Music. Welcome to Mr. and Mrs. Therapy, the podcast that empowers you to transform life's challenges into opportunities for personal growth and healthier relationships. We're your hosts, Tim and Ruth Olson, licensed marriage and family therapists and trauma experts. As experienced therapists with backgrounds in addressing trauma and mental health disorders, we believe there is hope and there certainly is healing.
We've spent our lives supporting people through the ups and downs, and we want to share these insights with you. Together, we'll unravel the layers of personal and building healthy relationships. Each week, we'll bring you engaging conversations, expert insights, and practical strategies to help you heal from the past, foster healthy communication, and develop enduring love.
This podcast is your guide to transforming adversity into triumph, healing wounds and past trauma, gaining wisdom and insight, and creating meaningful, fulfilling connections. So if you're here to heal, to better understand yourself or your relationships, you're in the right place. So sit back, get comfortable, bring your trauma and your drama, and let's start healing. Welcome to Mr. and Mrs. Therapy. Music.
Hey everyone, welcome back to Mr. and Mrs. Therapy Podcast. We're so glad that you're here with us today. We just started a mini-series on grief. So in the last episode, we talked about the stages of grief and the grief waves. And today we're going to be talking about navigating the holidays while grieving and just talk about tips for finding comfort and coping.
So one of the things to be aware of is that the holidays or birthdays or anniversaries, those kinds of things, those are always times where you're more likely to experience a larger wave in the grief waves, where you're going to experience a little bit more emotional discomfort when those times come around, because they're stark reminders that that person is not with you or not around with us anymore.
So it's just kind of a benchmark time where you're likely to just be thinking about them more and remembering times when they were there and you were experiencing those holidays with them. And just to reinforce for you guys that if you are experiencing that, that is a totally normal thing for people to go through. Absolutely. And so as we go through today's episode, we talk about how to navigate while you're grieving and we give you different tips.
Just remember that everyone grieves differently. And so these are just general tips, but definitely give margin for yourself and give yourself grace as you listen to this and know what your grief journey is like. But our heart really is to offer practical tips and gentle guidance to help you navigate the holidays. So we really just have four points that we want to address today. And the first one is accepting where you are emotionally and really giving yourself permission to feel.
Knowing that it's okay to feel anger and sadness or numbness during the holidays. It's okay to go through all the grief, right?
When we look at the stages of grief, just to recap, we look at denial or shock, feeling anger or frustration, and then going through the bargaining stage where you're asking a lot of the questions, what if and if only, and then depression and sadness, and then coming to a state of acceptance and remembering that acceptance isn't believing that this is a good thing or everything happens for a reason or they're in a better place, but it really is accepting what the situation holds.
So accepting that they are no longer here. And so giving yourself permission to experience all of these emotions without any guilt. Another thing that you want to do is adjust your expectations. A lot of times during the holidays, there's a lot happening. There's a lot of parties. There's a lot of pressure to feel festive or happy simply because it's the holidays. But we want you to be able to adjust your expectation and set your own tone for what the holiday season will look like this year.
If it means laying low and not going to all the things and doing all the things, then that's okay. But maybe you do need that extra distraction and so encouraging yourself to go to a few things but knowing that things are going to look different and really adjusting for that.
And I think that's an important point too because especially depending on the stage of grief or how fresh the grief is you may be looking at these events and thinking there's no way I'm going to be able to enjoy myself or have fun and it is okay to tone it down but also the other side of that spectrum is that you may go and be surprised that you might actually be able to enjoy yourself And so don't let how you perceive things are going to go dictate what you choose to do.
Choose to try to at least go to some things and see if you can enjoy yourself. And if it's just too much to bear, then kind of back down a little bit. But then if you're pleasantly surprised, you're like, I'm able to enjoy this a little bit more. Try to push yourself out a little bit more on top of that. Because again, the thing about this is that you won't know exactly how you're going to experience grief or how it's going to play out for you.
So part of it is testing. If you just allow yourself to imagine what you think things are going to go like, especially if you're in like the depression phase of grief, it's going to convince you that everything's going to go bad and you're not going to have any good time and you're just going to feel miserable. But if you just follow along with that thought process, then you're going to make your world very small and actually can cause you to get stuck there.
But also, just like Ruth said, we want you to give yourself permission to tone it down a little bit if you feel like, I don't know that I'm quite prepared for it, but that there is this balance that you want to try to strike. I think another tip is allowing for that flexibility, where you just know that it's okay to change plans at the last minute if your emotions become too overwhelming. And you don't need to commit to every event or celebration, but you can also communicate that to people.
