Catherine Whelan Costen
Author of PERMISSION TO BREATHE
MY TOP TIPS FOR GETTING THROUGH THE HOLIDAYS WHILE GRIEVING
Respect Yourself and Your Process while Respecting Other People’s Space
Do say NO!
Sounds easy enough to do, but many people have yet to practice using the word ‘NO’ — it can be a complete sentence. You are not obligated to make other people feel better. You don’t owe anyone an explanation or excuse for your ‘no’. What you may have done at other times in your life around the holidays may not make sense for you now. The year after my son was killed in a vehicle accident, I put up the tree and decorated it, the next year I did not. I honoured my feelings at the moment, season by season.
Enjoy and celebrate your successes.
When you are grieving a loved one, it can be easy to get swallowed up in the shoulds, the regrets of the past and remorse over what could have been the future. You cannot know what the future would have held. You do know the joy of the moments past. You cannot change the moments from the past that were painful. You can (when ready) heal the regretful memories. Talk about your loved one with people who can celebrate with you. Honour them with an empty chair at a holiday table, if you decide to attend or host one. Make their favourite food, tell a story about their importance in your life. Don’t let people hush the memory or pretend that something has not happened. Denial is not your friend.
If you’ve recently lost your job-process those emotions. Write a letter to your boss and tell them how you feel; then burn it in ceremony. (Safely) Consider how many jobs you quit; how much remorse did you feel for the employer you left behind? When you decided to change jobs, you were likely excited to start the new adventure, but a loss had also occurred for your previous employer. Life is full of gains and losses depending on which side of the coin you are on and how you look at it. Don’t go to the parties and smear your anger and sorrow on the rest of the guests-they could be potential employers in the future.
Self-Care- I know this sounds like a trendy thing to do.
The world can sell you a million products to use for self-care. The question you need to ask yourself is, do I need that to soothe myself? Could meditation help? Spending time with some soft music, or music that lifts you up, can be very therapeutic without any expense. Self-care simply means paying attention to what you, your body, your spirit needs at this time — do that. If a walk in nature feels good to you, then do that, if a walk in nature terrifies you, then don’t. Self-care is empowerment. Self-care is saying ‘yes’ to you. A great teacher, Byron Katie said something like this; ‘when you say no to the world because you don’t want to do something, you are saying yes to you, and when you say yes to the world because you want to do something, you are saying yes to you’. Always say yes to you!
Eat well and surround yourself with people that can respect the space you are in without pressuring you to be happy when you simply do not feel happy, nor want to be. Don’t try to feed your grief, although sometimes a little something sweet can provide temporary comfort, a lot of it can give you a real drop in energy. Family food, gatherings and commitments might hold triggers for you. Holiday events can trigger old traumatic wounds; even the smells can be a trigger point. The wounds may have been buried for years. If those wounds are preventing you from living life to the fullest, perhaps it’s time to consider getting help to heal them? Maybe it’s time to start new traditions and stop the obligational ones?
Remember that the world is not going to stop while you process your grief, your trauma or life’s hurdles.
When you were on top of the world with great news, partying with your friends, surrounded by loving family and so forth, in the past, other people were dealing with the loss of a loved one, a job, financial struggles etc. Let other people have their joyful times, they’ll need those memories to comfort them when they experience grief. There is a season for everything. Life cycles are unique to each of us. Honour those cycles.
Very important -do NOT host a pity party.
It is not a pity party unless you invite and expect people to get down into the pit of misery with you. If they are all down in that pit, who is going to help you out of it? It is NOT a pity party when we sit with our sorrow, or loss, or disappointments; that is healthy processing. Having a friend sit with you is not pity-that’s compassion. Crying and letting that emotion move is very therapeutic and necessary; it is not pity. A good book, a tear-jerker movie or emotional music can help those tears flow if you are stuck. A pity party can go on for months or years; when you expect the world to stop because you have been wounded and refuse to accept that it won’t stop. When someone leaves the planet they didn’t do it to hurt you, when they leave a party they don’t do it to hurt you. Life is about learning to navigate the ups and downs, never staying too long in one place.
Embrace and feel YOUR emotions.
