Guest post: Finally! The recovering perfectionist's all-you-need guide to surviving the holidays

by StillStanding1

The holidays can be tough, what with families and history and people in our lives expecting unrealistic things of us and our own selves expecting unrealistic things of us. Add in post-trauma from betrayal and you have got a seriously heavy load to carry.

I am a recovering perfectionist. Being a perfectionist sucks. You think no one will love you unless you do everything absolutely right. This always comes back to my “enough-ness”, that softest of all my soft spots. You destroy yourself through over achieving, you hustle for worthiness, trying to make everything just right for everyone else and losing yourself in the process. 

At this time of year, it takes on an even deeper level of intensity. Christmas (that’s the holiday I do. Feel free to insert your holiday loaded with expectations and desperation here) must look like the love child of Currier & Ives and Pottery Barn. Everything must sparkle and glow (decorate every room in the house and do the outside lights by myself). Mince pies perfectly dusted with powdered sugar (stay up till midnight baking because everyone will be disappointed if you bring something store-bought). All presents on list purchased and wrapped (everyone must have piles of things to open. Everything for the kids must be fair and equal. I must make sure I get presents for my friends and my kids' friends despite my dwindling budget). All parties attended and dressed in appropriately festive attire and everyone well brushed and behaved (crap, my son needs a haircut. Does he have clean pants that aren’t athletic?! WTF am I going to wear?). Fake that smile as if my life depended on it (even as I’m triggered watching other people’s husbands over-indulge in alcohol and breathe the fumes on me). Visit out-of-town relatives for parties I dislike and sleep in uncomfortable rooms or on slowly deflating air mattresses (but don’t dare suggest we say “no” because someone might be disappointed. Gasp). A frenzy of shopping and shipping and wrapping and cooking and visiting and trying so hard to make sure all the people in my life have all their needs met. Even needs they didn’t know they had. Wow. I’m exhausted just writing that.

With the discovery that I don’t have to be perfect to be loveable and these amazing things called boundaries (what is and is not okay with me), the holidays get just a little bit easier.

1.      Give yourself a break. You don’t have to do it all. You don’t have to sit through movies or music or anything that upsets you or just makes you feel lousy. You don’t have to be strong for others. You don’t have to be strong at all. You don’t have to be super mom or Mrs. Claus.

2.     Say no.  To invitations that don’t fit your schedule.  To doing things for other people that you don’t want to do. To anything that feels like a bad idea. To your husband wanting to go out for drinks with his pals, if that doesn’t suit you just now. To anything your gut tells you is not good for you right now. There’s so much pressure to be nice and do all these things we don’t want to do. You can say no and still be nice. They are not mutually exclusive. Resist the urge to explain or justify your no. “Thanks for thinking of me, but no thank you.” Repeat as necessary.

3.     Let go of expectations. For yourself, that you get everything done, that all the boxes are checked off, that you feel a certain way.  Don’t expect that you should feel happy or joyful or forgiving just because some arbitrary holiday season says you should be feeling those things. Let go of expectations for others; that they do more or be more capable of something or different than they are. When you can start seeing and accepting people where they are, you don’t get disappointed. And those people can tell when there is a new room for them to show up in.  Let go of the idea that things need to go a certain way or look a certain way or be a certain way.

4.     Say yes to self-care. Sleep, eat to take care of yourself, exercise, meditate, read, make time for you. See #2 above. Get your nails done. Visit with friends. Call your mom/sister/other reliable support person.

5.     Whenever possible don’t engage with toxic relatives. Don’t take the bait when one tries to get a rise out of you. Let the complainer’s complaints roll off you. They are about her, not you. Don’t bite when individuals question your life choices. Don’t sit next to people who set you off or are emotionally risky for you. Have an escape plan. You are allowed to leave early.

6.     Boundaries. Boundaries. Boundaries.  A well-meaning relative may pressure you to eat more because they have made something “especially for you.” You can say thank you and then go ahead and eat or not eat what you had intended. Your husband wants to go to a work holiday party after hours. Does that make you uncomfortable? Does he get to go but needs to check in? Or do you go with him? You decide what works for you. That’s your boundary.

7.     Drop the judgement. You are not a bad person for not wanting to spend more time with relatives or in-laws. You are, rather, putting yourself first and that makes a lot of us (and others) supremely uncomfortable. You are not a failure because you did not make 800 lbs of shortbread cookies. Be gentle and compassionate with yourself.

