Holiday Heartaches & Healing: Grief, trauma and regret

When the holiday season rolls around, we are bombarded with potential triggers that are so loaded with decades of associations, we become vulnerable to extreme emotions. The emotional experiences explored in this session are grief, trauma and regret, with a special focus on how the power of this time of  year can make it all harder. Walk with me on the journey of being human.

Transcript

Hello and welcome back to the B Spot, the place that gives you almost therapy but not quite therapy. Thank you for taking the time out of your busy lives to listen to the sessions I share and thank you also to those who have provided feedback on the sessions so far. One of the main reasons I started this podcast was to share insights and experiences that relate to us all as we journey along the path of being human. Most of us go through life feeling so different from everybody else but when you peel back all the glitz and glamour and gadgets and gold, we’re all making our way through life doing the best we can. And we all carry our entire history with us everywhere we go, and we all feel insecure often because there’s just no manual that has all the answers. 

We all have times when we feel all the major emotions, psychopaths excluded, maybe we’ll talk about them in a future session. Those emotions can be especially difficult this time of year with the days so short and trauma triggers abound. For most of us, November and December are filled with vivid memories of time spent with family and friends during both the highs and lows of life. Those memories stretch back to our earliest years and our most powerful experiences. There are so many triggers for anyone who has experienced trauma or loss that they associate with the major celebrations that take place this time of year, that it can be challenging to navigate the holiday season without dysfunction rearing its ugly head. So, let’s talk about some of the challenges that come with this time of year that can easily cause dysfunction to pop up. I realize that I’m a little late for this year, but maybe this will be helpful for next year. Please share this with anyone who is struggling this time of year or any time. 

Holidays this time of year have a rich history with most of us, and it can be hard when we are forced to experience them without a close friend or family member that we are used to having around. Many people who have had to endure the death of a loved one find themselves especially aware during this time of year of just how much value they had placed on the relationship with that person. Often the first big holiday after a loss is when we find ourselves no longer able to postpone the acceptance of the permanence of the loss. The rhythms and participants of the holiday gatherings change and begin to be looked at as the new normal, at least until the next disruption. Many people find it difficult to allow themselves to enjoy the holidays because they feel it is disrespectful to the person who is no longer there. They feel they must sit with their grief in order to honor the dead. I have come to the conclusion that there are better ways to honor the dead, and that engaging in those better ways will help carry you through the holidays and lead you toward healing. 

It will be no surprise to anyone who knows me that the first way of honoring those who have passed on that I would recommend is to write about it. There are a couple of different types of writing that can be helpful for this type of…work. The first type we’ll talk about is documenting. If you have experienced trauma around the holiday season, it likely replays in your mind often, especially around the time of year it occurred, and around triggering events like holidays. Just a reminder that loss can be, and often is traumatic, and those who live on suffering generate the majority of that suffering by repeating painful thoughts in their mind about the loss. Documenting can help whether your trauma is related to the loss of a person or a feeling. Any event that forces a dramatic shift in our perception of our world can be traumatic, and documenting that shift can release us from the constant replaying of such emotional memories. Documenting is just what it sounds like. You write down everything that you remember about a traumatic experience you have been through and write the story as chronologically as you can. Leave no detail unwritten. Understand that your brain will want to constantly remind you of anything that you don’t write down and although these are clearly things you don’t want to forget, you cannot move forward in life allowing yourself to experience them fully all the time. It just becomes too difficult to feel that level of emotion that frequently. So, writing those things down is how you create a space for those traumatic memories to reside and be available for experiencing whenever you need to do so. And you will need to do so at various points along your path, but you may also go through long stretches when you don’t need to do so, and that is OK. 

One of the cheesiest yet most true sayings I’ve ever heard is that you have to let it flow to let it go. We are emotional beings and when we have powerful experiences, we need to allow ourselves to feel powerful emotions, even if it’s scary. It would be great if we could just pretend to the point that it becomes real that we don’t need to feel painful emotions but the fact is, we just do. We need to feel. And when we try to get in the way of that process, guess what happens? That’s right, dysfunction. So, if you are still reeling and not yet healing from a traumatic experience and you find yourself repeating all the details of that experience over and over again in your head, try documenting everything that you remember about the event. If this was the loss of a loved one, the documentation could begin with the days or weeks leading up to the loss, through the experience of discovering or being made aware of the loss, and then the experiences that took place immediately after the loss. The more details the better because again, these are things you don’t want to forget. These memories deserve to be preserved, just on paper rather than as unhealthy, negative emotion producing, ruminations in our mind that only keep us stuck unhealed and unwell.