You don't have to you don't owe people an explanation by any means but if it is a party that you're invited to you can let the person know hey you know i'm hoping to be there but there might be a chance that i don't come just because things have been really rough for me lately and you don't have to explain all of that but if it's someone close enough to you you can certainly have a conversation and that'd be okay but knowing that it's okay to be flexible it's okay to change things
sometimes even minute by minute it's okay to change things because our emotions are fluctuating and those waves are coming and we may be totally on calm ground that morning and then by that afternoon you were just hit by a wave of grief you just don't have the mental capacity or the emotional energy to be social and that's okay. So the second point we want to make is that you want to create a space for grieving.
And this may sound a little bit funny, but you want to almost schedule a time where it's like, hey, I'm going to take time and I might grieve now, or I might think or I might do some remembrance of this person at this time. Those feelings are there and they're likely to come out. If you wait until they come out on their own, they might come out at times where you are less pleased with them coming out at that time.
But if you take a little bit of time you say I'm going to take some time this afternoon I'm going to think about them I'm going to journal about them I'm going to think about past holidays that we have had with them or the first holidays maybe I have missed with them not being there and you allow yourself to experience those emotions and I don't want you to take this as a guarantee that if you do this that you won't have other times where they come up where you're not expecting
them but those emotions are there and if you acknowledge that they're there if you give space for them and you give space for yourself to feel and experience those emotions you're less likely to become overwhelmed in unexpected times. Again, feelings will come up whenever they want, but if you have less of a reserve because you've spent some time working on expressing and experiencing these emotions, then it tends to make them a little bit more manageable in other moments.
And I think another thing that it does is because you're designating time to remember. Whether it's through looking at photos or writing a letter, you're setting aside that specific time to honor the memory of your loved one and to really experience your grief, I think it also then gives you room and allows you to feel like, okay, I am making space to honor them.
It's okay for me to also experience happiness and joy because I'm not forgetting them in this time, but I'm being very intentional with remembering them. Another thing that we can do along with creating space for grieving is honoring traditions or creating new ones. And so some of the traditions that you may have may be too painful now, But I would also caution you not to just throw them out right away and try to avoid them.
But I do think giving yourself permission where it's like, hey, maybe we'll just put a pause on this one for this year. We're creating a new tradition of remembrance or taking a time where we remember this person or we give thanks for their life to acknowledge the grief and the passing of this person. And also another piece of this is you want to make sure that you include supportive people. These are people who would be encouraging listeners who allow you to talk openly about it.
And one of the things to know is that not all people are going to be okay with this. Some people have a much more avoidant personality and they don't want to talk about it or they don't want to experience it or they just want to kind of shut all this stuff out because it makes them uncomfortable. And I definitely don't want you to take it as your job to try to get these people to be comfortable with that.
But finding those people who are comfortable with it, who can be supportive, who you can talk it through, and who are people who aren't going to kind of throw those platitudes at you, but then really listen to your experience and just be an open and supportive ear to you. Because during the holidays, especially with family dynamics. Not everybody is particularly emotionally healthy. And acknowledging and understanding, like, hey, this is who they are.
I know maybe they're not the greatest person to try to look to for support for this. But then actually there's some people over here who are great to look to. And I will go to them more for the struggle compared to my other family members who are not likely to be responsive or have in the past shown that they're not very responsive. And I think when you have these people in your corner that you know you can trust, it can help this season not feel so isolating for you.
Number three is setting boundaries and practicing self-care. It's really important during this time to recognize your limits because grief can be so exhausting.
So you want to make sure that you're setting boundaries around holiday commitments we kind of talked about this in the first one but feeling free to say no to events or gatherings that feel just too overwhelming and recognizing what your capacity and limit is another thing you can do is just finding comfort in small ways so finding ways to nurture yourself every day maybe you have a special devotional that you're doing or you're cozying up to a fire or you're taking a quiet walk
Maybe it's something as simple as drinking your favorite warm beverage. So as you're grieving. These little areas of comfort, your favorite tea, your favorite blanket, your favorite spot in the house, your favorite book, being able to find comfort in the small ways. And as we always talk about boundaries and self-care, I think there are some very practical ways. And I would just remind you to breathe.