8.     Remind yourself that you are doing an awesome fucking job. At showing up. At breathing. At getting through each day. Maybe you made your bed. Win! Maybe you had tea with a friend. Win! Maybe you decided the laundry could wait another day. More winning!

9.     Ask. For. Help. Really. You don’t have to do it all yourself. Refer to #1. Delegate decorating to kids or ask your partner to help you this year. Maybe you go to the grocery store to get the dinner fixings together. Maybe your husband can be in charge of buying the gifts for his side of the family if that usually falls to you. Make a list. Assign to your team. Kick back with your tea and watch people actually rise to the occassion.

10.  Resist the urge to swoop in and make sure they do it your way. Reference #3. I think the reason so many of us go in to fix it mode after betrayal is because it was our go-to coping strategy to begin with. When in doubt, take over, be busy, don’t think, don’t feel.  And also make sure everything is just so because perfection makes everything better (#sarcasm). Once you’ve delegated a task, trust that the person doing the task will get it done. It may not be your way but there is more than one “right” way. Let go.

11.  Be grateful. For whatever you can muster gratitude for. Your health. Your kids. The roof over your head. Your dog. For friends and family that love and support you. For sunshine. For the smell of snow. For a chance to live another day. Whatever you can feel gratitude for, keep your eyes on that. Its hard, in the wake of betrayal to feel grateful for anything. But over time, remembering what you have, the good stuff, helps you get past or let go of what no longer serves you or what you feel you’ve lost.

12.  Be sad. If you need to. The overarching glory of the holidays tends to silence or erase our sad feelings.  And like so much of our experience as betrayed wives, we just need room to feel our stuff all the way through. We see others being happy, normal, living lives not marred by this weight and we think why not me? We think of what’s missing and it takes our breath away. Ideally, share your sadness with someone who understands and can love you through your sadness. But even on your own, sadness won’t kill you. I promise. Let yourself have it, if that’s what you need right now.

13.  You have permission to change your mind. You can feel like you want to go to a party when you get the invitation but when the time comes, you may just have had a bad day. You may be too tired and sad. You are allowed to stay home and take care of yourself.

14.  Be happy. Give yourself permission for this too. There’s a lot going on right now. If you find yourself surprised in the moment by some happiness, wrap your arms around that shit and enjoy it. Post-betrayal, some of us feel like good feelings are not permitted. That if we feel happy, even for split second, we are letting him off the hook. Our happiness is just that. Ours. Let yourself have it.

Holidays can be tough for so many reasons. Remember that you are not alone. We are all standing here with you. And if you feel overwhelmed, stuck in depression or like you just can’t take another day please call 1-800-273-8255. It’s for everyone, open 24/7 and free.

Reimagining: The Holidays

You can color in your holidays however you choose. 

D-Day blows up our world as we know it. Even if others don't see the damage, we do and it impacts every part of our lives, from whether we continue to display wedding photos on a bedside table to whether we start driving a different route to work to whether we put our house up for sale. Changes big and small become our new normal.
And though change can be tough, especially change that we didn't invite into our lives, it can also create renewal. It can spur growth. It can remind us to look around with fresh eyes and examine our lives, to do some metaphorical decluttering.
It's with that intention that I'll be writing some blog posts under the headline: Reimagining...
There's much we can reimagine following a partner's betrayal. Within the darkness, we can shine a light selectively on those parts of our lives that we want to change, whether wholesale reinventions or smaller tweaks that lead us back to our authentic selves.
Let's start with a time of year that's often the source of stress at the best of times, but that also tends to be rooted in deep traditions: The Holidays.

