The truth is, our anxiety and stress come from trying to control things we cannot control: other people’s feelings and actions. It is why we can feel so defeated when we jump through all of the hoops to keep others happy and we realize that it didn’t even work! When we try to get everything right to try and make others happy, we tend to forget that we are only one part of the equation. We have no control over the other person’s history that might be skewing their mood and their interpretation of everything that shows up in their world. We have no control over what else has happened in their day, and how they chose to handle it.
Here’s the not-so-shocking news (but it’s the thing we all seem to forget): you can only control you. Your choices, your reactions, and to some degree the thoughts you think (you can’t control the automatic thoughts that just pop in your brain, but you can choose how you respond to those thoughts and if you allow them or overrule them).
Hopefully you have braced yourself, because it is tough-love time!
People are allowed to judge you. You might not enjoy it, but they are allowed. You cannot stop it, and right or wrong, they are allowed to have their opinion. Stop trying to prevent them from judging you. They’re going to do it anyway.
People are allowed to be upset with you. Whether you have done something wrong or not, they are allowed to be upset. We need to have a balance of accountability for ourselves (if you have done something that harmed another, you need to be accountable for your actions) with not taking responsibility for their reactions to everything. If you throw the stuffing across the room in a fit of anger, people are allowed to be upset with you, and you need to be accountable for your behavior. If you decide not to attend a gathering because the environment is too chaotic for your children and your mom is upset that you’re not attending, she is allowed to be upset…but you are not responsible for fixing her upset—even if she doesn’t believe that!
You job isn’t to make everyone else happy, even during the holidays.
You’re allowed to say no to things that don’t align with you. See #2.
Don’t expect everyone to see the world the way you see it, even with the really big issues. Everyone has their own life experiences that influence their view. Expecting everyone to see the world through your eyes not only minimizes their life experience, but also will only lead to suffering for you when you can’t change them. If you are really brave, you can try to understand their perspective with compassionate curiosity. But if your stress level is already high, it might not be the best time to try.
It might feel like I am suggesting you do all the work of changing and letting everyone else off the hook. But the truth is, I’d give the same message to your family too. While they feel a bit brutal, they are actually ways to claim your power back.
For those that really struggle with implementing steps like these, you might get curious about how long you have been carrying beliefs that tell you that you are responsible for how others feel. It might be time to do some deep digging with an anxiety therapist to help you understand how to rewrite these patterns.
In the spirit of the holiday season, healing can be the best gift to yourself.
