Ep 191: Handling the Holidays During and After Divorce | Becoming You Again Podcast

Divorce and the holiday season can feel like an overwhelming emotional rollercoaster full of triggers, unexpected bad surprises and a lot of thoughts of just wanting them to be over. But this year can be different. Join me, Karin Nelson, as I share personal insights and practical strategies to help you manage your holiday season this year to make you feel more calm, more capable of handling the negative emotions when they show up and more intentional about what you want your holiday's to actually look and feel like.

By the end of this episode you will know EXACTLY how to craft an emotional safety plan which is essential for a peaceful holiday experience. You will understand how to expect the unexpected, develop proactive strategies and arm yourself against any overwhelming emotions you might encounter. You will feel totally capable of supporting yourself in every way throughout this holiday season.

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Grief and trauma are the two biggest struggles women deal with as they go through their divorce. It's highly likely that you are experiencing both and don't even realize what you're feeling. I'm here to tell you that it's okay for you to grieve your marriage (even if it was shitty) and it's normal to be experiencing some kind of trauma (which is essentially a disconnection from yourself - your mind, body and soul). I can help guide you through the grief in all of the forms it shows up so you can heal. I can also teach you how to ground yourself in healing so you can ease through the trauma. Schedule your free consult by clicking here.

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Full Episode Transcript:

When you're going through a divorce, sometimes what you want most is a giant hug from somebody who's been through it, knows exactly what you're going through and can help you along the way. This podcast, Becoming you Again, is that hug in many different ways. This podcast is going to help you with the mental, emotional and physical stress that you are feeling as you go through your divorce. I am your host, karin Nelson, and you are listening to Becoming you Again, episode number 191. Welcome to Becoming you Again, the podcast to help you with your mental and emotional well-being during and after divorce. This is where you learn to overcome the grief and trauma of your divorce. We're going to do that by reconnecting with yourself, creating lasting emotional resilience and living a truly independent life so that your life can be even better than when you were married. I'm your host, karin Nelson. Welcome back to the podcast, my lovely ladies. As always, I am so happy that you are here listening for your own mental, physical, emotional well-being, healing, growth all of the things as you go through your divorce.

In this podcast today, I'm going to be talking about getting through the holidays and whatever that means to you. Maybe it's getting through the holidays and not losing your shit. Maybe it's getting through the holidays and not feeling triggered at every turn. Maybe it's getting through the holidays and feeling comforted and loved because you don't have your kids with you this time around. Whatever it means this year in the holiday season and I am specifically releasing this episode right before Thanksgiving, if you're in the United States, which leads right up to Christmas, hanukkah, kwanzaa, all of the other holidays, new Year's Eve, right, all of the things so this episode may be exactly what you need right now and all the way through the end of the year. And, by the way, if you know anyone who is struggling, they are going through a divorce, maybe a separation, maybe just a breakup. Maybe they just really, really struggle with the holidays in general. If you know someone who is struggling with the holidays, in whatever situation, I am asking you to text them right now the link to this episode. Send them this episode, tell them that it's going to help, that it is helping you make it through the holidays.

Okay, I know many of you are probably very nervous about going into the holidays. Maybe this is the first time you're experiencing the holidays during or after your divorce, and so you won't have your kids for one or many of the holidays right or days, or maybe you're not going to be able to celebrate the holiday on the exact day that it falls on the calendar. Maybe you've been through your divorce and it's been years and you're still struggling with experiencing the holidays. Maybe you're been through your divorce and it's been years, and you're still struggling with experiencing the holidays. Maybe you're still feeling triggered all the time about having to ask your ex about certain days or being able to have the kids at certain parties, or there's so many iterations of what this can look like and what you might be struggling with over the holidays. But let me tell you what my goal in teaching you the things that I'm going to talk about in today's episode is to help you create calm for yourself, to help you be better equipped to handle the holidays, no matter what they are, and to show up with being intentional about how you want your holidays to go. Now, I'm not saying that this episode is going to teach you how to make your holidays perfect, not teaching you that you will never feel any kind of negative emotion during the holidays. Both of those things aren't possible. I want to remind you of that. It's not possible to be perfect, and we don't want to strive for that, because then we over-function and we create chaos instead of anything close to perfection, and it's totally normal for you to feel negative emotion. But I am going to teach you things that will help you be better equipped when those negative emotions show up, so that you can support yourself in a more emotionally intelligent way to be able to handle when the negative emotions come. So I want you to think about this what happens to you when you think about the upcoming holidays, like right now?