My D-Day was December 10, 1996 so you can probably imagine that Christmas. Merry, it was not. My parents, who were incredibly supportive of me in my agony, nonetheless bore the brunt of my pain. I screamed at my mother for her alcoholism in my childhood, casting my current pain as an extension of the pain I'd felt much of my life and for which I blamed others without self-control. Like her.
My kids, unaware of what was really going on, were on the receiving end of some of my wrath too. Early Boxing Day morning, as I tried to sleep, my year-old son began a fight with his little sister. I stomped downstairs, told him to stop and when did it again, I picked up a discarded box and bonked him on the head with it. He wailed with outrage more than any pain. And to this day, despite sincere apologies by me for losing my temper and "using my hands instead of my words", he reminds me of the "child abuse" he suffered early that morning.
I don't remember much else of that Christmas season beyond misery and anger and a profound disappointment that one of my favorite times of years was "ruined".
I hear that word a lot on this site, especially about the holidays. Birthdays are "ruined", Thanksgiving "ruined", Christmas or Hanukkah "ruined".
And yes, in the short term, there's so much pain and so much disappointment that a holiday pressuring us to put on a happy face and "celebrate" is inevitably going to feel "ruined."
But what if we gave ourselves permission to do things differently? What if, under the circumstances, we gave up this idea that things always had to look a certain way, or include a certain tradition, or involve certain people? Does that seem frightening? At a time when so much feels uncertain, we might want to cling even more tightly to rituals we can trust. But if those rituals are creating more pain, maybe it's time to reinvent them. To remind ourselves that human survival does not depend on whether the turkey includes homemade stuffing, or if our passive-aggressive mother-in-law is at the table, or if we celebrate on a certain calendar day or the day after.
You are in crisis mode. And when you're in crisis mode, old norms don't hold. When you're in crisis mode, you get to make the rules. You get to decide just how much you can handle and how your energy is best expended. Maybe, just maybe, it's more important for you to build in time for a long hike in the woods on Thanksgiving than it is to host your annual gathering of extended family. Maybe, if a separation is part of your post-D-Day world, you can sit down with your kids and redesign this year's holiday, holding on to what brings joy and tossing out what doesn't. If you're going to be alone, maybe this year's holiday includes a volunteer stint at a soup kitchen (don't underestimate the power of realizing that there are many kinds of pain and many opportunities to experience compassion) or maybe what the doctor ordered is a day of watching movies and crying into a bowl of Doritos.
Let me tell you, as someone who reinvented my own holidays in the years since D-Day, the sky is not going to fall. Trust me on this. The laws of nature will hold. One day will follow another. Nothing is worth hurting yourself further when you've already been so hurt.
But there are some rules I'll ask you to adhere to:
Be honest. Start with yourself and figure out what you honestly want given your situation. This isn't about wishful thinking and falling into an abyss of how you shouldn't even have to be dealing with this. You're right. You shouldn't. But you are dealing with it and you can deal with it from a place of honesty with yourself.
Then extend that honesty to everyone around you who will be affected by any changes. Be prepared for backlash because people are freaking crazy about tradition. Be prepared for tears. Be prepared for blame. Be prepared for passive-aggression, for all the countermoves we talk about on this site. Because you're likely doing something you don't often do, which is put yourself first. It's high time people discovered that you are entitled to your feelings too. And if it matters so much to them that the Thanksgiving dinner include your secret gravy, then tell them you'll happily pass that tradition along and that you'll be delighted to savor their version.
If all this seems daunting, then tweak it in ways that serve you. Carve out some alone time with a friend who knows what you're going through. Take that walk with the dog and let everyone else clean up. Or do whatever you can to create a tiny space of peace for you. Changes, big and small.
Check your motives. Don't wreak havoc as a way of expressing your pain. Don't throw out things that genuinely matter to you just to make someone else hurt.
Check your expectations. This year will be different. There's no way around that. Expecting it to feel like "good" years is destined to leave you deflated and disheartened.
Watch for moments of grace: Make it your task to mentally catalogue at least five moments of grace. Maybe it's someone squeezing your hand because they know how hard this is for you. Maybe it's your child or grandchild climbing into your lap and giving you a hug. Maybe it's an overcooked turkey that everyone eats anyway because what's on the plate doesn't matter so much after all and you all realize, more than ever, that hearts are fragile and we need to be gentle with each other. Maybe it's gratitude that you're not in jail for killing your husband. If you're watching for moments of grace, it will be easier to overlook the moments of disappointment, which will be there too.
At the risk of being a silver-linings thinker (though I'm guilty as charged!), the incredible pain of betrayal can also be an opening into another life, one in which we learn to be gentle with ourselves, to hold our hearts in high regard and to create space in our lives only for those who show us they deserve to be there, by treating us with honesty and dignity and respect.
And we can start reimagining that future today.