Another type of writing that can be helpful with loss especially is write to the person you’ve lost. Some people start a journal specifically dedicated to communication with the person they are missing. These are people who want to share their living experiences with the person who is gone. Those who don’t have other supports available or who aren’t ready to find or use new emotional or social supports, or for whatever reason matters to them, feel the desire or need to communicate with the person they are missing. That’s the thing about grief, while there are predictable stages we all go through, that can look vastly different person to person, and outside of a few extremes, there is no right or wrong way to deal with the loss of someone special. It just hurts and we experience that hurt however we can but we must be able to function in life, even if that means barely for a while. One thing that can help us function is to maintain, or even rekindle our connection to the person who has died. There’s a tendency to think that once the funeral has occurred, thinking or talking about the person who has passed will only make those who mourn feel worse, but it turns out it’s quite the opposite. Trying to forget the loss doesn’t respect the power of the connections that we form with those we love. The loss must become a part of us, but not a part that weakens us, a part that gives us resilience and strength, and wisdom. Keeping a line of communication open between yourself and the person you’ve lost can help you move forward rather than staying stuck in sadness.

Another gift you can give yourself if you are mourning the loss of someone close this holiday season is to honor that person by creating something special, that can become a space reserved for memories and emotions and can serve as a positive representation of that person or what that person meant in your life. Some things people have done to accomplish this are to sit on the floor with a box of photos and make a collage or paint a picture that represents some aspect of the relationship or the person. You can create any thing or type of display that serves the function for you of honoring the person who is gone…ish. I say ish because we don’t really know just how gone a person is after their body and brain have died. It is quite possible that some element of the energy of the people we love stays with us forever and choosing to try and forget how much a person means to us discredits that possibility. Creating a space that honors that connection is a far better way to move forward. Any of the ideas mentioned above would help to honor the dead and would serve as a memorial that can be seen and felt when needed, and closed up and put away when needed as well.

The DSM 5, which if you don’t know what that is, consider yourself lucky because I’m guessing you’ve never been diagnosed with a mental health disorder. Anyway, the DSM 5 says that adults get a year and kids get 6 months before they can be diagnosed with Prolonged Grief Disorder. That gives us a lot of time to feel and work through our emotions after a significant loss before we get to even begin to consider  ourselves diagnosable just because it still hurts. Because it’s still hard to accept life without the person you lost. Because you’re having trouble focusing on what is rather than what was. So the point here is that grief is one of the big emotions, it’s one that can absolutely wreck your perspective on life if you let it, and it can be especially hard during the holiday season. We all experience grief differently and it is important that we do experience it. We all must live with the knowledge that at some point, if we’re lucky, we will experience the death of at least some of our loved ones. When we go through that very human experience, we get to go at our own pace. We get to feel sad, we get to cry, we get to miss, and we even get to be pretty darn dysfunctional for some time, but eventually we also get to move back onto our life path and move forward. We never get over grief. We learn to live with grief and have it take up less and less headspace over time. Again, the losses we experience become part of us, but they don’t need to hold us back. They make us stronger and more aware of the fleetingness of life. Aware to the point of maximizing more moments and finding more joy, because isn’t that what life really is all about?   

Another common experience this time of year, and one that can easily be connected to past trauma is loneliness. It can be a lot harder to create artificial connections with others in the wintertime. People are less likely to want to leave the house and can become isolated easily. It’s one thing when loneliness is due to having experienced a loss and not having the social strength to go out and create new connections. It’s another thing entirely when someone allows their ego to make a point to the point of isolating themselves from someone they actually love. Going back to that idea about how powerful the experiences and memories can be this time of year, the conflicts that divide often occur around this time of year, and are most often thought about and regretted this time of year. People have all sorts of ideas about how important their ego should be in helping them make decisions about relationships. People can decide to be upset about all sorts of things and use that as an excuse to deprive themselves of a relationships they actually want. My kid shouldn’t have done this or that, or my parent shouldn’t have done or said some thing, or a friend should have called me back so I’m not calling them. There are lots of different stories we can tell ourselves to justify our resentments but in the end, cliches abound, we only end up hurting ourselves and often the people we love. Proving our point leaves us regretting our actions.