If I say, think about what's going to happen on your Thanksgiving, or try and imagine how your Christmas is going to like. Your Christmas morning is going to look, what happens? I want you to kind of take a look and try and notice what is happening in your mind and what is happening in your body. Let's pay attention to what's happening in your mind First of all. Does your brain go into a story about what you're pretty positive the future is going to look like? About what that Christmas morning is going to look like? About what that Christmas morning is going to look like, how it's going to feel, what's going to go right, what's going to go wrong, how hard it's going to be, how different they will look, how the traditions aren't there anymore. How sad it's going to be because you're not a family unit. How sad it is because both parents aren't there together. Maybe you don't have your kids on actual Christmas or actual Thanksgiving or over Hanukkah.

What is happening in your mind? What is the story that your mind is spinning? And then notice what is happening in your body. Do you feel your nervous system activate? Do you feel your cackles raise? Do you feel triggered in some way and, if so, where are you feeling that? What's going on in your body? Are you feeling tightness anywhere? Is your heart beating faster? Just start to notice these things.

I want you to be aware of what your brain is telling you and that it's just a story and what is happening in your body when you think about the future and the holidays and what might happen. Because the more we are aware of when our nervous system gets heightened, of the stories that our mind is feeding us, the more we can step in and create calm, create regulation, create emotional healing and support for ourselves. When we are feeling triggered, when we are feeling uncertain about the future, when we are feeling scared about what might happen. Awareness is always, always the key to any kind of understanding. We have to have that kind of understanding through curiosity before change can occur. So I want you to think about when your nervous system is getting activated, when your body is showing up tense and tight and you're feeling anxious and you're feeling nervous or uncertain or frustrated or any of those things, those triggers to your nervous system. That nervous system activation. It's here to show you something. It's here to show you where either there's some healing that needs to happen or there's some learning that needs to go on about what's happening in your body, right, so the key to going into the holidays with more calm and more intention around what you want them to look like is to create safety. We want to create as much emotional safety as we can. And again doesn't mean you're going to not never feel negative emotion. What it means is, when you feel negative emotion probably sometimes intense negative emotion you know how to emotionally show up for yourself, be compassionate with yourself and give yourself the things that you truly need moving through that negative emotion, allowing it to be present and moving through it. And I want to just say a little side note about intentions, because intentions are very, very powerful. Let me give you an example.

When I first told my husband at the time that I had decided that I wanted a divorce, I had an intention in my head from the very beginning that I did not want a typical divorce that we see in the media, right, that we see play out, played out on movies and television and books and all the things. And and those typical divorces are a lot of animosity, a lot of hate, kids picking sides, co-parenting is impossible, there's no communication. You know all of the things, right. We, we all know what that typical divorce looks like and I did not want that. I didn't know if it was possible for me to not have that. I had no idea I'd never been divorced. I didn't know what kind of people we would become through our divorce.

But I had an intention that I wanted our divorce to look different. And I told him this I said I don't want our divorce to look like everyone else's, don't want our divorce to look like everyone else's. I would love it if it's possible, that we get along, that we put our kids' needs and their well-being first above our pride, above our own selfish desires, above trying to stick it to the other person above any of that and we just do our best to create an environment where we are still a nuclear family that gets along, that can be around each other and make this as easy and as smooth as possible for the kids. Now don't get me wrong. If your divorce doesn't look like the way I set my intention for mine, it's totally fine. I'm not saying that there's anything wrong if your divorce looks different. If yours looks like the typical divorce that we see in the world, that is fine. There's nothing wrong with you or with what is going on. I understand that it is not possible or even wanted to have that kind of a divorce. I have no judgment for you and what is happening in your life. All I have is love and respect and admiration for you and whatever you are dealing with. So I know divorce looks all kinds of ways.

I just wanted to give you an example of the intention that I had and how powerful that was in my own life, so that you have an idea of the power of intentions. So for us it took some learning, it took some growth. We had a little hiccups along the way and of course we're still learning and growing and figuring that out, but for the most part, eight years later, that intention has been brought to fruition. So I just wanted to tell you that story to really reinforce that intention is important and it is powerful, and you deciding what you want your holidays to look like, to feel like, can be very powerful for you. So coming up with an intention of what you want your holidays to feel like maybe is a really good place to start, because, even though we can't stop negative emotion from coming or from happening, we can change how we feel or even how we think about things to create different emotions in our lives.

