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. 

I’ve been doing 12 days of tips as part of my Holiday Self-Care Series! My goal with this series is to help you navigate the holiday season. Because to be honest, as much as I love the holidays, I also know that I feel extra stressed.And after working with clients for years during the holidays, I know I’m not unique in feeling a bit more stressed during the season. 

So far in the series, we’ve covered the following:

  1. Holiday Self-Care Series: Day 1: Helping you practice a three-minute breathing exercise to boost your mindfulness skills.
  2. Holiday Self-Care Series: Day 2: Focused on truly understanding and identifying your triggers during the holiday season.

If you haven’t read those yet, you could benefit from checking those out first. Especially since today’s blog will build on naming your triggers.

Holiday Self-Care Series: Day 3: Knowing & Naming The Story

Today I’m going to be talking about knowing the thoughts or, a lot of times, what I like to call the ‘stories’, that come up concerning the triggers.

If you prefer to watch the video on this, check out the video here. If not, keep scrolling to continue reading the blog. 

Video on Holiday Self-Care Series: Day 3: Knowing & Naming The Story

What do I mean by ‘stories’? The ‘story’ is the associated thoughts that show up when you consider any situation. Thoughts are the stream of conscious including images that are going on in your mind. 

In Day 2 of the Holiday Self-Care Series, I encouraged you to identify your holiday triggers. So I will a hypothetical example to help illustrate what I mean by story. 

Let’s say one of your triggers during the holidays is interactions with family members. Whether that’s all family members or a specific member, or whether that’s just the general tone or vibe in these get togethers. In this case, let’s say family gatherings with extended family are a trigger for you because one or more family members tend to give you unsolicited advice on your appearance, relationship status, career etc. Just the thought of having to explain your career choice one more time gives you hives. 

The ‘story’ is the thought about that specific situation that shows up and feels difficult to manage in. Or the story is really the reason that is causing you distress. And that story can be unique for each person. For example, it could be “Gosh! She’s so critical! She just loves to criticize and put me down. I bet she’s know it makes me cringe” 

Perhaps it’s something more along the lines of “She must think I’m such a failure because of my career choice. And she might be right!” Or maybe it’s, “I don’t really care what she thinks but how do I stop it? Or shut it down? I can’t possibly say something? Can I? My mom will be so embarrassed if I’m rude.” 

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Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

Whatever the story is, you get caught up with the thoughts that come up. But depending on what are the specific story behind the trigger that it’s difficult, can influence the way you ultimately choose to handle it. Because depending on whether you’re more stressed about feeling shamed in that moment and needing to cope or you don’t really feel shame in that moment, more so confused on how to assertively handle it while taking into account your mother’s potential reaction. 

I encourage you to list out all your triggers and the associated story like this:

  • Trigger: 
  • Story:

Now that you know exactly what are the associated thoughts, you can than figure how to best handle these sticky thoughts. When you realize that you’ve been hooked my certain thoughts, it can be helpful to try to create some distance from these thoughts. These are just thoughts that passing through your mind. And it doesn’t necessarily even matter if the thoughts are factual or not. Who knows if your aunt is trying to be critical, disrespectful or maybe in her own way, she believes she’s being helpful and supportive? Who knows? She could just be completely clueless of how her responses are landing.  

There can be various reasons to explain her behaviors. And you’re goal is to focus more on helping you create some distance from the story so you can then make an intentionally decision on how you want handle the trigger rather than just getting bullied around by your thoughts.

One way to create distance from thoughts is to think of this story as a chapter in a book. If this story is a chapter in a book, what would title it? What would call the chapter in this book? 

Would it be the Annoying Aunt story, would it be the Critical Aunt story, would it be the There She Goes Again story? By acknowledging the story is and naming it (even giving it a funny name), it can help you notice when this particular thought is getting you all caught up and you can start to tell yourself  “Oh! There’s that Annoying Aunt story!” 

Simply by labeling these thoughts and giving them a name, gives you a huge advantage by creating more room to be able to view these thoughts objectively and reduce some of the impact in the moment. 

Next Steps

To recap, Day 3 of the Holiday Self-Care Series is about noticing what are you specific thoughts about your holiday triggers. Once you can name the stories, then you’re in a much better position to better cope with the situation rather than getting too hooked by everything your mind is saying about the situation. It’s easy to forget that a thought about a situation isn’t actually the thought itself. It reminds me of the quote:

The thought of a tiger is not a tiger – Anon

Keep that in mind, just because you think of a tiger, doesn’t mean you’re going to get bite by the imaginary tiger in front of you.

Alright, guys, I hope the third 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.