Ah, Christmas, silver bells, mistletoe, shopping and family togetherness, a recipe that can generate quite a bit of stress. Did you know that Christmas time ranks just below finances at the top of the list of what people find stressful and worrying? Yes, Christmas has a dark side and a bright side. Where are you on the continuum between joy and dread at Christmas? Or are you all over the map?
For some, Christmas is a time of joy, family reunions, generosity, friendship, happy children, Christmas lights and celebration. But for others, Christmas is a dreaded time of sorrow, sadness, or loneliness.
What people do and feel the rest of the year seems to be magnified at Christmas. Christmas is a time of excess: eat too much, drink too much, spend too much and get more excited. Childcare issues become larger than life due to an intense public desire for children to have a good Christmas.
If you are lonely and single, loneliness can become unbearable. If you also have financial problems, loneliness can even turn into despair. These intense negative feelings can also be excessive at Christmas.
For the youngest children, Christmas is an enchanting time of joy and anticipation. However, it tries to put you inside the feelings of a 13-year-old girl facing Christmas in a chaotic, abusive alcoholic home. It is too terrifying for most of us to contemplate. For such a teenager, Christmas is the time of year she dreads the most, and she has no chance of escaping with friends like she might at other times of the year. She waits for the day when she can leave home, but until then she has no escape.
Yet 15 years from now, this former teen will face her own children at Christmas and wonder why she feels so stressed and sad, even scared, when she’s supposed to be happy. Her fears are being triggered by the old Christmas trauma from her childhood. If her partner drinks, the emotions are further magnified.
Aside from why things get so dark for many at Christmas is that a lot of “assumptions” and “shoulds” resurface, creating demands that are impossible to meet. In our society, we tend to put more pressure on ourselves than necessary.
Most find it very difficult to take a break like they do at other times of the year. Most judge themselves more harshly at Christmas, so that the woman with occasional feelings of inadequacy thinks, “I am a failure as a wife and mother.” The recovering alcoholic’s occasional doubts expand to “I’m a loser, so what difference does it make if I drink?”
The key to understanding what’s going on comes from developmental psychology. When children are under stress, they temporarily revert to a way of coping characteristic of an earlier stage of their development. For example, tantrums that disappeared two years earlier suddenly reappeared at Christmas.
Adults under pressure are not immune to this particular coping characteristic. Stress can cause us to revert to less mature ways or ways of handling things. The couple, who learned in their twenties how to discuss an issue and reach an agreement, find themselves in a shouting match at Christmas. Facing Christmas alone and financially strapped, the recovering alcoholic reverts to a predevelopmental way of coping: he goes to a bar. This is a classic relapse.
There are some things you can do to deal with Christmas stress.
1. The first step in doing something about your experience of Christmas stress is to become more aware of your own feelings and recognize that you have a mix of good, neutral, and bad feelings at Christmas. And that’s fine.
2. The second step is to avoid putting the “I should be happy” trip on you and others. Feelings cannot be legislated, so don’t set yourself and your family up for failure.
3. The third step is to have a plan for getting help if things get too difficult. Agree in advance with a friend that you will keep in touch and even meet up regularly during the Christmas holidays. Make sure your AA sponsor can be contacted. If things really get out of hand, there are help lines and even help professionals available for emergencies.
If you want to make this Christmas a truly positive experience for you and your family, a good start would be to plan to reign in the usual Christmas excesses of doing, feeling and hoping. In other words, get off the Christmas roller coaster of ups and downs and trade the excesses for a positive but peaceful and loving Christmas.
