How to Celebrate "The Season" Your Way

The Friday Edition | No. 7

How to Celebrate “The Season” Your Way

As we roll into November, December, and the new year, it is inevitable that the holiday season will bring challenges, anxiety, fear, flashbacks, and other unjolly things. But it doesn’t mean that we can’t create celebrations and festivities that honor and support who we are, and how we manage holidays, and “the season.” I hope ease and love walk with you no matter what your plans are and how you face, accept or meet holiday invitations, family, friends, and others.

If I am honest, I abhor the term “holiday survival guide” thrown out to trauma survivors at this time of year. It is a banal idea that not only highlights differences and increases feelings of separateness. It makes it seem as if not being with family or choosing other options to celebrate is somehow less than or falls short of the norm. How you manage your life while enduring family or not during a “special date” on the calendar is for you to discover and honor. You are not different or less than any other or in need of surviving a date on a calendar. You are everything sweet one. You have the power to determine how you want to celebrate a “special day” with family, and friends, helping others or reveling by yourself. It is up to you how you greet and define a day or a season.

Make it yours sweet one. Make it special.

Make it reflect your beautiful, loving, worthy, and deserving nature.

I love mimosas so I always have them ready for my mornings on special days but I just as easily make every Sunday morning a special day for “mimosas and me” because I find that I like this extra special addition to my week – and in exchange I am nurturing myself, healing and feeling my worthiness to be me. I love time for self-reflection, and having an entire holiday all to myself is the best feeling ever. I create it how I want and it generally contains, movies, puzzles, reading or writing, a bubble bath, talking to friends on the phone, napping, eating my favorite foods, with my favorite wines or scotches, good desserts, and maybe a walk in the woods or exercise on the treadmill or just more napping. It has become a fun project to find out what I want to do on these days when so many are with family and the world is closed for the day. I have friends that will invite me to join in at their homes but I generally don’t go – I love that they ask and hold the gratitude of their invitation as a gift in and of itself. I pamper, love, and adore myself on these days. I make it as special as I want it to be and it has become a wonderful time to focus solely on my own healing and nurturing. How we each choose to celebrate a holiday or just a Tuesday is our business and only ever ours.

For those of us with CPTSD, we can get lost in the hazy chaos and emotions of the holidays as well as have to deal with flashbacks, dissociation, and other trauma responses. Allowing ourselves to breathe instead and come home to ourselves, to what we want and deserve, what gives us respite and nourishment, gives us joy, and fills our hearts with love and groundedness is a critical piece of healing and recovery. We have the right to take our power back and say no to attending a party or celebration that does not honor who we are or may enable others to lash out at us as part of a holiday cycle of abuse, or trigger us and push us back into the dark caverns of flashbacks and old stories. To read more about CPTSD please see my article at HeartBalm titled, “Courage, Self Love, and CPTSD.”

Healing comes from letting there be room for all of “this” to happen; room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.

_Pema Chodron, “When Things Falls Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times”