And I know that it sounds so funny because we're breathing all the time, but making sure that you are taking those deep breaths and you're slowing yourself down because even the simple fact of oxygen, sometimes we're not taking in as much oxygen as we can or we should.
And so yes, we're breathing to stay alive, but those deep breaths where you're really breathing in through your nose and breathing out through your mouth and just taking that time, I would say three to five deep breaths will allow you to release that tension and really help to ground you, especially during those moments where you're just feeling intense sadness or anxiety. Maybe it's in the middle of a holiday gathering. You're starting to feel that tension.
Take a minute and take those three to five deep breaths. And so when we think about setting boundaries and. Like we've said in the past, it's not always these spa days and getting your nails done. It's daily practices to help you take care of yourself. It's getting the rest that you need. It's drinking enough water. It's getting that oxygen flowing through you. It's making sure that you are eating, that you're taking a shower or maybe taking an extended bath.
All of these things to really care for yourself during this hard season.
And some of these things can feel so small but when it comes to taking care of yourself a lot of these small activities really can build up to more powerful experiences and emotions and so even just that act of breathing or doing like a long hot bath like you were saying those things can really make a difference in the long run but then when we start neglecting them it doesn't seem like it makes a difference in the short run but then over time it kind of compounds and it either gets
better or worse the more you're taking care of yourself or the less you're taking care of yourself. And so the final point that we want to make is we want you to find ways of experiencing moments of joy. And I know we talked a little bit about this in the last podcast that the people who are departed from us, the people that we love that are no longer around, they would want you to still be able to experience happiness and joy in your life.
And so when you're going through it, don't let the fact that they're not there allow you to stamp down or tamp down feelings of joy or happiness. When it strikes you, it strikes you. And you just want to be able to experience this little nugget of happiness that hits you. And don't get too caught up into thinking more about what that means, but just being in the moment and experiencing, man, I feel good, or that was fun.
And even if that then causes you to remember the person that you've lost, that doesn't mean that you should then just dive into those thoughts, but then recognizing like, okay, this was a nice experience for me here. Because I think sometimes you can feel guilty for experiencing that happiness. But remember, it doesn't diminish the love that you feel for the person you've lost. Another thing that you can do, and this may sound a little bit funny, but you can give back or you can volunteer.
And taking some time to help other people who are in need or other people who are struggling, a lot of times it can surprise people how rewarding that can feel. And so just like we were talking about in the last little point is that it can give you these little moments of joy or happiness or experiencing these positive feelings. And that can help you to process a little bit of your own levels of grief when you're stopping to give back to other people.
And I think the other thing too when you're stopping to take time to volunteer give back to other people it's also something that you're doing to kind of get out of your normal routine and it can give you brief moments of respite from thinking about the person who's passed away where you're focused on some other activity so as we close up today's episode we hope that this will be helpful as you navigate the holidays and we just want to reassure you that however you
choose to handle the season, it's okay. There's no right way to experience the holidays while grieving. And you can just take it one day at a time. You can keep things simple and really simplify all the activities to focus on what brings comfort and meaning to you. You don't need to do everything that you did during the past holidays, and really simplifying can help reduce that stress and allow you to go through the season.
That's already difficult for you, but it can take a little bit of that burden off. And so maybe you decorated multiple trees in the past and your whole house is decorated. Maybe just put one simple six inch tree up or hang one ornament up that brings you joy or have one friend over to have hot chocolate or tea and really try to find those little moments of joy in the midst of all of your grief.
And remember like we talked about in the last episode to really hold room for both, hold room for that joy while holding room for that grief and making space for it. All right, you guys, we hope that you stay tuned for the next episode as we talk about supporting someone who's grieving during the holidays. So have a great day and remember, your mind is a powerful thing. Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of Mr. and Mrs.
Therapy. We hope that you enjoyed today's episode and found it helpful. If so, would you take 30 seconds and share it with a friend? Also, we'd love for you to leave us a review on Apple Podcast. It lights us up to know that this podcast is helping you. If you have any questions or a topic you'd like discussed in future episodes, visit our Facebook group. Just click the link in the description below.
Although we are mental health providers, this podcast is for informational purposes only and is not intended to provide diagnosis or treatment. If you are struggling with persistent mental health issues, chronic marital issues, or feeling hopeless or suicidal, you are not alone. Help is available. Please seek professional help or call the National Suicide Hotline at 988. Thank you again for joining us on Mr. and Mrs. Therapy. Remember, there's always hope and there's always help. Music.