If the holidays come around, and you start feeling blue, know that you are not alone. There is a lot of grief that surrounds the season. This can include mild irritability or immense sadness. For some of us, holiday music, gatherings, and decorations can trigger the pain of loss. The first step to coping with this grief is to acknowledge it for what it is.
The power of naming your grief is proven across several studies in psychotherapy. We often hear that we should help children name their feelings, but we forget to do it for ourselves. By calling your grief and sadness by name, you empower yourself to overcome it. When you label it, it becomes a reality instead of an enigma in your mind.
How to Cope with Grief During the Holidays
After you accept that what you feel is grief, you can start taking steps to manage your symptoms. Symptoms of grief include:
Feelings of numbness
Bitterness
Inability to find joy
Detaching yourself from others
Irritability
Overwhelming feelings of sadness
Here are some ways you can empower yourself to overcome your grief.
Take care of yourself
This can be one of the most difficult tasks when we are in our grief. It’s important to eat healthy foods, drink plenty of water, and get adequate sleep, especially while we’re grieving. Grief takes a physical toll on the body. We carry our emotions in the tension of our muscles and the clench in our jaw. To help our bodies and minds cope with grief healthily, we have to maintain healthy self-care habits.
This extends to creating healthy boundaries for yourself. If there is a toxic family member at the holiday gathering, take the space you need. Who we give our time to is something you can control. You are not obligated to tolerate negativity. Surrounding yourself with people who build you up and support you is key to coping with your grief.
Understand that it’s a process
Grieving is a process that happens over time. It may go away for a little while, only to appear just before your family’s next holiday gathering. The important part is to lean into this process. Understand that it’s okay for you to feel the way you do.
Accepting that grief does not simply go away overnight sets you up to have reasonable expectations for your recovery. Part of healing from a loss is to let yourself experience it as a loss. So if these feelings of tremendous sadness happen just before a holiday dinner, acknowledge them. Then, talk with your family and friends about how you’re feeling.
Talk about it
Because grief can be so overwhelming, we often bury it. This is an unhelpful coping mechanism during the grieving process. Grieving is tricky because it is inevitably painful. Our automatic reaction as humans is to avoid that which causes us pain. It doesn’t take us long to understand why we shouldn’t touch a hot stove.
Grief is harder for us to process, though, because, in order to recover, we have to face the pain associated with it. One of the quickest and healthiest ways to cope with grief is to talk about it. Talk about it with friends, family members, or groups that have experienced similar losses. It’s by speaking through the emotions we help our brain fully process the loss and how it’s affected our lives.
Speak with a therapist
The professional therapist can be pivotal in your recovery from grief. They can help you identify coping strategies that work best for you and your lifestyle. Psychotherapy has proven extremely useful for managing grief.
Much of overcoming the overwhelming emotions of grief depends on creating a positive narrative around your life and how that grief has affected you. It comes down to understanding why you’re grieving, how you’re grieving, and what control you can take over your emotional state. I can help you with all of that and more. Please reach out for help today. Don’t fight your grief alone.