Holidays bring emotional baggage with them. Between the messages from media and nostalgia, your expectations don’t line up with what happens.
All the smiling people enjoying each other in a pristine setting doesn’t happen with you. Then, there is the big emotional let down as the holidays wind down.
All those expectations push you into emotional ups and downs with the holidays. If your experience with them are filled with disappointments, the holidays are something you dread.
I mention all this since a reader asked “Why do holidays breed desperation?”
Let me start by pointing out that when you’re going through a cheating situation, it amplifies all emotional responses along with neediness. What the reader sees as desperation, I refer to as neediness.
The high emotional ups and downs put added stress on you. When you’re emotional resilience is low and your alone, those stresses bring desperation with them.
You may not have felt desperate before the holiday, but when it happens, it reminds you how lonely and hurting you are. As other families enjoy each other’s company, you feel even more miserable.
Although holidays like Christmas and Easter are big ones, the others like Mothers Day and Valentines Day put emotional expectations on you. When you no longer have any emotional flexibility or resilience, you start feeling desperate.
The lack of emotional flexibility makes you vulnerable to the emotional strains. Those strains leave you feeling helpless and out of control. In an effort to make those feelings go away, you experience desperation.
If you have a history of struggling with trauma, the desperation is even more extreme. The desperation leads to recollections of trauma.
Let me recap my answer to why holidays bring the desperation.
- Being betrayed amplifies your responses
- Emotional ups and downs bring added stress
- Unrealistic expectations add to the ups and downs
- Comparison of yourself with others
- Lack of emotional flexibility
- History of trauma
The ideal solution is developing emotional resilience. The problem is that doing so is a long process that requires work and practice. When you can’t practice that kind of resilience, the next best thing is letting go of the emotional garbage with forgiveness.
The desperation is worse when you continue holding onto painful memories and recollections of trauma. This is where forgiveness helps. The better you understand forgiveness, the better able you’ll be in moving past those painful hours.
In the video “Forgiveness: Stop the Pain, Tear down the walls and Remove the Roadblocks”, I share how forgiveness helps you jettison the emotional garbage weighting you down.
Instead of succumbing to desperation, you can take action to change things. Click and download the video today. Instead of drowning in self-pity and pain, you can instead move past it and start developing hope for the future.
Keeping It Real,
Jeff
