Merry Christmas and a big Happy Holidays to all!

The Holiday Season is a whirlwind of shopping for gifts, singing Christmas songs, planning family meals, giving to those in need, and enjoying happy times with loved ones.

Or is it?

Unfortunately, being surrounded by love and happiness isn’t what all families experience. Sometimes the holidays are a cause of great sadness. For others it’s a time of great anxiety. Either way, one thing is true.

What we expect of our holiday is usually what we get.

For those of us who have lost loved ones, the pain and sadness will be there. But remember that your loved ones are always with you in spirit, so acknowledge the pain and the sadness, feel the emotion — then let it go.

Don’t let the sadness stick to you. Your loved ones want you to remember them, but they also want you to be happy while you are here. Laugh at their peculiarities, tell their funny stories, and blow kisses into the air for them.

You will see them in time.

If for you the holidays make you anxious, you are far from alone. However, sometimes stress is self-induced!

Are you someone who tries to do it all? Like Carson on Downton Abbey who lost half his staff during WWI and still tried to maintain the same standard of service. He actually thought he was having a heart attack he pushed himself so hard!

Don’t let that happen to you.

Also, and just as important — don’t allow friends, acquaintances, or relatives to push your buttons!

You see, we all play various roles in life and when you succumb to a role another assigns to you, you lose sight of who you are. But remember, you assign roles to others just as they do you. It’s an accident waiting to happen!

It is this I wish to address today.

Many of the wisdom masters speak of cause and effect. Basically, our thoughts are the cause, and our experience is the effect. Psychologists speak of this phenomenon as self-fulfilling prophecy. Most of the time it occurs around something we dread.

We are so afraid something is going to happen that it does.

We all play various roles in life — wife, mother, sister, friend, youngest sibling, oldest sibling, husband, brother, father, our sex, our job, our age… You get the picture. Each of these ‘narratives’ has an associated role within it.

It’s when we get lost in the role or allow other people to keep us stuck in a role that they wish us to play, that conflict arises.

You see, sometimes other people need us to interact in a certain way, so that their impression of us is safe and consistent, and therefore their ego. They are justified in seeing you in a certain way. And the same is true for you as well — how you see others and what you expect of them. We are all functioning from the ego.

Most of the time we do this unknowingly. Other people assign a role to you — you accept it (willingly or with resentment) — and you assign a role to them. You both respond to one another the same as you always did. Why does this happen?

It’s because we think in the past. Past interactions repeat themselves as current events.

For instance, being the ‘youngest’ even though you are now 35 years old, can cause you to assume a position of child or one of servitude as this is what is expected of you. You will always be chronologically the youngest,  but you don’t have to succumb to your ‘elders’ overseeing what you are doing or giving you continuous direction and advice. That’s no fun for anyone.

Once you become an adult you should interact as an adult — as you do at work or with your friends — even in your family! But many times, we revert to our historical hierarchical roles and become what is expected of us.

Could this be why family gatherings are sometimes so stressful?

Everyone arrives at the table with his or her assigned ‘family’ role and their expectations of how others will act. Sometimes we even plan for it — the inevitable fight, the two drinks it takes for Uncle Carbuncle to get drunk, the whining winer that you can’t get away from, etc.

What can be done?

The first thing to do is to start with the face peering back at you in the mirror. You can only change you — your thoughts and your behavior.

Thinking precedes experience!

The wisdom masters would tell us to visualize. Imagine upcoming events in all their detail, but proceeding the way you wish them to. I spoke of this before, seeing in your mind that crabby cousin or demeaning aunt or uncle as loving and supportive. See yourself as not being frenzied by anything they could do or say. Stay cool in your mind.

Change the way you look at things, and the things you look at change. (Wayne Dyer)

If the time comes and you start to feel yourself tense up, do what my friend Susan does. When she feels like she is in an impossible situation, she surrounds herself with imaginary mirrors facing out to what is stressing her. This creates an energy barrier that prevents other people from infusing her with their negative energy. It reflects back to them. What she finds is that whatever the stress was, it goes away. People either wander off or change their tune. Very interesting, yes?

I’ve done the same with imaginary force fields, being a bit of a Trekkie. I imagine a ‘shield’s up’ in my mind, which always makes me chuckle. Whatever was annoying suddenly seems so unreal, and it disappears.

So, what three things do you need to remember this holiday?

• Remember that your loved ones want you to be happy until you are with them again. Don’t get stuck in the sadness.
• Don’t accept or let other people or family members assign roles to you.
• Employ the mirror-illusion or ‘shields up’ method to protect yourself from other people’s negative energy.

For some more thoughts on handling holiday stress, check out Successfully Handling Stress During the Holiday Season.

MERRY CHRISTMAS and HAPPY HOLIDAYS everyone!

Love to you all!

For more on family dynamics, check out my post on Thanksgiving.

Tune in next week for Resolutions – The Never-Do List!

Please Like my Facebook Page and follow me on LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter.