12.22.2011
This Application will help you navigate thru this Holiday Season … Enjoy.. Live, Love and Laugh!
Tis the season for emotional trauma….
Not reacting:
Well, here we are in the holidays. This is when deep-seated emotional trauma can rear its ugly head… so be aware. If are you are a sober person it is said that there are three reasons why people go out: Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years…
This is because most of our trauma or emotional damage that we received in life is greatly intensified around these times of the year…
For it is the holidays when we naturally would think about spending time with family and close personal relationships. As we do this, we go through the years, one by one, almost automatically thinking about and resurrecting feelings… feelings of past holidays… feelings of past moments… feelings for some people we don’t see anymore because there has been emotional damage.
As we think of our family and the emotional damage we all have felt in our close personal relationships, feelings begin to come up from the subconscious level… There is great importance put on the holidays in the society in which we have grown up. The holidays represent a happy family life or a broken family life… a big family life or none at all. This is why the society we grew up in puts so much importance on how much family one has… how close are you to your family… how healthy are the people in your family… Do you come from a happy family or do you come from a tortured family… so during the holiday season all of our emotions – good and bad – are wound up into a great amount of pressure on these three days. This is why this is an intense time in our lives because we’ve grown up in a world that says if don’t have a good family then you don’t have a good life. Imagine how much pressure we put on ourselves consciously and subconsciously to evaluate our lives predicated on how our family is or was to us and to what we believe the world sees about our family. Thus the questions: How come other kids have things but I don’t? Why does that family seem so happy but my family is not so happy.”
This is truly the area of our lives where we measure our insides by other people’s outsides and get caught up in a boatload of emotions.
As the application suggested, as we think of our family and the emotional damage we all have felt in our close personal relationships feelings begin to come up from the subconscious level… and the telltale sign is that we’re being sensitive everywhere in our lives… we’re snappy, irritable, nitpicky, grumpy… so we end up with feelings that we want to run from sometimes. As we make plans with certain family members or personal relationships we may talk about someone we might be awkward around or someone who might be awkward around us. Our emotions immediately go on the defensive… and then, of course, there can be those family members who don’t agree with our version of the pain that we feel… or say that we’re responsible for administering more pain than we believe we are.
We find ourselves inundated with bitterness, anxiety, remorse or guilt. This is what produces that emotional whirlwind that we will do anything to escape from…
We all have people who trigger our worst trauma… we know who these people are… let’s not wallow in the messy bog and be a victim. Create a list of who is likely to trigger emotional pain or trauma and take each one of them individually to your Creator and ask for the right thought, feeling or action toward them this holiday season. Remember, with certain individuals this might be a mantra that you will have to repeat over and over again… and the mantra would be “God I ask for the right thought, feeling or action toward ______.” Remember at this time of year that the people you may have conflict with also have conflict with others besides you. It is this awareness that will help you know how to handle each individual separately. For instance… someone that you have conflict with may be far more sensitive and less sound than you. If this is the case, this is not the time of year to bury your cross with these kinds of characters. Remember not all family members are going to agree with your version of the past… we have to allow others to have their own perception. They do not have to agree with our concept of the pain we endured… or the pain that we administered. Everybody is having their own experience.
In other instances there will be those characters that we all have who seem to be completely shut off and shut down in regards to the pain that may have gone on between us. Again, do not make this holiday season the time to confront these kind of people.
What all this means and is indicating is that we don’t want to become the victim of our own erratic emotions.
Healing and choosing where we want to go and who we want to spend our holidays with …with no guilt, remorse or pain.
What is the healing… what are the benefits… how this can be a positive time for us now… what joys we can feel around the holidays now? How can we prepare to have a great holiday season instead of one with anxiety?
