As we approach Thanksgiving, Christmas, and other holidays this season, there is a different feeling in the air. For some, this is a time of excitement and anticipation – they are excited to get to visit family and enjoying planning a holiday dinner or shopping for gifts.  For others, the holidays bring all sorts of anxieties and tension. If you are in recovery, this time of year can be particularly challenging, particularly in early sobriety.

If you are one of those who gets depressed during the holidays, it’s important to plan in advance and gather an arsenal of tools to handle the typical stresses of the holidays.   Maybe you will attend some extra meetings – find out about sober holiday parties or plan one yourself. The important thing is not to isolate and become absorbed by negativity and pessimism this time of year.

If you have a family of active alcoholics, it’s important to figure out what will work for you. If you don’t think you can handle a family room of drunks – don’t. It can be easier to avoid family events that could put you at risk if you live far way – you can say you want to spend this season in your new home; you can let your family know you can’t be around alcohol and heavy drinking; you can plan your own winter holiday or create a new tradition that doesn’t involve drunk uncles.

If you are someone who feels pressure to give lots of presents you can’t afford, set your budget early and stick with it.  You might even want a shopping buddy who can help you stay within your budget.  You don’t want to add financial stress to your life when you are in early sobriety!

The biggest issue facing people this season: unrealistic expectations.  The holidays do not fix families. All the pain of the past, the issues in the present, and the hopes for the future are not worked out from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day.

For years I fought this feeling of disappointment everytime the holidays came around. Christmas often felt more like a “lesson in humility” than a celebration of anything. There was a feeling that somehow you were bad if you asked for a specific gift. It often felt as if we were being punished for wanting anything at all that time of year. It’s hard to reconcile that type of holiday when you see everyone around you filled with joy and a spirit of giving.

At some point I had to let that go: my family would never be typical and I was never going to change that. The only thing I could change was myself – I could create a holiday that I wanted and I could stop reacting to others’ seeming lack of holiday spirit.

I also found it was very important to give up that “I hate the holidays” attitude.  First thing I did was create a few holidays of my own – my own tree, my own celebration – and I did that for a couple of years before I felt I could handle going home for the holidays.

Remember, if you are traveling and plan to be with some crazy family members this year, call in advance to find out where meetings are in the area you will be visiting. Let people know in those meetings that you are visiting – and if you are feeling pressured or anxious.  Long distance phone calls are cheap enough these days (if not free), so there’s nothing wrong with calling your sponsor and support network back home if you are feeling frazzled and vulnerable.

The ultimate goal this time of year is to focus on what you can do to make this a celebration without alcohol or drugs – and begin to embrace your new way of living. The celebration is about truly living life as a fully conscious and feeling person.  Sometimes that means setting new boundaries and doing what is right for you rather than what is right for everyone else.

Do you get the holiday blues? Many people do. Sometimes it’s our huge expectations about family interactions or gifts or whatever…sometimes it’s just the memories, especially if you grew up in a house with substance abuse. Stay very connected to your support network to fend off the blues this season.

Some of my friends think my almost giddy excitement about halloween is amusing- not like I’m a kid anymore!  I was at Universal’s Horro r Nights on opening night with front of the line passes so none of us would have to wait to be terrified.  I’ve always been a fan of well-done scary movies and there is just something about Halloween that appeals to me.  I think there are a few reasons – first, it brings the kid out in you.  You can wear a crazy costume, act a little silly, and not worry about what anyone thinks – it’s Halloween after all!  I also think it allows you to have fun with friends or family without the trappings of Thanksgiving or Christmas. No weird family dynamics. No expectations about gifts. Focus is on candy and treats vs. alcohol. It’s just a day to let go and have fun.

There are some who think Halloween is evil – to them I say, you don’t get Halloween then. While demons and creatures might be the costumes and themes of the night, Halloween is more about the shift in seaons toward the “dead months” where trees lost their leaves and crops lay dormant. To me it feels like the doorway into the Winter season. It’s the countdown to the start of the New Year.  It’s a good time to start taking stock (personal inventory) and prepare for the coming year. What a great metaphor for the process of growing and changing in sobriety!