So the first thing that we're going to do to create safety around our holiday season, to go into this holiday season, is we're just going to kind of expect that there's going to be some triggering happening, and I don't know what those triggers are for you. Maybe trigger isn't even the right word. I don't know what. Those things that set you off, those things that create emotional instability in your life, create the emotional roller coaster, that create the stress I don't know what those things are for you, but we're just going to what those things are for you. But we're just going to number one expect that there's going to be some, because the more we go into the holidays and we just think, well, I don't want any bad thing to happen, I don't want to feel any stress, I don't want to feel any triggers, I don't. I just don't want to feel, I don't want to be triggered by anything, I don't want to have to deal with any of that. That's literally setting ourselves up for disaster, because when we try to outrun negative emotion or things outside of our control from happening, then we're unprepared for any of it to happen and we get pissed off and scared and upset and angry when things do happen.

Because inevitably, nothing in our lives will go perfectly, and I know you know that. I know you know that your holidays aren't going to turn out perfectly, no matter what. There's always going to be somebody who doesn't like the gift or is mad because they woke up too early or you didn't make the thing right, or like whatever right. They're never going to be perfect and that's okay. Life doesn't need to be perfect. It's how we respond and show up in those moments when things don't go exactly as we planned. That makes us who we are. That shows the world who we are.

So we're going to go into the holidays expecting that things are going to happen. Things aren't going to go smoothly and it's going to be fine. We're going to go into the holiday season with an understanding that there are going to be things that look different. It's not going to be mom and dad opening presents with the kids on Christmas morning. Maybe you're going to be opening your presents with your kids on December 28th Totally done that before, it's totally fine.

Maybe you're going to go in understanding that this is the year, like I just said, you're not going to have the kids on that holiday. Maybe you're going to kind of go in expecting that your ex may say no to letting your kids go to that party that falls on his time, or say no to the extra hour or coming over the night before something. Maybe you're going to go in knowing that you're probably going to have memories of past holidays where things might have felt happier or looked different and that might hurt a little bit. But you're going to go in expecting that these things are going to happen or going to come up, that memories are going to flow, because once we have the expectation that things aren't going to go exactly as they used to. Exactly as we hope that everything is going to be perfect, we know it's not, but now that we have that expectation, we don't have to be surprised by anything. Right, and maybe you still will be, and that's okay too. But once you get over the surprise, you just go. Okay, all right, this was something maybe I should have anticipated or expected. It's fine that I didn't see it coming. I feel this negative emotion Either way.

What we do next is we have a safety plan in place for ourselves so that we can take care of ourselves emotionally. This is an emotional safety plan, and I'm going to tell you exactly how to create one for yourself so that you are prepared to go into this holiday season. And I am asking you that, as I lay this out, please do this write it out, type out some notes on your phone If you only have your phone with you get out a piece of paper and write out a safety plan, post it somewhere on a post-it note, put it somewhere, not just in your head, but literally write it down or type it out on your phone where you can reference it. Because I promise you, when you are activated, your brain is going to go offline and it's not going to be open to learning or remembering what you said that you wanted in your safety plan. It's going to be like I don't know what the fuck to do in this moment. Everything hurts and this sucks and I'm crying in the corner over here and I don't know what to do.

We have a safety plan ready to go so that you are prepared to show up for you. That is the whole point of this is to show up for you and take care of you in this time of year that we know we are expecting is going to be kind of difficult, right? So I want you to think about this Like we are doing anything we can to protect ourselves beforehand, before the things that we are pretty sure are going to happen are going to happen. We have that plan in place. So think about like a fireproof safe or even like a bulletproof vest. When those things are used, it doesn't mean that there's never going to be a fire, or it doesn't mean if, like an FBI agent or something, is wearing a bulletproof vest, it doesn't mean that they're never going to get shot. It just means that they have a protection.

The fireproof safe protects things from a fire that might occur. Or the bulletproof vest protects someone from a bullet that might be coming their way right. It's not stopping any of the outside things or the emotions from happening, but it is a protection. It's a protective plan, it's a safety plan. That is what we're creating with your safety plan as you go into the holidays, because the goal is to not not ever feel triggered or to not ever feel stressed or to not ever feel negative emotion. The goal is to grow your capacity to hold the trigger, to hold the negative emotion, and we do that with our safety plan because your safety plan is made specifically for that. So, basically, a safety plan means that you know how to take care of your nervous system when you're triggered, when you're stressed, when you're emotional, when you're all the things, because a safe nervous system is open to learning, is open to curiosity, is open to allowing negative emotion to be there without freaking out, without reacting. A safe nervous system is open to your thoughts and, like the intention that you've set for your holidays, research has shown that, over time, learning doesn't happen effectively without safety. Safety is truly the foundation of healing. Without feeling safe in your body, there will be no healing going on. So, when you are learning to connect with yourself and when you are learning to move through the holidays in a more intentional, calm way, in a more intentional, calm way, a safety plan is what's going to get you there.

