Holidays

This is a first blog. My idea with these pieces is to share short reflections that arise out of therapeutic work or pieces that clients have brought up. These topics or letters are a product of whatever the current themes and patterns I’m encountering in my practice of psychotherapy and collaboration with clients. 

As the holiday season has begun there are varied issues arising for many of us at this time of year, as they do each year. Many themes including unmet expectations, hopes, disappointments, stress, intensified burdens on family relationship and a sense of dread. These experiences, seemingly at odds with the origins of the holidays and missing the usual belief that the holidays are functions of a fundamental joy, opportunities to pause and reflect, share gratitude, etc. Instead, many of us have anything but happiness during the holidays and the refrain “I can’t wait for the holidays to be over” can be a common statement in the therapy office.  

I was reminded of these pieces upon visiting Disneyworld years ago with my eldest son and wife. There were many kids and adults wearing Disney t-shirts that said, “Best Day Ever!” But of course, many of these were ice cream and tear stained, illuminating the basic reality that the heavy burden of happiness for one special day, holiday or vacation comes with not only our basic humanness and a lot of expense, but also a lot of should’s and impossible expectations.  

Another memory comes to mind. In 2015 I flew across the country after learning my mother had a cardiac incident. While I traveled from east to west coasts, I hoped that I would simply see her alive, even one last time. What unfolded was a lesson in joy. While I couldn’t be happy that my mother was in real trouble, I found that I experienced a simple and complete experience of joy and wholeness in being with her, holding her hand, brushing her hair and teeth, caring for her in the ways I could. While my mother thankfully lived and recovered, I realized what I see as a difference between happiness and joy. Joy doesn’t need any particular external factors to operate, it is a fundamental state of felt wholeness and aliveness. Happiness differs, I find, in its reliance on external factors being aligned with what I like, or don’t like (unhappiness).

Many of us may find our life situation or family experience an unhappy one as related to the holidays. Perhaps it is best to reconsider how we can relate to joy, to our basic aliveness. I see this as embedded in the metaphor of ‘light,’ a common symbol of the holiday season throughout the northern hemisphere, seen in the Christmas tree, the Jewish Menorah, the candles in the Diwali holiday of India and Asia, to name a few. I wonder about the light carried within each person into the dark months of this time of year, into the unhappy experiences we may have had, or are having still.