Acceptance, Gratitude, and Finding Strength in Reflection this December

What’s your mindset in these early days of December? 

With the holiday season upon us, nights are getting longer, the calendar year is wrapping up, we have celebrations to plan, and our routine is disrupted. It’s a busy time and a time filled with a lot of joy.

Festive foods, beautiful decorations, familiar and comforting traditions, and the people you love gathering together all make this a season with much to look forward to. But it can also be a complicated time, when the disruptions to our carefully planned schedule are less joyful and more of a chore. The Grinch saying, “All the noise, noise, noise, noise!” comes to mind.

It’s no surprise that December is a time of mixed emotions. You may find yourself happy with some things and deeply sad about others. Conflict can increase between you and your loved ones, you may feel misunderstood, or you may find yourself exhausted. You may be grieving people who aren’t there with you to celebrate, you may feel alone, or you may feel like too many people are demanding too much of your time, even if, overall, you’re having a great holiday season.

So, what can you do to anchor yourself emotionally and make this most wonderful time of the year one where you feel strong and fortified by your own self-support? I’ll share with you below what I share with my clients as we gear up for this time of year.

Your mindset can be your source of strength during the holidays

Your mindset encompasses your attitudes, opinions, and viewpoints. It’s influenced by your life experiences and deliberate choices on where you direct your attention. When we aren’t actively directing our mindset and instead let outer and inner influences steal our focus, it may not always work toward our best interests.

An unconditioned mindset can prompt you to focus too much on the negative around you and within you, especially during the holidays. Thankfully, your mindset is something you can change. This holiday season, if you are struggling to feel positive, calm, or grateful, intentionally shifting your mindset can help you cope. Holiday gratitude is possible even when your holiday season doesn’t look the way you want it to, and your mindset is the key to unlocking that gratitude.

Through active participation in reflection, acceptance, grounding, and gratitude, you can build up your resilience and strength, embracing the best parts of yourself and your life while seeing any shortcomings as opportunities instead of punishments.

Reflection builds a bigger picture

Reflection is the act of thinking over experiences and how they shape your life, your mindset, and your sense of self. Also called introspection, it can be the process of getting to the “why” of you. Reflection can be a source of strength when you practice it regularly, because it can help you understand yourself and see your experiences from a broader perspective.

Why reflection matters

When you sit down and think about your life, you may be surprised at how many details are not at the forefront of your attention, even though they’re things you really enjoy. By default, we experience negativity bias, where you’re more inclined to remember and focus on negative experiences. With this mode of operating in the world, our negative experiences and self-beliefs more easily come to mind unless you spend time deliberately reflecting on the whole picture of who you are and what you know about yourself.

Noticing the good things

Reflecting on the good things in your life reinforces your mind’s ability to recall and integrate these things into your mindset. It gets harder to believe that you, say, hate your life, when you spend time thinking about all the experiences you have that make you happy. It’s harder to keep thinking you’re useless when you consider all the things you do that are productive, helpful, and enjoyable for you.

Learning from the hard things

When the days are short and the nights are long, you may struggle to reflect on the good things in your life. That doesn’t mean you can’t still shift your mindset! Our failures, what we lack, and our shortcomings can all be part of the story of our greatest successes. How can you integrate the hard experiences of life into your mindset in a way that helps you?

Say you are carrying around a lot of sorrow about missing a dearly departed family member during the holidays. You might be angry about other people enjoying themselves or worried you’re too sad to be around.

Reflection can help you recognize that your grief is a life experience you share with many people around you, so you’re connected to others even in this moment of loss and loneliness. Grief is complex but rooted in deep love, so honoring your loss while appreciating your love can be another lesson. You can recognize that you may be struggling more than you realized and that you deserve a break from the expectations of the season so you can be fully present in your grief.

Appreciation, acknowledgment, and self-compassion can grow out of reflecting around the holidays. When you root your mindset in a caring space, it can become a source of strength in a season that isn’t always easy.

Grounding

Grounding is the act of drawing attention to the present moment, including paying attention to your physical sensations. It's a form of mindfulness, and it specifically helps you align your body and mind in the same space to feel less overwhelmed.

You can ground very literally by focusing on how your feet feel as they touch the floor. You can also ground yourself metaphorically, engaging your senses and mind in the sensations of your body and the environment around you. I could write a whole blog solely on grounding techniques, so I’ll just encourage you to look up “grounding techniques” online or ask your therapist about mindfulness in therapy to help you get started.

Why will grounding help?