Make sure you take the holidays and the emotions that come with them slowly. Ask your Creator to help you stay aware all through the season. The importance of this application is that it gives us the ability to do some spiritual forecasting so we’re not emotionally blindsided. Love, Love, Love Yourself is the theme this year. Be good to yourself. Do not feel like you don’t measure up or your family doesn’t measure up. Don’t measure yourself emotionally by what a dysfunctional member of your family has done or is still doing. Give yourself room… take care of yourself. If you know there’s emotional trauma for you around this time of year then look to be around people who are emotionally nurturing and emotionally healing for you. Stay connected to whatever groups you might be affiliated with… go to more meetings if that’s what you do… find workshops that strengthen you emotionally… find sources of strength for you and tap into them.
In fact, it’s a good time to do inventories when we start to feel these feelings… make sure you do it one emotion at a time… don’t wait for them to build up. If you are aware at this time of year that you are susceptible to these kind of emotional booby-traps then make sure that you adhere to the discipline of not wandering around in the past morbidly. As a matter of fact, if you find yourself going to the past and feeling any sense of pain, do not go into your past alone and without purpose. Not going it alone and making sure you include someone in your review allows the other person to pull you back if you start going too far. Purpose would be represented as your desire to learn and grow so that you can move on from past trauma.
This is a great time for creative visualization. Imagine yourself having connective holidays… emotionally fulfilling holidays… look for something special to happen this holiday. See yourself fulfilled this holiday… see it better than any holiday you’ve ever had. There may be times where you won’t have the energy to think about someone or doing something nice for someone… that’s why this is a building a process. This happens as a result of many holidays not being enjoyable… so now to have enjoyable holidays can actually feel a little awkward… to try and be emotionally available during the holidays can be a little awkward… to try and have energy to go out and do holiday shopping can be awkward… or support family members in the holiday cheer can be awkward. As we walk through each awkward moment we begin to enjoy the holidays more and what becomes awkward is not to enjoy the holidays and what becomes natural is to become someone who has learned to enjoy the holidays. Learning year after year to have better holidays is the key to this application. Put effort into making plans in advance.
One of the indicators of emotional trauma around the holidays is when one waits until the last minute to do their holiday planning and shopping.
Shop ahead for those that you care about. If money is tight then think about writing letters, or creative heart expressions. Magical means anything that comes from the heart… these are the magical gifts that we can give to anybody….nice cards with handwritten letters in them… pictures in frames of special moments that you’ve shared with the people that you love. Don’t attach a financial explanation to your gifts like “Sorry I’m really broke this year. Wish I could’ve done more.” Don’t get up caught up using your credit cards and running up debt thinking you’ll catch up later next year. This economy is not right for taking this approach. Usually by the time you catch up it’s the holiday season again. This is how it usually unfolds… we think to ourselves “Oh I’m broke or I’m just going to keep it mellow this year and keep it low-key. I’ll be okay with that.” We even start to say it to people when they ask, “What are you doing for the holidays?” …we respond with “I haven’t really planned anything I’ll probably – key word probably – just stay close to home.” And then we start getting sad and feeling isolated and lonely and maybe it’s a week before the holidays or a couple of days and that’s when we panic and seek mercy invitations and let people know we have no plans at all.
We end up waiting until the last minute and all these emotions come up and we say we ‘have to get at least this person something’ or ‘at least that person something’ and so on and so on until we send ourselves frantically to the mall and up spending way more than we expected and could afford… thinking we can buy holiday cheer. Which means that right after the holidays we are filled with remorse and regret.
Love yourself, love yourself, love yourself. We all have to love ourselves during the holidays. We can’t buy our love… we can’t undo the past… but we can nurture our inner child and heal with our Creator and create new memories, new laughs, new feelings – good ones this year… by the people that we choose to be around and share our love with in our new healthy lives.
So all in all, make this the best holiday ever by making sure that you don’t let anyone take your season cheer from you.
And be good to yourself, be good to yourself, be good yourself. Envision yourself having a fulfilling holiday. Everyday feel the good feelings of connection… of a good holiday.
Wishing everybody a happy and enjoyable Holiday!!! Live, Love, Laugh… and enjoy it!
Much Love.
KC
© 2011 This material is copyrighted and owned by TLC and is not to be reproduced or used without the authors consent.
