Bah Humbug!

  One of the things I thoroughly enjoy about working in psych is the never ending questions.  We are always trying to discover the root of the problem, to understand the cause and the why to the behaviors.  The dangers of being in psych is that you take this questioning and longing for answers and begin applying it to not just your patients, but to others in your life and even yourself.

  For the past few years, I have started dreading the holidays.  The days and month up to the holidays I enjoy - making lists for gifts, decorating the house, making meal menus.  Then as the days get closer to the big day, I start becoming angry and bitter.  I am(self) tasked with many things such as making the entire meal, purchasing the gifts, wrapping the gifts, pleading with family members to attend at least one mass out of the year with me, and driving my mother to and from my home.  All without an offer of help from other family members.  I then find myself stewing over my being deprived out of an ideal family gathering where family members share in the tasks of making meals and opening their homes to one another, and staring at just another item on my list (nurses love to make lists, even adding little check boxes to make the items official) that I cannot wait to check off and call it a day.  Obviously not a festive or mentally healthy way to spend what is called the "most wonderful time of the year."

  So, what do I do?  I need to re-frame my thinking, much in the same way I try to teach my kids at work.  Look for the trigger.  Examine how it makes me feel.  What is my behavior.  The trigger is the holidays and my belief that there is an ideal family holiday that I am not able to enjoy, which in turn makes me angry (not sad or depressed, but very angry) which makes me irritable and honestly not really nice to my family.  Here's the hard part.  I need to change my thinking, and I know that I need to do this in order to stop this cycle, and it is going to take a lot of conscious effort on my part.  Yes, it is the holiday and I only have my family of four, my mom and my father-in-law to celebrate with, not the Norman Rockwell painting I envision for a large gathering.  Although I am tasked with the cooking and baking, realistically, I am the only one able to prepare the meal.  What I need to look at is delegating tasks to others and being o.k with those tasks being done by someone else.  Ironically, I am feeling better already.  As cliche as it may sound, I (and I am telling myself this) need to be grateful that I have family around to celebrate with.  Although it may not be the celebration I envisioned long ago, it is still a celebration and needs to be viewed as such, not an occasion to be bitter and angry.