Emotional Triggers: 3 Holiday Survival Tips for Sober Women

The holiday season can be a psychological minefield for women in recovery, filled with emotional triggers that can challenge even the most resilient individuals. In this powerful episode, host Shelby John provides practical strategies to help you move through the holidays with grace, self-compassion, and emotional stability.

Why Holidays Are Emotionally Challenging

• Neurological triggers that activate past memories
• Sensory experiences that transport you back to unprocessed emotions
• Societal pressure of performative happiness
• Amplified grief and loss
• Complex family dynamics
• Recovery-specific challenges

3 Powerful Tools for Emotional Processing

1. Emotional Check-In Practice

• Create a consistent daily routine
• Establish a sacred space for reflection
• Practice non-judgmental observation of your emotions
• Identify the root of your feelings
• Develop self-understanding and compassion

2. Expanding Your Boundary Toolkit

• Master verbal boundaries using "I" statements
• Implement physical boundaries (time limits, exit strategies)
• Create scripts for managing sensitive conversations
• Protect your emotional energy
• Prepare responses in advance

3. Grounding Techniques

• Use physical methods like weighted blankets
• Practice progressive body relaxation
• Engage all five senses to stay present
• Implement breathing techniques
• Develop personal meditation strategies

Bonus Resources

🌟 Free Resource: Discover how remote neurofeedback can support your healing journey. Schedule your free 15-minute consultation and learn about this evidence-based treatment for anxiety, depression, and more.

Key Takeaways

• Your emotional responses are valid
• Healing is a journey, not a destination
• You have the power to navigate challenging moments
• Self-compassion is your greatest ally

Remember: The holidays don't have to be something you merely survive—they can be an opportunity for gentle, loving navigation of your emotions.

Website: Shelbyjohn.com

If you loved this episode, please leave a rating and review, and share with a friend who might need these tools.

Transcript

 Hey there sober ladies, thank you so much for joining me today for the Confident Sober Women podcast where we are creating a movement of powerful wisdom seeking women who are building lives of joy, confidence, and profound personal enlightenment beyond initial recovery. I am Shelby John and every week we have empowering conversations to help you build a life you don't want to escape from because we all know sobriety is only the beginning. 

So we have about eight days until Christmas, a few more till the end of 2024. And as it is a crazy time of year. Most of us have different kinds of challenges at this point, and that's why I decided to spend the last Two weeks of the year, creating shorter mini episodes around topics that are commonly discussed during the holidays to provide practical tools, tips, and strategies that you can implement right now after you finish listening to this episode. 

So if you didn't listen to the stuff that was happening last week here on the podcast, please make sure you go back and check them out. There are several mini sodes. And also, I am incorporating a few interviews with other people but much shorter to stay with the mini episode theme and to highlight the things that we've been talking about here together. 

Today I really want to share with you three tools for navigating emotional triggers during the holiday season. And I think that most of us understand what we mean when we say emotional triggers. And then if you pair that with the word holiday, I think we can all come up with the different things that happen in our families and in our lives and our histories that can create  Some potential triggering experiences.

So let's get real for a moment, right? We all know that picture perfect scene that we sometimes see in the movies isn't really the reality for most of us. We have what I always call golden moments though, right? There's those little moments, maybe it's 30 seconds, maybe it's a couple hours, sometimes it might be half a day or a whole day, but usually it's not. 

It's not golden times. We don't get a whole week of amazing times where everybody's getting along. And it's just great. We get these moments, right? Where you're whisked away almost by the emotion of. your children growing up, or just the gravity of the joy and the gratitude that you feel. We had these moments where the picture goes really well, right?

And the memories are shared, and the laughter is flowing. So we always have those things, but then there's also Some of those kind of emotional amplifiers, right? Those things  around the holiday time, really, that kind of turn up the volume on our deepest vulnerabilities. And I feel like for women in recovery, this particular season can feel like  walking through a psychological minefield, really.

Every decoration, family tradition, and gathered moment has the potential to be a trigger, really. It has the potential for profound emotional responses. Let's break down why the holidays create such a powerful storm for emotional resurfacing. The first thing really is a neurological effect. It's the echoes of past experiences.

Our brains are incredible pattern recognition machines, and during the holidays, there's a lot of familiar sensory experiences, so things like a specific perfume, the sound of certain music, the layout of a family dining room. can instantly transport you back to some of your own old, unprocessed memories.

