The holidays can be a stressful time for people in recovery, newcomers and old-timers alike. With this in mind, I’d like to offer some practical suggestions that you can share with your clients to help strengthen their sobriety while maintaining their serenity during this hectic time of year. Please feel free to reproduce this column and share it with your clients.

As a counselor, you are well aware that the holiday season is a very trying time for many people. Why is this so? Part of the problem lies in the fact that as a society, we’ve moved a million light years away from the premise on which the “holy days” were originally based. Christmas, Hanukkah, Ramadan, and Kwanza all coincide with the coming of the Winter Solstice. Looking at the seasonal message attendant to the Winter Solstice, I think that nature is trying to tell us — “Hey guys, Winter’s here. The days are getting shorter and the nights are getting longer. Time to slow down, to dream, give thanks for our blessings, and recharge our batteries in anticipation of the opportunities and challenges that the coming year will bring.”

Caught up in the holiday frenzies
Instead, in the context of our fast-paced, materialistic society, we get all caught up in the “trappings”of the holiday season perpetuated by Madison Avenue and all of the accompanying culturally-imposed “shoulds.” Rather than drawing back into a reflective mode, listening to our spirit and giving from the heart when we are moved to do so, instead we are subjected to an onslaught of frenzied commercialized messages that exhort us to “BUY, BUY, BUY!”

On top of this, the holidays confront us with a whole slew of subtle pressures in the direction of forced socializing and forced cheerfulness, often focusing on people we might not normally choose to spend a lot of time with. While this may be OK if you have lots of time of your hands, most of us are not so fortunate. Instead, we’re juggling full-time jobs and family obligations, perhaps going to school as well, and trying to squeeze a million and one things into our hectic day-to-day schedules. And then the holidays come along, dumping an overload of additional obligations on top of our already overcrowded schedules.

Coping with the holiday “crazies”
In the midst of this chaos, it can become very challenging to hold onto our serenity, to say the least. In the interest of maintaining balance and harmony, let me suggest the following pointers to help you cope with this year’s “Holiday Crazies”:

1. Be aware that the holidays bring out both the best, and the worst, of family dynamics, and plan accordingly — family interactions during the holidays can be particularly challenging for people in recovery, as many of us come from rather dysfunctional family backgrounds. While I love my extended family dearly, by and large they are not the kind of folks I would go out of my way to “hang out” with on a day-to-day basis. Recognizing this, I’ll tag along with my wife when she hosts our annual family get together sometime close to Christmas. If my wife chooses to do some more extensive visiting with the family over the holidays, that’s OK with me, but yours truly will generally take a pass on most of these occasions. Come Christmas day, you’ll probably find us both hiking on the Olympic Peninsula, basking in the serenity of nature and communing with our higher power.
2. Slow down and plan ahead — I’ve learned the hard way, from past experience, the importance of careful planning in preserving my serenity during the holiday season. Sit down in advance of the holiday “rush hour”, sort out what you really want to do as the holidays approach, and separate this out from all of the culturally-imposed “shoulds” that us co-dependent types are so adept at buying into.
In recent years I’ve enjoyed sampling various holiday traditions that fall outside the particular culture in which I was raised. For example, although I am not Jewish, I eagerly look forward to visiting our local temple for the annual Festival of Lights celebration.
3. Set reasonable limits — resolve to keep a sane handle on your holiday giving and holiday parties, to avoid feeling overwhelmed. All too often I see guilty parents, overly caught up in their career paths, showering their kids with expensive presents this time of year. I question whether this is really the best message to be sending our children. In my opinion, the best gifts that any parents can give their children are genuine love and caring, together with quality time. But these gifts need to spring freely from the heart and ideally should be bestowed throughout the year. Easier said than done, I know.
4. Keep working your program — during the hectic and celebratory times that are about to descend upon us, it’s critically important to make a special effort to keep working your program — going to meetings, checking in with your sponsor, and doing whatever else you need to do to ensure that you enjoy a sane and sober holiday season.

Being consciously aware of the very real stresses that are part and parcel of the holiday season in our particular culture, you can take sound precautions to safeguard your sense of balance and serenity. Having said that, let me be the first to wish you a happy and joyous holiday season!

John Newport, PhD, is a free-lance writer, wellness counselor, speaker and consultant based in Port Townsend, Washington. He is author of The Wellness — Recovery Connection: Charting Your Pathway to Optimal Health While Recovering from Alcoholism and Drug Addiction. To contact him or obtain more information on wellness and recovery, visit his website at www.wellnessandrecovery.com.

This article is published in Counselor,The Magazine for Addiction Professionals, December 2005, v.6, n.6, pp.22.

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