The first step in your emotional safety plan is you need to be able to ground yourself. So I want you to write down a way that you ground yourself or a somatic practice that you have used that works very well for you, that immediately creates a sense of more calm than what you're feeling in the moment and helps to realign your nervous system. I have many, many podcasts that can help with this. Hopefully you've tried several of them and have one or two that you really love. But that is number one. Write down a grounding technique or a somatic practice that you can use to self soothe, to create calm, to realign your nervous system. After you've done that, you've taken a couple of minutes. Maybe it's a breathing exercise, whatever it is right. You've taken a couple of minutes to do that. I want you to remind yourself that if things get too intense because sometimes when we're doing a somatic practice, things still stay kind of intense that you can just step away anytime you can move your body, you can do what you need to do to support yourself.

Number three I want you to try to notice what emotion you're feeling in the moment, whether it's anger, frustration, fear, unworthiness, blame, shame, sadness or anything else, sadness or anything else. Notice what emotion you're feeling, notice it and then name it. I just want you to know there's no wrong answer when it comes to naming the emotion. You might be thinking like, well, I don't know what emotion this is, I'm not sure it could be this or it could be this. That's okay, just pick one, see if it feels like it fits. Whatever it is that you are feeling in that moment. And then I want you to notice, on an emotional intensity scale of one to 10, what number are you feeling that emotion at? I'm feeling an eight and I'm feeling a lot of anger right now.

And then I just want you to allow that feeling to be in your body. What is anger or sadness, or what is that emotion that you're feeling, feel like in your body? Describe it as much as you can in physical terms. You can even kind of invite it in and go oh yes, that is anger. That is what I'm feeling. Okay, hello, there you are, welcome in Describe it in physical terms. Where do you feel it in your body? What does it feel like? What does it look like? Is it fast, is it slow, is it hard, is it soft? Does it feel constricting or tightening? And when you describe it and breathe through it, notice, does that make the emotional intensity go up on your scale? Does it stay the same? Does it go down? Just start to notice these things as you are allowing that emotion to be present inside of you.

At this point. I want you to check in. Where are you on that emotional intensity scale? Do you feel like the emotion is processing through you? Do you feel like it's dissipating? Do you feel like you still need to react to it or the urge to resist it in some way? Or are you feeling more open, more calm, more realigned in any way? If you are feeling more calm, more opened, more realigned, more able to go about the rest of your day or the rest of whatever's happening for you in that moment, take a breath, thank yourself for allowing the emotion to be there, to working through your emotional safety plan, and then move on with your day.

And if it still feels very intense and you still feel like you need some support and some healing and some compassion and love, then I want you to try some more things. On a separate piece of paper, write down any thoughts that are coming to your mind. Do this unfiltered, without any kind of judgment about what is going on for you, about what you're feeling and thinking. Don't tell yourself I know I shouldn't be thinking this, I know I shouldn't be feeling this. Don't say any of that. We're just going to write down everything that's coming into your mind and get it down on paper. Then you're going to take a breath, you're going to thank yourself for showing up for you, for supporting and loving you through this moment, and then you're going to take that piece of paper and either shred it If you have a shredder, you are going to rip it up into tiny pieces or you are going to burn it, maybe in your sink or in a safe place where you can burn things right.

But that is a way of emotionally and mentally letting go. It's a process of letting go and allowing those thoughts and those feelings to dissipate, to move through you, to let them go without judgment. Then you're going to check in with yourself again on that emotional intensity scale. Are you feeling more calm? Are you feeling more capable of handling what is to come? Are you feeling more realigned and able to support yourself without reacting, without resisting or avoiding any emotions that come? If you are, take a breath, thank yourself for showing up for you, for creating a healing environment for yourself, and move on with your day. And if you're not, then we're going to keep going.