When stress, flashbacks, tough emotions, and worry you can’t let go of crowd your thoughts, grounding helps you cut through that mental noise and focus on where you are and what’s happening here and now. This focus strengthens your ability to make change when it’s needed and to recognize when the urge to act is based on anxiety and the desire to soothe that fear versus a need to make a change.

Acceptance

Sometimes, you can’t change things, no matter how much you want to. Reflecting on your lack of control can be deeply distressing, and your mind can start spinning its wheels, ruminating over wanting the change and repeatedly trying to find ways to create that change.

Stress and regret can start taking over your mindset, clouding your ability to enjoy even fun moments and escalating difficult ones. Your mindset can become solely focused on needing or wanting change that can’t happen, causing you to suffer.

Radical acceptance frees you from attachment to the impossible

When you’re stuck with a situation you can’t change, you can find strength in acceptance. Now, it’s important to remember acceptance is not approval. You don’t have to like the situation suddenly, you don’t have to think it’s okay, and you don’t have to be comfortable. 

Acceptance, particularly radical acceptance, is the act of recognizing that this is the way things are and that you cannot change them. You will work to incorporate that recognition into your reaction to the situation. Radical acceptance includes releasing judgment, so your emotional reactions to the situation are shorter-term and more in line with the duration of the experience. 

Radical acceptance is an active practice, not a single event you master all at once. It takes effort to recognize when your thoughts or actions indicate you’re still attached to a change that can’t happen and aren’t practicing acceptance.

Radical acceptance in action

Here’s an example: your mom micromanages your holiday celebrations. You’ve talked to her about it, you’ve asked family to step in, and you’ve weighed whether or not you should even invite her. It makes you feel like you’re not enough. You’ve decided you can’t stand to exclude her, but you’re exhausted by her, and you just wish she would change. You try and try to think of ways to get her to change, and each year, your holiday stress increases because she just will not change.

Radical acceptance offers you a way out of that cycle of stress. Your mom isn’t going to change, and she will be a part of your holiday. She will try to micromanage. When you accept that these are the facts of the matter, you can also release the judgment attached to them: that you’re not enough. If you feel you’re enough, you are, and your mother’s unchangeable urge to micromanage only reflects her state of being, not yours.

Doing what makes sense for you, and letting her do whatever it is she chooses, without attaching yourself to her actions or the outcome, releases you from that suffering. She may be annoying, and you may have blips of stress, but when you release your attachment to changing your mom, you free yourself.

Gratitude

In its essence, gratitude is recognizing there are things in your life that are good, and it’s worth recognizing them. Gratitude is essential to a hopeful, happy life, and it can help you find strength and stability in times that feel uncertain or tumultuous.

In-the-moment gratitude or a formal practice, whatever works

A gratitude practice can be set up to fit your personality. At the root, it’s thinking about, and possibly recording, things in your life that you appreciate and are glad to have. You can do this in a journal, to a friend, in art, out loud to your cat, in your head, anywhere and anytime that suits you.

Trying to be consistent with gratitude is worthwhile, and this can happen in two ways. Set aside time each week for gratitude, or try to practice it in the moment. Formal gratitude practices help you create a space of happy calm, but in-the-moment gratitude offers you a little bit of magic in the mundane times of your life. You can even do both and see which works better for you.

Holiday gratitude makes negative feelings less noisy

Regularly bringing to mind things that make your life better helps crowd out the negative thoughts and emotions that may be at the forefront of your mind. Gratitude won’t replace those emotions, but it quiets them down so you can gain a greater perspective on them. Gratitude is the antidote to the “negativity bias” that we discussed earlier. 

Gratitude is a type of mindfulness; it pulls your attention away from past or future worries and into the current moment. Mindfulness is a great source of strength in busy, complicated times. It asks you to focus on what you notice, helping you practice directing your attention where you want it to go. When you develop this skill of guiding your attention, particularly toward things you want to appreciate, you can use that skill whenever you like. If you find yourself struggling to shake off the holiday blues, gratitude as a form of mindfulness can help you focus and ease some of your sadness. 

Therapy in Florida can help you find your strength this holiday season

Developing different aspects of your mindset to help strengthen you through the holiday season and throughout the year is a large undertaking, and it can sometimes feel intimidating to do it alone. At Haven Family Therapy, I have helped many people find ways that grounding, gratefulness, acceptance, and introspection can become integral parts of their lives. Therapy in Florida that supports you by hearing out your struggles and sharing your joy in success can make a world of difference, and it is an honor to get to help people this way. Please reach out and start the conversation on how therapy can help you center and strengthen yourself through the joys and the sorrows of this holiday season.