13. Give
This is another strategy to get beyond your preoccupation with areas of your life you cannot control and generates pain.
How can you give? How can your family give? Whom can you give to?
Serve at soup kitchen? Visit stricken family? Food pantry? What service organizations in your town could use your help?
Do more than give money. Give your time. Give your energy. Enter into the lives of those who could use a friend or helping hand.
12. Pray/Meditate
Get beyond yourself and your circumstances. Take some time to pray or meditate, whatever you call that experience in which you intentionally quiet your inner self and reach out to a higher power, God, force or energy… whatever you name it. Seek quiet. Begin to know and experience your part of an every expanding and purposefully growing universe.
Reflect on your life’s purpose. Why are you here? What are you called to do? Are you doing it? How? When? Is something pulling you in a direction which honors your life’s purpose? What would this look like in 10 years for you?
After your moments of prayer/meditation/reflection notice the intensity of your pain on the 1-10 scale.
11. Get to know you.
Use the Holiday Season to get in touch with the real you. So much of our pain is often focused externally; what our spouse is doing, not doing; what we are getting or not getting from him/her. So much of our pain is focused on our lack and our personal needs not being met by him/her/them. Much of that we CANNOT control. And so we feel helpless, which augments our pain.
Make a shift. Take some intentional time to know you. Here’s a specific exercise.
Make a list of your top 5 personal needs. A full list in the form of the “Needless Program” is available after you fill out the survey for this article. Spend a few days during the Holiday Season completing the “Needless Program.”
Define your standards. A standard is an action or behavior you hold yourself to because that is the kind of person you are.
Take some time each day to complete this sentence:
I am someone who_________________________________________.
10. Use a mantra
If you’ve been to my website you know I have a mantra that I teach. Some find they take these words with them and they provide a refuge of relief and hope.
The mantra: “This too shall pass.”
Readers report using this mantra whenever they bump into the negativity, or they use it to start the day, pasting it on their mirror, desk and carrying it in their wallet, purse, etc.
What mantra might you use?
If you take your role as a parent seriously you are concerned about the welfare of your children during a martial crisis. Children know, don’t they? They feel it. The conflict soaks into their body and they carry it with them.
And, we as thoughtful parents, have a difficult time when our children suffer. We suffer because we believe they suffer. We often remember our suffering as a child, at some level, and do not want our children to experience the pain.
And so, we frequently want to protect and shield them. And, during the Holiday Season we want our children to have a joyful time and remember it with warmth, even if mom and dad are not having such a wonderful time.
To alleviate this pressure, focus on the coping skills your children are developing. We CAN”T escape conflict and pain. It is ever before us. It begins at birth and continues until we die. The contrast of life – the good, the bad – the joy, the sorrow – the successes, the failures – is ever before us.
We learn, we grow, we evolve (hopefully) as a result of those contrasts. That’s what your children are doing. Building a feathered nest for them will only cripple them later in life.
Reflect on how each child copes. Take some time to list 5-10 strengths for each child. Spend some time during the Holiday Season encouraging those strengths and skills.
7. Use a Timer
When you notice the 8, 9 or 10 (see Holiday Tip #1), set a timer for 2 minutes. During those 2 minutes write down every thought in your mind. No censorship. Write down every feeling, where it’s located and what it is like. Write furiously.
When the timer goes off, say to yourself, “OK, I’m done for now. I know there are important issues that I demand my attention. And, I want to get to the bottom of them. But, for now I must (fill in the blank.) Thank that part that has the concerns and inform it that when it appears again you will pay attention to it. You will come back to it in the future.
Use this exercise whenever the pain and thoughts spike.
8. Use the bathroom
You are surrounded by friends and family and you feel awful. You are trying hard, but you are managing. Then someone says something or something happens that is a powerful trigger for your negative thoughts and feelings. You want to burst into tears, rage, scream or in some way explode. But, another part of you believes it’s not appropriate and will not be received well.
Excuse yourself to the bathroom, or some other corner of privacy and use one or more of the techniques we discuss here, to reduce your pain and negative thinking. (Use the 1-10 scale to monitor.)
