As the excitement of a new year fades, many of us find ourselves discouraged by resolutions we haven’t been able to keep. Rather than responding with guilt and self-criticism or just scrapping your goals altogether, we want to share a few questions that can help you pause, reflect, and clarify what you are working toward.
When we are struggling with difficult emotions, it can feel as though God is not with us or for us at all. This can be especially difficult during the holiday season when we feel as though we should feel “merry and bright.” But the miracle of the Incarnation - the very thing we anticipate throughout Advent and celebrate at Christmas - actually takes on profound significance in those very same hard places. It assures us that Jesus knows the burdens of our hearts and minds not in some distant or abstract sense, but intimately and personally, because He chose to take them upon himself for our sake.
For many of us, winter is not always the wonderland we hope or expect it to be. As the weather gets colder and days get darker, our mood often follows suit. Fewer daylight hours and drops in temperature can also mean increased feelings of sadness, irritability, isolation, and fatigue. And although we can’t control the weather, we can take steps to decrease depressive symptoms and improve our overall mood this coming winter.
For many people, the holidays can bring up anxiety, sadness, distress, or a sense of overwhelm. With the fun and festivities of the season can also come painful memories, tense conversations, and complicated relationships. If this is something you’ve struggled with in the past, here are some practical ways to prepare for and protect your mental health this upcoming holiday season.
Difficult changes are often marked by ambivalence, resistance, and uncertainty. It can feel like some part of us is bought in and ready for the change while another part of us is still holding back. So what should we do about that? Do we just dismiss it, get over it, power through it? More often than not, this produces the same kind of half-hearted change that does not really take hold. Instead, the key to meaningful and lasting change is to acknowledge our ambivalence and explore both sides of it, that is, the part that is ready for change and the part that is not yet ready. We need to deal with the things that we are still holding onto and recognize the role that those things continue to serve in our life in order to be able to move on from them.
The local church has a unique potential both to help and to hurt (often unintentionally) traumatized persons. Being known and cared for within a redemptive community that is rooted in the power of the gospel can enable traumatized persons to experience deep healing, integration, and resilience. At the same time, the real life complexities of community are rife with potential triggers and grievances and vulnerabilities that can cause it to feel unsafe and even adversarial to a person affected by trauma. Furthermore, the intense emotions and disruptive behaviors that are stirred up by trauma can be difficult for a community to withstand, which may then lead to the traumatized person being (or at least feeling) shamed and alienated. Clearly this is thorny ground for both the person and the community. And yet...even so...traumatized persons need the church, and the church in turn needs traumatized people.
Consider your life as a story. What chapter are you in the middle of? What have you, the protagonist, had to go through to get where you are now? Who are the key characters who have influenced you, and who do you rely on now? Where is your story going, and what obstacles stand in the way? Narrative Therapy provides a way for people to shape the stories about their experiences, relationships, and lives in order to make sense of and find meaning in the world.
Anger has the capacity to be constructive and purposeful, but more often it becomes destructive and vengeful. To avoid such negative outcomes, we could withhold or suppress our anger entirely, but this tends to produce resentment and passive-aggression which ultimately lead to equally negative results over time. So what are we to do with our anger? How can we defuse the destructive aspects of anger so that its constructive and important aspects can be clearly expressed?
When it comes to experiencing loss, ambiguity can be hard for us to manage because it often results in feelings of confusion and uncertainty. If given the option, we would prefer to have a sense of closure. But what if closure is not the most beneficial goal to set for ourselves when experiencing ambiguous loss?
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