If you need to keep going on your emotional safety plan, the next thing you're going to do is you're going to step into ownership and acceptance. This means that you take ownership over yourself and you accept who you are and where you are right now. You can say things like I accept myself for who I am and and it's totally okay that I'm feeling this way in this moment I am not my thoughts and I am not my feelings. They are things that move through me and they wax and wane. I am worthy and whole exactly as I am. I can learn my way through this. Nothing has gone wrong here or something else that feels resonant to you. Ownership and acceptance is owning who you are and the way you feel, not making any of those things bad or wrong, and accepting that you are in charge and have the power over yourself and your life, that you are in charge and have the power over yourself and your life, and it's a knowledge of your worthiness, your value, your lovableness and your wholeness as you are.

Do that and then check in with your emotional intensity level and notice has it gone down? Are you feeling more calm? Do you feel more capable of moving toward the intention that you have set for yourself in your holiday season? Are you feeling more capable of handling whatever is facing you on the other side of this moment that you've taken for yourself to step into your emotional safety plan? If so, take a breath, a cleansing breath, thank yourself for showing up for you emotionally and move on with your day Now, after you've gone through your safety plan. That's going to bring your prefrontal cortex back online, because you've been able to calm down, you've been able to realign your nervous system in some kind of way, and so this is the perfect time to either, number one, set the intentions of what you want your holidays to look like If you haven't done that yet, of what you want your holidays to feel like, or, if you've already done that and set your intentions, because you're probably going to need your safety plan a couple of times more than once, I'm sure.

But if you've already set your intentions, possibly think about the person that you want to be moving forward toward the intentions that you've already set Right, and so you can think about like what's the next best step to move me closer to making my intention a reality, or what decision can I make in this moment to support myself moving forward. Listen, no one can tell you what your intentions should be. That is totally up to you and that is something that is very personal. So think about what is important to you, what your values are, what aligns with you, and set your intentions around the holidays around that. For me, my intention this upcoming holiday season is to enjoy myself in the present moment as much as possible. It is to take as many pictures as I can when I am with my family, and I have also set the intention to allow the holiday season to be joyful, to be peaceful, to be fun, but also to be filled with grief as often as it needs to be.

This holiday season for me, although I am not struggling with anything around my divorce, as many of you probably will be I will be feeling a lot of grief, and I'm anticipating that and expecting that kind of like I talked about at the beginning of this podcast. But mine will be there in a different way. I lost my father earlier this year and this will be the first holiday season without him. I have already been feeling a lot of grief leading up to these last few weeks and I am anticipating and expecting that that grief is going to continue, and so my intention is to just allow that to be present within me when it comes, as I move forward and move through this holiday season.

So what are your intentions? Decide after you've gone through your safety plan and then continue to move toward those intentions throughout the holiday season. You've got this. I love you. You can do this. This is the time. I love you. You can do this. This is the time of year. Like any time of year, is a great time of year to show up for yourself, to help yourself heal and support yourself as you're going through really difficult things.

The holidays for many of us, especially during and after a divorce, are the worst time of year or the time of year that we dread coming up. The worst time of year or the time of year that we dread coming up and that is the best time for you to have something in place that you can go to to support you, to help you, to love you through this. Being hard on ourselves when things are already hard just makes everything harder when things are already hard just makes everything harder. When things are hard, we need softness, we need love, we need support, and you can provide all of those things for you in every way. You can be soft with you, you can be kind and loving to you as you are struggling, as you are going through hard things, and you can provide that healing, that emotional support that you're looking for, that you're desperately wanting. When you go through really difficult times, the holidays do not have to be terrible. You do not have to dread them and, if forever, the rest of your life you continue to dread them and you continue to not be happy that they're coming. Let's love ourselves through that. But the way to do that is to create your emotional safety plan, create the intention of what you want to happen, expect that it's not going to go perfect and that it's going to be okay no matter what, because you will show up for you, and this is the exact way to do that.

All right, my friends, thank you for being here. I will be back next week. Hi friend, I'm so glad you're here and thanks for listening. I wanted to let you know that if you're wanting more, a way to make deeper, more lasting change, then working one-on-one with me as your coach may be exactly what you need. Together, we'll take everything you're learning in the podcast and implement it in your life, with weekly coaching, real-life practice and practical guidance. To learn more about how to work with me one-on-one, go to KarinNelsonCoaching dot com. That's W-W-W dot K-A-R-I-N-N-E-L-S-O-N coaching dot com. Thanks for listening. If this podcast agreed with you in any way, please take a minute to follow and give me a rating. Wherever you listen to podcasts and for more details about how I can help you live an even better life than when you were married, make sure and check out the full show notes by clicking the link in the description.