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Key points
- The holiday season puts extra emphasis on being a "happy family."
- Coping skills for the divorcing or recently-divorced may be diminished because they're grieving.
- There are ways to have a cheerful holiday season despite a divorce.
During the winter months, the days get shorter, temperatures get lower, and most of us isolate more. For most people, this combo doesn’t bring out the best and brightest emotions. Many folks knowingly or unknowingly suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), so winters for them can be extra rough. Add COVID to the mix, and, on top of that, add one of the most destabilizing life events—divorce—and you have a recipe for extreme emotional darkness.
Holidays act as an amplifier of all things lovely but also all things painful. If things are good with relationships and family, the holidays can be a wonderful time of year. Contrarily, if your life is not going very well in the family and romance departments, this season can feel like torture.
There are a couple of reasons for this. First, the expectation that the holidays are a family-centered time makes it especially painful if you don’t have the family that you would like. Secondly, when you are going through a major life transition, you don’t have the same bandwidth or coping skills you might otherwise have to deal with difficult times. It can become a downward spiral: The sadder you are, the less you can deal; the less you can deal, the sadder you are.
So, what’s the best way to cope?
While one strategy might be to just suffer through the holiday season until the end of January, I want to offer remedies to the top three mistakes I see newly divorced or divorcing people make. If you follow these suggestions, it just might make what you fear will be the worst holiday season one that you look back on ith fondness.
1. Isolating
“My mind is a bad neighborhood I try not to go into alone.” —Anne Lamott
Winter is a natural time to be less social. If you’re in emotional pain, you may isolate yourself even further because you have the added notion that you don’t want to burden others with your problems.
But here’s the thing: When you isolate yourself, and you are stuck with your own thoughts and ideas, it can make it impossible to get out of the discomfort.
Being alone with heightened emotions of sadness, anger, or fear (a natural by-product of a breakup) can feed imbalances that lead to anxiety, rage, and depression. Dwelling on how she or he hurt you, wondering about whether you’ll have to sell the house, and feeling overwhelmed with just plain grief about losing your person, and perhaps the other parent to your kid(s), often becomes a loop of challenging emotions that feeds on itself.
I recently heard a great saying: You can’t fix a broken brain with a broken brain. Likewise, you can’t fix a broken heart with a broken heart.
It’s important to be around supportive people. If you feel like you’re leaning too heavily on the same two or three people, join a divorce group or a grief group; join a 12-step meeting and/or get into therapy. Participate in activities that make you feel positive and provide a healthy distraction, such as sports or cooking. You need to feel your feelings in order for them to pass, but staying too long will ultimately hurt your mental and physical health.
2. Preserving traditions from married days
“If we are to preserve culture we must continue to create it” —Johan Huizinga
Most people love to have traditions for the holidays or, at the very least, routines. As a kid, we always had Thanksgiving at our house and Christmas at my grandmother’s house. My father always read us “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” on the night before Christmas. We then hung our empty stockings under the mantle, put cookies and milk out for Santa, and in the morning, the densely filled stockings were always at the end of our beds. Although there was some variation on the self-care-items theme, without fail, there was a sack of gold-wrapped chocolate coins at the bottom of the stocking. We always opened presents after breakfast and then went to church.
There was tremendous comfort in these rituals—an “all is right with the world” sensation. My parents divorced when I was 19, so I didn’t experience a breach in the family customs since I had long outgrown them. I suppose it would have felt strange and awkward to try to recreate things, like the reading of “’Twas the Night Before Christmas,” with my mother reading. It just wouldn’t have been the same.
Trying to carry on as if everything was the same usually only serves to put a spotlight on the fact that everything is different and that someone is missing. I don’t recommend it.
I realize it’s counterintuitive but resist the urge to go to what you know and take a risk by changing things up. If you can’t think of anything yourself, ask friends (ideally divorced friends) how they celebrate and try to incorporate their ideas. You can also ask your kids if they are old enough what they would like to do. Traveling to a different land may not be financially feasible for everyone, but for those who can, it’s a surefire way to see different sights and focus on new customs.
If you’re all just too sad, mad, scared, or raw due to the marital dissolution having just happened or happening suddenly, you don’t have to force yourself and your kids to have a good time. It might be best to simply accept that the holidays will be hard and find a movie you and the kids will enjoy either at home or at your local movie theater.
3. Expecting too much from yourself
"Expectation is the root of all heartache." —William Shakespeare
If you find yourself uttering, “What’s wrong with me? I should feel happy! It’s the holidays!” or, “Why am I not over this by now?” you are perpetrating yourself by having expectations that you “should feel” in a way that you don’t. You can’t force healing any more than you can stop an oncoming train.
Emotions have a life and timeline of their own. They will be done when they are done, not when you want them to be. You can’t make yourself feel chipper if you’re down in the dumps. So don’t try. Just be where you are and make no apologies.
Instead, honor yourself and be gentle with yourself. Remember that your life will not always be this raw, sad, scary, depressing, or hard—you are going through a tremendous transition, and your feelings (particularly your negative emotions) may be heightened—even if the separation or divorce was your choice.
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