Sorry for that unhappy title, but the focus is on good self-care and stress reduction. Most people have heard of holiday stress. And while I have not suffered a loss of anyone close to me for a few years, the holidays are when I and many people feel grief bubbling up as our memories of yearly traditions surface. And it's so random sometimes! I was at the grocery store around Thanksgiving and with all the seasonal foods in view, I suddenly remembered holiday grocery trips to Albertson's with my dad. It was sad but sweet. It wasn't the type of grief to bowl me over, but when we lose important people, the grief will cycle back from time to time.
I do know some folks who've recently lost people, and I sent them a good blog post about holiday self-care for the bereaved titled
Six tips for getting through the holidays with grief by author Sameet Kumar, PhD. Even if you just find the holidays (and your family) stressful, the tips Kumar gives are quite solid and helpful. (I could so benefit from working out more in this season!) Kumar explains, "Most of the people I've worked with over the years find that no matter
when their loss occurred, the spiral path of grief tends to circle back
to very difficult emotions around the holidays. . . The holidays are stressful under even ideal circumstances. In the
context of grief, they can feel absolutely terrifying. There's not much
you can do to skip them, so you might as well find a way to get through
them as healthy as you can. Grief sometimes feels like a battlefield;
the holidays are grief's bootcamp. The goal of getting through this time
of year is to not only endure but to grow into a sense of resilience." Well said. His tips would help anyone struggling this season, not just with bereavement but with any stressor or void. Holiday resilience sounds like a good goal--and I still plan to have some fun.
For anyone looking to read more of Kumar's work, he wrote a good book called
Grieving Mindfully--it is probably the most helpful book I read on mourning. The "mindful" approach is to be accepting and non-judgemental of whatever feelings come up, assuming that they will not last forever. The idea is that most feelings, negative or positive, simply exist and are temporary--and resisting them can actually cause them to hang around longer. And they'll come out later anyways--we're human and can't avoid them entirely. Combine mindfulness with compassion and self-care, and that's a recipe for resiliency. Strength and recovery don't come from an absence of grief but the ability to feel and experience and still bounce back, over and over. It's become more normal for me, I'm happy to say, and learning how to grieve has helped me in other areas of my life. I guess it's one of the redeeming qualities or blessings of loss.