Here’s a little history courtesy of Wikipedia:

Halloween has origins in the ancient Celtic festival known as Samhain [pronounced: sow- wen] (Irish pronunciation: [?s?aun?]; from the Old Irish samhain, possibly derived from Gaulish samonios). The festival of Samhain is a celebration of the end of the harvest season in Gaelic culture, and is sometimes regarded as the “Celtic New Year”. Traditionally, the festival was a time used by the ancient Celtic pagans to take stock of supplies and slaughter livestock for winter stores. The ancient Celts believed that on October 31 the boundary between the world and the otherworld dissolved, and the dead become dangerous for the living by causing problems such as sickness or damaged crops. The festivals would frequently involve bonfires, into which the bones of slaughtered livestock were thrown. Costumes and masks being worn at Halloween goes back to the Celtic traditions of attempting to copy the evil spirits or placate them, in Scotland for instance where the dead were impersonated by young men with masked, veiled or blackened faces, dressed in white.

Family gatherings, holiday parties, bbqs with ice chests full of forbidden beverages…sometimes, especially in early sobriety, you just wish there would be some kind of moratorium on holidays.   My experience with these events is that they are stressful because they are often forced family events.  I know in my case, my family was something to be reckoned with and early on in sobriety I simply didn’t have the confidence or the skills to really handle them without ending up a basket case.

I started to change how I dealt with these obligations.  First thing I did was change my mindset: these events might be obligatory, but there is no point in me meeting an obligation if it threatens my sobriety.  People might be upset, but over time, as they see your life get better, they will be more forgiving.  If they aren’t, oh well – you aren’t good to anyone if you do something that puts your sobriety at risk.

One of my challenges was that I had two ways of dealing with things: confrontation or stewing. There was no in-between.  These family gatherings really forced me to look at how I handled conflict and learn how to handle it more gracefully.  The first part of that is forgetting the idea that somehow as you get better your family will too.  No such luck.

While it might seem like a cliche the truth is: you can only control your behavior. So don’t spend a lot of energy trying to get your family to treat you differently. Instead, what I did was set boundaries that I knew were critical to my sobriety. Then, without judgment or hostility, as kindly as I could, I enforced those boundaries.  I understood that no matter how delicately I handled this I might hurt someone’s feelings, but as long as I was kind and not just trying to shove my family’s character defects down their throats, I pushed through and did what I needed to do.

I remember being home for a holiday one year – this was always a challenge because it meant an expensive plane ticket and my finances weren’t that great in early sobriety. When I got home it was the usual. I thought I was strong enough, but it became clear that the relentless criticism and disapproval was really dragging me down. I was crying myself to sleep at night.  I explained how I felt – and what I needed – which was met with the customary, “Get over yourself.” Now when you’ve been hearing that since you were five years old, it is pretty painful.

I decided to move my return ticket up. I did it first, before explaining what I did, because I knew this was what I needed to do.  When I told my mother she was furious. I very calmly explained to her: I’m in a huge transition right now. Maybe you think I’m being a baby, and maybe I am being a baby, but the truth is this is what I need to do right now. It isn’t about you at all – it’s about what I can handle and not handle right now.

She let it go after a few hours – and I think it helped to tell her it wasn’t about her. Parents can be so defensive when you are in early recovery!  “Oh, I bet you’re telling that therapist how horrible we were and blaming it all on us!”

The truth is this: it wasn’t about her, because in reality, I could never and would never be able to change her perspective on life.  It was about me, because I wasn’t strong enough yet to accept her as she was.

A few good things came from this event.  In the future when I came home to visit my parents made a very real effort not to turn my week into a what’s-wrong-with-our-daughter marathon. Frankly, they really loved me and wanted to see me. And some part of them recognized that I wasn’t a child anymore who was captive to their verbal abuse. If they wanted a relationship with me it had to be mutually respectful.

Of course, this also meant changes on my part as well. Complex relationships are never a one-way street. I had to learn to be less sensitive and less defensive.  I had to have enough sense of self that I wasn’t devastated by every little off comment.  I’m not going to say this happened overnight, but certainly over the first five years of sobriety things got much better.