Grief is very personal. Remember that you are not going to process grief the same way another person does, even if that person is a relative. We each walk a unique path in life and we do better when we respect each other’s journey. There is a saying often quoted, ‘until you walk a mile in my shoes you cannot judge me, or know me, or understand’ etc. That statement seems incredibly redundant to me. The fact is we cannot walk in another person’s shoes, period. We can have empathy and show compassion, but that is as close as it can be. I cannot feel for you, that is your job. You cannot feel for me, that is my job.
Do reach out to help someone else.
This might seem counterintuitive to the first item on the list, however self-care and caring for others can be very healing. Sometimes you will want to be alone, honour that of course. Sometimes we genuinely are entertaining a little pity party with all of our mind voices and stories, so reaching out to help someone who needs help can expand our heart space and feel incredibly joyful. Being joyful is not dishonouring our deceased loved ones. Nothing pleases those who cross over more, than seeing we are living our lives to the fullest. If your religious beliefs, cultural traditions around grief or trauma are not serving you, it might be time to expand your horizons and find something that does.
Let people help you.
When people we love reach out to offer help, they often do not know what to do or what you need. They might offer you something that sounds ridiculous to you. The best way to approach this is to tell people what you need; they want to help and often do not know how. You may not know what you need and this is why it is incredibly difficult. Be gentle with yourself and the people around you. When I was processing my deepest grief over the death of my son, I didn’t want help. I didn’t want to be told what to do or how to grieve and I was afraid that I would be overcome with the weight of it. I had experienced many deaths of loved ones, much trauma in childhood and afterwards which taught me not to reach out for help and I pushed good people away. We are not meant to carry these burdens alone, so I encourage you to reach out.
Open your broken heart.
If you don’t feel comfortable talking with your family or close friends, reach out to a therapist. Trauma and grief are so much a part of the human condition and also an area that is least talked about in modern society, in a healthy way. You deserve to be loved; we all do. Often people don’t know how to love us through these challenges, and we don’t know how to love ourselves. Soaking in a bubble bath may help ease some tension in your body, writing a journal may help release tension and anger in your thoughts but most of all, give yourself the time and space to acknowledge your wounds so they can heal.
Vibrant juicy delicious lives are not calm, not smooth sailing.
Just like a climb up a mountain, you’ll always see life through the same lens but with a higher perspective with each hurdle you climb, each valley offers a view of the mountain top that the mountain top does not provide. If you stumble on the way up the mountain, it is not because you are bad, or wrong; stumbles are part of the climb. Sometimes a fall can provide an excellent and fresh point of view, you might even see a new path from that vantage point; one that you couldn’t have seen without the fall. We don’t ‘get over trauma or grief’; it isn’t a bump to straddle, it’s a path we have to walk through with understanding, compassion and sometimes a helpful friend, or therapist with tools to bust through the hard stuff. I tried the ‘fake it till you make it’ — it worked for a while but eventually all the ‘stuffed stuff’ got really toxic and had to be faced.
Emotions are not meant to be denied, nor squashed, numbed or swallowed- they are part of the human condition and create richness in our experience. Energy in motion=emotion; that energy has to move just like water has to move to stay healthy. Stagnant water can become toxic, so it is with emotions. Some people try to drown them with alcohol, others vent them with violence, some try to eat them away, or shop them away but none of those will ever heal the wounds. The wounds don’t go away on their own, they require love and patience, often they require a trained professional in trauma and grief. The other emotions like joy can get stuck underneath those heavy emotions. Don’t let guilt stop you from celebrating life when you feel like it. Dance, sing, enjoy life and don’t let anyone tell you that is not the ‘right’ way to grieve. There is no right way; there is only your way.
Every loss in life is a matter of perception.
Every trauma causes a wound that can be perceived as a great loss. We all deserved love, we don’t all receive it from the world in the way we may want it. We have to learn to give that love to ourselves. The holidays come around at the same time every year, but our losses do not follow a regular path or date on a calendar. Honour yourself and take the time you need to heal. Reach out for help on this path and know you don’t have to do it alone, but you alone have to decide for your healing journey. No one can force healing on another. Healing is personal and so is trauma and grief. I wish you love this holiday season and all year through!
I invite you to explore my website for more blogs, videos on the subject-this is not a form of medical advice, please seek professional help if you need it. Watch for my new ebook, ‘PERMISSION TO BREATHE’ on the insights I gained from trauma and death of loved ones, coming soon! Sign up for the newsletter on my website if you want to be notified when it is released! claritywhispererartandsoul.com
