5 Tips for Navigating Holiday Grief
As therapists, we know that the holidays aren’t a joyful time for everybody. For some, the holiday season might be the first one spent without a loved one. For others, the holidays bring back memories or feelings from a dysfunctional home in the past. These emotional flare ups of heaviness, sadness, and anxiety are holiday grief - your body’s signals of mourning for a lost loved one or a healthy childhood you didn’t have. Holiday grief isn’t a sign of weakness or regression in your healing journey, it’s a natural response to your experiences. If you’re coping with holiday grief this season, it may help to take extra steps to care for yourself. Read on to learn 5 coping strategies for living with holiday grief.
Self-compassion. Acknowledge your feelings as normal and human reactions. Remind yourself that holidays are hard for millions of people, and you’re not alone. Journaling can help organize and make sense of your feelings, and tools like loving-kindness mediations can cultivate a sense of self-compassion. Try to treat yourself the way you would treat a loved one who’s experiencing grief.
Lower expectations. This can be hard to hear, especially if you were a lover of the holidays in the past or if your family has big expectations. However, it’s most helpful to start from a place of understanding that this holiday will probably be hard, and go from there. Is your goal just to get through it? To remember your loved one? To make a new memory? Setting realistic expectations and goals sets you up for a satisfying experience.
Be flexible with traditions. Grieving during the holidays can bring up strong feelings about traditions. Should you keep a time-honored tradition? Are you mourning the fact that your family never had any enjoyable traditions? The trick here is to get honest with yourself about what feels right. When you think about keeping traditions, does the grief feel honored, or exacerbated? What new traditions feel healing and enjoyable to you? There’s no right or wrong way to spend the holidays.
Take care of yourself. When your mental health is under strain, and limited daylight hours make us feel blue, it’s easy to see how holiday grief can snowball into a crisis. During this difficult time, take care of your physical health. Prioritize things like sleep, rest, and movement that feels right to you. Avoid substance use and people and situations you know will be triggering. If you have self-care rituals like hot showers or meditations, now’s the time to return to them.
Surround yourself with support. You may find the pain of grieving alone to be worse than the pain of the holiday grief itself. You’re not alone - many people struggle with the same thing. Seek out support groups, grief groups, or even online forums. If you have a friend or family member with similar shared experiences or who you know you can talk to, lean on their support. If and when the holiday grief gets heavy, reach out for professional support. A licensed therapist can help you cope with and heal from the grief and provide the support you need through the holiday season.