And these sensory triggers activate our limbic system in the brain, which is the emotional center of the brain. And it bypasses all of our rational thinking and pulls us into that intense emotional state.  Sometimes we have ecosystems,  right? Think about it. We have communication patterns that can quickly become activated.

We have childhood roles that can rear their ugly heads. We have unresolved conflicts that are simmering below the surface. And then generational trauma that repeats itself over and over without our even conscious awareness.  And for many women in recovery, Family gatherings really become a complex dance of maintaining your sobriety, trying to figure out how to set boundaries, managing your emotional triggers, and then protecting your own personal growth, your own, really, self care. 

So there's a lot going on for us  in these family gatherings, more than meets the eye.  There's also the profession the pressure of performative happiness.  Our society truly creates, I think, like an unrealistic narrative about holiday joy. Everywhere you look there's images of perfect families and perfect meals and perfect moments and this really can create a tremendous amount of psychological pressure.

It also can create feelings of inadequacy like, oh gosh, I'm not enough or if I don't My kid doesn't have the perfect outfit, or if I don't do this thing, I won't measure up. There's also a lot of comparison and judgment. We see in our social media feeds different highlight reels that make us immediately go to the comparison game.

And then there's heightened anxiety about not meeting other people's expectations. Maybe it's your parents or your partner or your kids. You have all of this happening all at one time.  Then there's grief and loss amplification. We talked a little bit about this in another episode last week about grief and loss at this time of year.

There's a lot of things happening for us when we are struggling with absences and losses, the memories of loved ones who are no longer there, the relationships that were damaged or lost, possibly not repaired before they were gone,  previous holiday seasons that were spent in your own active addiction, and then your own childhood experiences of neglect or trauma.

These memories don't just whisper, they really can scream  and create intense waves of emotion that feel overwhelming  and uncontrollable.  And then there's the psychological stress response. It's You know, our bodies are  wired for handling this kind of stuff. We have hormones and fight or flight. Our brains know how to handle stress and things like increased cortisol levels start happening.

It creates disrupted sleep patterns. It changes our eating habits. We begin to crave things that we don't normally eat or we want to restrict our eating or eat more.  We reduce our own self care routines, we get financial pressures and social anxiety.  Each of these factors compounds and they create like a perfect storm for emotional wounds to surface and feel particularly raw and painful. 

And then lastly, there's just the recovery perspective, right? For women in recovery, triggers are multi layered. We're complex people and although the concepts that we talk about a lot in recovery are simple, they are never easy or singularly focused, right? They are complex. So we're managing our sobriety.

We're, again, protecting those emotional boundaries. We also might be protecting, financial boundaries, things around work, our time. We might also be in the midst of processing our own past traumas. We might be dealing, doing EMDR therapy or neurofeedback or some other neurological approach to process our own trauma. 

And then we're navigating family expectations. A lot of times if you're fairly new in recovery or even if you've been around for a while, You're trying to figure out what the family expectations are of you now as a sober person. That was different than when you were in active addiction. 

And then you're really trying to maintain your own hard earned personal growth. Once you have learned and changed things and recovered, you don't,  no one can take that away. Even if you have a slip in your mental health or you take a step back, you can't take away the things that you have learned.

You just get off the journey for a hot second and then you have to step back into it. But that takes a lot of effort and we all know the momentum of doing something that you're already doing is way easier than trying to get back to it. Just know that your emotional responses are completely valid, whatever they are, it's not a weakness, but they are signals of your incredible strength and your ongoing healing process. 

Okay, finally we're going to get to it. I want to share the three practical tools for emotional processing so that you can take these into your life right now and start using them. Number one is the emotional check in practice. I want you to choose a consistent time every day. For me, I always recommend the morning, afternoon, and evening.

because I think it's great to start your day with preparation. Also evening. So there's like a wonderful opportunity to have a morning routine and then also an evening routine to prepare for the next morning, but it needs to be done consistently every single day and never deviated from. So I want you to pick a time of day that really works for you.

Maybe lunchtime is a great time for you, like depending on your lifestyle. And you create like a sacred space. Like in the morning for me, I come down, I have my coffee, I sit in the same chair, I have my dogs, I have my book, all my tools are there, and then I have my whole routine. It's right there. It's my little space.

