I know that the holidays are brutal for many. They can be a time of high expectation and low return. They are chaotic and overwhelming at best.
We are under huge pressure to have a picture perfect holiday (cue social media, presents, decorations, activities …) and it’s hard to feel upbeat if you don’t have family or friends around, or if you’re still a little fragile and trying to sort out your sense of self and what’s important and what in the heck you’re supposed to be doing.
The holidays can feel deeply depressing and hopeless for some. Being alone or feeling outside the imagined “norm,” of celebration and family can reinforce harsh beliefs that our lives don’t measure up and magnify feelings of loneliness. There can be a terrible feeling of being out of sync with the whole world.
And then for some they are just seemingly inevitable firestorms where you just know somebody’s going to cause a scene, blow up, get hospitalized, wind up in jail!
I have also had my share of holidays alone and of holidays full of emptiness or disappointment, and I know many people who have zero fond associations with them.
I acknowledge that we have trivialized the meaning of our holidays and infected them with commercialism, and that it’s artificial and performative to celebrate holidays like this on a single day and then ignore those values of good will, kindness and giving all the rest of the year.
However, in spite of all of that, I have deep fondness for the holidays and the emotions, associations, memories and history I associate with them. I respond to the little ceremonies and rituals and traditions -- none of which go back very far, just little rhythms we’ve fallen into and liked. I find it a nice time to take a step back and appreciate my life and to look at and affirm what is most important to me, whether the holiday looks like what I’d hoped or not.
And in case I didn’t do so well with that continuous expression throughout the rest of the year, I do want to take a moment, at least once a year and tell and show people how I feel about them.
Time drifts by quickly and Christmas and the holidays serve as sort of timestones for me.
Drinking To Cope With the Holidays
I don’t have a specific terrible holiday story as an example, but I remember feeling so, so ragged and bleary on holidays. Running around, trying to drink, but not enough to throw me too far off, and the timing, and trying to cook and entertain without people noticing how drunk I was, and being distracted, trying not to spill or trip, trying to keep track of what I was doing. Or Christmas morning with a raging hangover, trying to be enthusiastic about the kids’ excitement and looking at a long, long day ahead. I seriously don’t know how I stood all that stress and pulled any of it off (and didn’t poison anyone or catch something on fire by accident).
The drinking added to my holiday stress and anxiety 100-fold, in retrospect. It’s such a tricky thing. It feels, in that instant, like it will help, like it is helping. But even AS I was doing it, I knew, in a little corner of my mind, that I was purely inviting disaster, every time.
At best, it knocked me off my game. At worst, well. Looking back, I just feel sorry for that poor young woman who thought she was reaching for relief and a great way to cope and to enjoy life, but was coming up with what was the very opposite.
It was the very thing that MADE me feel frazzled and tired and wrung out and desperate and sad and frustrated and confused. And then I’d reach for more. It still feels too soon to be comical (like maybe in another lifetime), but it’s hard not to see a flicker of the ridiculous.
Keeping a Positive Attitude Even When Holiday or other Challenges in Addiction Recovery are Objectively Hard
One of the most valuable skills I’ve found is the ability to shift perspective, by examining things just a little bit. Instead of staying stuck with discontent, complaints and yearning, I actively try to notice the other things around me.
The little moments when a ray of sunshine breaks through. When a child breaks into an absolutely radiant smile. When someone is thoughtful. When just by dumb luck something goes well. We can look for and focus on almost anything, at least for a moment.
I broke my arm very badly a few years ago. It was the elbow and I just shattered everything in there. Long surgery. And recovering reasonable use of that joint felt agonizingly slow.
I swear to you, though, that even though it was my dominant side, when I felt it break, the thought that flashed through my mind was, “well at least it’s not my leg.”
I am beyond grateful that it didn’t knock me out of life even more than it did. I was surprisingly competent with my left hand (thank goodness!), a few years later, I’ve recovered nearly full range of motion, which feels almost miraculous.
I sure am abundantly grateful for all the times I should have been injured or worse and miraculously wasn’t!
I’m no martyr, and I can complain with the best, but I used to use all the bad things in the world and my life as an excuse to use and withdraw, which made life exponentially worse. When I look for the brighter side of things, I feel happier, and life feels better.
Is it Reasonable to Look to the Positive When it Feels Like the World is Falling Apart!?
How do you look at the bright side, when the world is falling apart and life is hard and unrewarding and bad things happen to us and holiday challenges in addiction recovery on top of that feel overwhelming?
Well, first,I think we fail as often as we succeed in endeavors like this, but I think the attempt itself saves our sanity, and we get better at it.
First, we tend to exaggerate how bad things are. We turn everything into a catastrophe, and everything is the worst ever. That’s just not true. If we’re still alive, it’s not the worst ever. It‘s just not.
Even though I broke my arm and it was initially very chaotic, I was able to get help. I did not get run over by a car, and the EMT and hospital people were all wonderful, as was my ex who came and got me and my children who came and helped take care of me.
Whether I felt sorry for myself or whether I focused on being grateful, I was still stuck with a shattered elbow and all the practical work of recovering from that. The best reason to focus on the gratitude piece is that it made me feel better about the whole process. Nothing physically or practically changed, but my attitude made me a lot less miserable.
On a broader scale? Well, I think, practically, we want to make the best of what we can -- relish all the flashes of hope we can gather, and then work towards the bigger changes we’d like to see.
Consider a Gratitude Journal in Recovery
So, this is certainly not a solution for the ills of the world, but it could be a small start in seeing the world and ourselves through kinder eyes. Keeping a super-simple journal for a period of time, where you just list 3 things you’re grateful for each day can be a good way to start practicing, and the benefits may surprise you.
Morning or night (or both), just jot down 3 things that you’re grateful for. It can be anything -- being alive and breathing, having a roof, heat, a nice interaction with a neighbor, a flash of laughter, how nice coffee smelled in the morning, a flower ... Here’s an article https://positivepsychology.com/gratitude-journal with a whole variety of suggestions.
There are some studies that have looked at the benefits of keeping a Gratitude List or Journal, and they are associated with reduced stress, better sleep and better overall mood. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10393216/
It seems like a good idea, intuitively, to spend a moment noticing the good things in our lives, big or small, and lots of people swear by gratitude lists and journals. I think Oprah was big on them for a minute.
You don’t have to do anything fancy, but there are lots of beautiful journals out there if you like that idea, and want to make the whole process its own little experience, like a little treat. And of course, you could set up any kind of document or app to record something like this.
Wishing You Many Moments of Joy, Gratitude and Peace as 2024 Ends and the New Year Approaches
I hope during this busy, relentless, often annoying, pressure-filled, expensive, energy-sapping season, that you will find many moments of joy and gratitude. In my personal experience, when I look around for the beauty, I am less devastated by ugliness; when I look for the good, I am reminded that it eclipses the bad, even though there may be difficult spots where it’s hard to see a glimmer of hope. The more in touch with what I am thankful for, the larger the space that occupies in my heart and life, and the less room I have for addictive activities, drinking, drugs.
Just like addiction can crowd out life, life can also crowd out addiction and render it unnecessary. It turned out to be such a poor solution for me!
I am grateful for my family, for my neighbors, my friends, my acquaintances, my city, my country, and my world -- with all our faults. So, in this Holiday Season, best wishes to you, all!
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