Hi everyone! My name is Diana Garcia, and I’m a Licensed Mental Health Counselor in Florida and the owner of a private practice called Nurturing Minds Counseling. 

This is Day 5 of 12 of my Holiday Self-Care Series, where I provide 12 tips to help you deal with any holiday stress. I truly love the holidays and I also acknowledge that my stress level goes through the roof. Based on my lived experience and the collective experience of my clients, I decided to provide some tips to deal with the holiday season.

So far in the Holiday Self-Care Series, I’ve covered the following:

  1. Holiday Self-Care Series: Day 1: A quick way to practice some mindfulness skills by practicing a three-minute breathing exercise.
  2. Holiday Self-Care Series: Day 2: All about listing your triggers during the holiday season.
  3. Holiday Self-Care Series: Day 3: Helped you notice the specific thoughts associated with your triggers. 
  4. Holiday Self-Care Series: Day 4: Focused on being able to identify and label your emotions.

If you haven’t read those yet, you could benefit from checking those out first. 

Holiday Self-Care Series: Day 5: Allowing & Validating Your Feelings

Today we’re on our fifth tip, which is all about allowing and validating your emotional experience, or your entire experience in general. You can either watch the video below or scroll down for the blog.

Video on Holiday Self-Care Series: Day 5: Allowing & Validating Your Feelings

For today’s tip, I’m going to focus on being able to make room for your emotional experience. I often find that many of us tend to make our initial emotional experience worse by judging ourselves for having an uncomfortable feeling. For instance, let’s say you find yourself feeling sad and then you start to judge yourself by saying “Why am I feeling so sad? Nothing caused me to feel this way, I have no reason to be down in the dumps. Something must be wrong with me that I’m not feeling happy right now.”

This type of reaction to your initial sad feeling may cause you to invalidate yourself and make yourself feel worse. Maybe you think you “shouldn’t feel this way” or you believe that “other people wouldn’t have this reaction to the situation.” There’s many different reasons as to why this may be the case.

You might buy into some cultural beliefs that “We always need to be happy” or “Something is wrong with you if you’re not always content or grateful”. Maybe you also received messages about suppressing emotions from your family of origin or that’s what was modeled. At times, you might notice that the voice that is judging you, might not even be your own voice. But you’re hearing your mother’s critical voice or a harsh teacher who put you down. Whatever reason or combination of reasons, it’s helpful to acknowledge that you’re not alone in treating your emotional experiences this way.

It’s helpful to remember that you are allowed to have all your emotional experiences. Whether they’re right or wrong because emotions don’t function from a place of being right or wrong, they are just an internal experience that is happening. And can give yourself permission to feel the full range of your emotions.

If we build on this from the previous post, identified the following:

  • Trigger
  • Story:
  • Feeling:

Now I want you to take a pause after you’ve labeled your feeling and I want you to take some active steps to allow and validate your emotions. That can look like saying something along the lines of ” Okay, I’m feeling sad here. I’m allowed to feel this, regardless if there’s an internal voice that is telling me I shouldn’t. I’m human and allowed to give myself room to be in my feelings.”

The truth is that no matter what anyone thinks or even if you have internalized messages about minimazling or invalidating your experiences, you can learn to do something different. And start treating yourself with the much needed safety and understanding.

Especially during the holiday season, when it might be easy to fall into old patterns that you should be feeling “happy, grateful, joyful, etc” because it’s the holiday season but that’s just not what your experience is. It’s okay, it doesn’t mean you’re the Grinch and the more you can just allow your emotions to come and go like waves, the better it will be in helping you navigate the season.

Alright, guys, I hope the fourth day in the Holiday Self-Care Series is helpful.  

Check out these other resources to take care of yourself during the holiday season:

Lastly, I hope you continue nurturing your mind, body, and soul, whatever that looks like for you.