Regret is another one of those powerful emotions that can come up during the holiday season. That nagging feeling that if I had just done something different, things would have been better. Or that nagging question wondering, “how could I have done that “Why did I say that?”  I heard someone the other day say that people should not be judged by the worst thing they ever did. He then went on to point out that people change, and learn and grow and deserve to be given consideration for that. I don’t entirely disagree but it did make me think of all of the men and women in prisons across this country. I started to wonder how they would feel about this point, as they sit in their cells exactly because they are being judged for what was likely the worst thing they ever did. I think about all of the relationships that have ended because one person was judged based on their worst decision. I think about how often people in those situations must sit and think about those “worst moments.” There are clearly some “worst moments,” both in life and in relationships that come with significant consequences.  I know when I do minorly stupid things that lead to minorly negative consequences, I have to actively resist stewing for too long because the tendency is to use my knowledge from the present to judge my decisions from the past, and that is not treating myself fairly. When thinking about our past decisions, it’s really hard, if not impossible to forget what we know from living through the experience we are now analyzing. And so as we tell ourselves what the right decision would have been and all the reasons we should have known that, we are filled with regret, which can trigger all types of other negative emotions. What is it that we think we can accomplish with regret? Most of us know that we can’t undo things that have happened, so, past the point of learning a lesson or two, what it the point of regret? 

Regret is one of the worst forms of self-punishment because there is absolutely nothing we can do to turn back the hands of time and change the past. I often think of the old Superman movie where Superman flies around the earth and reverses the spin and is able to go back in time. Regret would only be useful if we had that ability. Then we could go back and fix our mistakes and resolve the negative feeling. But without that ability, we are just punishing ourselves for something we can’t change. If you’re feeling regret, take a fresh look at why you’re feeling that and explore ways to take action on the issue at the center of the regret. For instance, if you regret that you didn’t apologize to a loved one when you were wrong, seek them out and apologize. Ignore that voice in your head that tells you you’ll sound dumb, or they won’t accept your apology anyway, or they should apologize first, or whatever justification your ego is telling you. Feeling regret is an indication that you either need to let something go or take some type of action. Once you identify an action and take it, you have reached the edge of your control of the situation. The outcome is out of your hands, but your part of the process is yours entirely.

Discovering that you need to take action can be easier than discovering that you need to let go of something. At least with action, there’s a clear path and clear limits of what you can control. You take the action you can take and then the rest is up to forces outside yourself. When you need to let go in your mind, the reality that it is completely within your control can actually make it feel more difficult. Because isn’t control really what this type of regret is all about anyway? The attempt to control the past? It’s conflicting to realize that you have all the control over your thoughts and none of the control over the past. This conflict makes it harder to truly let things go because our ego tells us there must be some way to fix it. And that just isn’t true, there is no way to fix the past. The past must be accepted, responsibility must be taken for one’s actions and ideally lessons are learned. One thing that I’ve learned about lessons though, if you don’t learn them, you will continue to be given chances to do so. 

There are lots of strategies for letting things go. As you probably already guessed, one way is to write down the things that no longer serve you and to ceremoniously destroy them while telling yourself that you are letting these things go. You can get a pile of rocks and imagine each one as something that needs to be let go as you toss them into a lake. You can close your eyes and imagine each regret as a helium balloon floating into the sky or painted on the side of a passing train. Whatever works for you but do something to let go of that which does not serve you. Regret does not serve any of us. It’s energy that can’t be used in the direction it’s aimed. Use that energy to find nuggets of wisdom that have come from the experience. And if you can’t do that, at least practice accepting that those things have occurred and that nothing can be done to change that.

You are in charge of your own story! I think that’s about the most important thing to understand in life and especially this time of year as people are telling themselves powerful stories due to powerful associations. There is a lot of emotion this time of year because often the celebrations, or even just dates on the calendar, trigger so many memories of years past. I talked about a few things here but I know there’s so much more we could talk about. I mean we’re talking about the holidays and didn’t even mention family or money or blending old family with new family or working through religious differences or the issue of fulfilling generational expectations. We could dive deeper into loss, trauma or regret and easily spend a session talking about each one. If one of these topics hit you hard and you want that deeper dive, email me at bhellercounseling@gmail.com and let me know. Hope something you’ve heard in this podcast has been helpful, and I appreciate you joining me for another session of Almost Therapy at the B Spot. Happy Winter everybody! May your days get longer, and thoughts get healthier. Until our next session, be well.