Following is a woman’s heartbreaking story of her experience with infidelity. Learn how she coped through a tragic turn of events and came out a stronger person in the end, largely because of her love for her children.
Hello, I relate so much to the crying, not eating, not being able to work. It was so hard. He walked out 1 week before Christmas. My friends and family helped so much. I thought, “What did I do wrong?” I thought I wasn’t good enough, pretty enough. But it dawned on me one day as I looked in the mirror. I looked at what I was letting him do to me, the weight I lost, the kids trying to cheer me up. It was because of my kids…I didn’t want them to see me like that anymore. I took back my life. They asked questions and I told them the truth about their dad’s other woman. I fought for my life and my children not to give up. Then, it got harder. Their dad (my husband) died in a car accident on Father’s Day. My youngest daughter was there spending the day with her dad for Father’s day. Thank God she wasn’t in the car. Through him leaving and his death, I’m a very strong woman. It has shown my children that you can make it through anything, as long as you have a support system, and for me that was my children.
5. Rubber band
When you notice one negative thought piling on top of another use some strategy to interrupt those thoughts. Some use a rubber band around their wrist. When they notice the intensity and frequency of the thoughts rising, they pull the rubber band and allow it to snap against the wrist. As you do that you might want to have ready a counter thought. For example, snap your wrist and say to yourself, “That’s enough for now. I have many concerns, I know. But I will address those at a later time. For the next few minutes I want to be with my children” (or whatever you are doing.)
6. Recalibrate your thinking.
Transforming or reframing your negative thoughts may powerfully alleviate some of your suffering.
For example, You may idealize the past. You think back and remember all the wonderful times of your marriage and lament the fact they no longer happen. You grieve for those days.
You may want to entertain a counter thought, i.e. “Not all of the good ole days were that good.” Balance your thinking. Attach it to reality.
Let’s look at Affair number 7, “I Want to be Close to Someone, But I Can’t Stand Intimacy.” This is often a long‑term affair that drags on over a period of time and not much change happens. Confronting the other person here, poses the risk that the distance between you and your spouse may increase. The cheating spouse may retreat even more, become even more distant, self‑disclose less and less because it’s as if they find it very, very difficult to handle that kind of exposure. I often say that in the “I want to be close to someone affair, but I can’t stand intimacy,” it’s like there is an elephant in the room that no one talks about. The risk is that the elephant may become bigger and take up more space in your life and that takes a tremendous amount of energy.
The reward here, in confronting the other person, is that you shake up the equilibrium in the triangle. That may be a catalyst for change. You’re doing something that prods this relationship for some kind of change because change probably has not been part of that relationship. It’s like throwing confetti up in the air and waiting for it to come down and see how it’s going to be re‑arranged. Often, there is a deep sense of relief here, because there has been an underlying current of tension for a long, long, long time. Again, that elephant is there. By taking the step of confronting the other person, there may be a sense of relief as if, “Wow! Finally, finally, finally, we’re doing something about it. I’m not sure what the outcome is going to be, but I certainly feel some relief.”
Tip #4 on emotionally surviving this Holiday Season is breathe and notice.
Notice now your breathing. Is it shallow? Do you take short breaths? Do you sigh frequently? Are your breaths deep, from the diaphragm?
This is a simple but powerful exercise to lower your number on the tension scale. You might want to know that research finds this to be a key in stress reduction.
Just notice. That’s right. Just notice what you think and feel. (A primary purpose of the 1-10 scale is to get you just to notice.) Much of psychology focuses on our capacity to stand back and notice what we feel and think. It’s called an observing ego. It’s healthy.
When you do not notice, you tend to be “in” the pain. You are the pain. You are the fear. It becomes very difficult, if not impossible, to alleviate the pain and fear.
If you want to take this to another level, be aware of your inner dialogue – one part “talking” to another. The usual scenario: one part of you is angry with another part of you for what that part thinks is foolish, weak or helpless. Round and round you go. It takes much energy to fight your self. Use that energy to address the issues before you.
