The Jolly Time of the Year
What does the upcoming Festive Time mean to you?
When you see the start of the advert campaigns that show the all-encompassing happiness that is supposed to be all around us, do you find your heart joining in?
I have to admit to finding my own heart filling with concern at seeing the new supermarket advert campaigns for this year… in every single frame of the short cartoon style films, every single person is actively and energetically smiling, laughing, exuding joy from every pore. I didn’t notice anyone at rest, with relaxed faces, just sitting and being in contentment. Instead there is much dancing, and movement, and excesses of food and drink and colour… and families.
Families laughing and cheering each other, hugging, smiling.
How exhausting!
And I might suggest here, not what most people experience.
The fib of the Waltons Family…
I don’t know about you, but I have yet to meet any family that is like the Waltons at all….
Yet, all around us, all around the country, all sorts of adverts showing us the highest ideal of the season, and of families, to which we are to use great efforts to strive to achieve, to join in this demonstrated way of being – and if we don’t, or can’t, then are we the odd ones out?
Great pressure to be the same as, and to strive for, what we are presented with time and time again, over and over again, umpteen times a day, sometimes even twice in one 3 minute advert break in one tv programme… pressure because if we look at what is happening in our own family spaces, we may find that we are falling short, we are not like those others, like those we are presented with. In not being the same, we are ‘not-in’.
As social creatures, it is very important to us to be in the ‘in’ group, as to be left ‘outside’ is to be out in the cold, to be outside the accepted norm, to be at risk of being alone.
And if we find ourselves alone, wished for or otherwise, then seeing so many others living and laughing can increase the sense of loneliness – where alone and lonely are held to be different matters, alone being an accepted temporary state, sometimes one of choice, and lonely being unwished for, apparently unending when the end of loneliness can’t be known, and which brings with it a sense of wordless internal anguish and personal aching pain.
This might bring a question as to how people do endure this level of seemingly unrelenting pressure – there can be many different answers to this. But that people do endure is held as evident, when statistics show us that the ultimate self-sanction, suicide, actually reduces over the Christmas tide – to then rise again in a rebound manner in January.
So perhaps people hold off over the festive time, but then cannot endure further when the decorations come down, the walls looking bare, and the long cold nights remain with many weeks of waiting until spring time can be felt to be heralded by rising temperatures and greening leaves.
If you are struggling this year, seeing the presented happiness around you as a taunt or an impossible goal, whether you have the words to describe or explain, counselling and psychotherapy can help.
This does not mean you are mad, or necessarily the broken one, or even the ‘one-in-the-wrong’ – but you might gain benefit from support from a qualified and experienced professional.
Rosalyn Young is a qualified mental health nurse with 30 years
Experience in govt and private agencies helping those in crisis
and in recovery. She has studied counselling to degree level,
and specialises in working with survivors of childhood abuse
and neglect, PTSD, DID, and emotional regulation problems.
She lives in Lincolnshire with her husband and a variety of
companion animals, is a brewer of mead, and student of
growing things in the garden.