So for you, maybe you have a war room, or a sun porch, or just a chair like me. Whatever it is, just make sure that it's consistent and done every single day.  You can start to use this time to write down your emotions. You can begin to really ask yourself, When I think about this emotion or this situation, where can I feel it in my body?

What is this emotion trying to tell me?  And then, from there, you can start to layer on other things. Like, where do you think the root of this emotion is coming from?  And as you're doing that, I want you to make sure that you are not judging yourself. You're practice, you're just practicing observation.

Non judgmental observation. So  Right now I'm feeling sad. It feels like a pit in my stomach.  This might be connected to the fact that my child isn't coming home for Christmas this year.  What I need in this moment is time to have memories, space where I can talk to my child on the phone or have a FaceTime, and a plan for when I'm going to visit that child. 

See how that works? So insert that into your own life without any editing or criticism, just pure, honest observation.  Okay, number two is expanding your boundary toolkit. You know me, I love to talk about boundaries, I think it's critical. We can't get enough of it and we can't have enough reminders because most of us are still learning and it's an evolution that we need a lot of practice with.

So I want you to make sure that you're practicing verbal boundaries. And what I mean by that is using things like I statements.  So when you want to share something,  expressing it with yourself first. I feel disappointed when you don't show up on time.  Or I feel angry when you speak to me that way.  So these are just some examples of how you are stating your feeling first and then you're being clear and concise about what the other part is without avoid, without pointing the finger at them,  creating the opportunity for them to become defensive.

So you want to avoid any kind of over explaining. Thank you. and you want to just be clear and concise. There's also physical boundaries. We know this can look a lot like, time limitations. I will come to the gathering on Christmas Eve. However, we're only going to stay for two hours, or we will have to leave at nine o'clock, or I'm going to drive myself so I can leave when I want.

Things like that. You can have an exit strategy. You can make sure that you limit being around the triggering people. Just have a plan for physical boundaries. And then there's the emotional boundaries. You want to make sure that you are prepared to  limit discussion of sensitive topics.

For example, you're talking to, Aunt Sally, and she keeps asking you when you're going to have kids, and you've been married for five years, when are you going to have kids, and maybe you've been in a fertility battle, and so this is a sensitive topic for you, and so I would suggest that either you limit your exposure to this person, and, or if it comes up, you come up with some very specific ways of dealing with that discussion, even though we would like to have a family, it hasn't happened for us yet. Or, we are working on a plan for that. Or whatever it looks like for you. But just have some responses that you can use for those sensitive topics. And just making sure you're protecting your emotional energy. And say you're talking to somebody and they're, getting really, negative.

And it's just like more and more negative. And, you're okay, this is you've tried maybe to reframe, you've tried to redirect, and it just keeps coming up. And so maybe after just a couple times you say, it sounds like you're really struggling right now, and you're being  really negative, so I'm going to have to end this conversation.

Or I think that what you're saying is really important, but I'll have to, we'll have to talk when you can be nice.  Things like that. Having some very advanced, prepared scripts, I know that sounds strange, but it is very helpful. Comments like, I'm not comfortable discussing that at this moment, thank you for understanding, but I'm taking care of myself.

Or, hey, I appreciate your perspective and I'm choosing to focus on my being right now. So just pick a couple, you can put them in your phone, write them down, whatever you need to do. Practice them with a friend before you go. Just be prepared.  And then the last tool is grounding techniques. Thanks. So you want to have some methods that help you to ground yourself and your emotions in the moment.

So there are some physical grounding techniques you can use like weighted blankets barefoot walking, specifically outside on the earth. I really recommend that unless it's snow on the ground or something, you might not be able to do that. Or just barefoot walking on different kind of flooring textures.

You can do this progressive relaxation, which is like squeezing and holding and then releasing single parts of your body. So starting with your feet, tightening your toes and your feet, holding it for a few seconds and then releasing and it's coming up your body the whole way. So you're tightening and releasing and doing that really helps to relieve the stress, helps you to ground yourself in your moment.

You can also use all of your senses. You can start to look around, you can say tell me five things you can see,  four things you can smell, three things you can hear, two things you can see, one thing you can taste so that you can really use your senses to ground you and bring you back into this moment.

It's a very, it's a very quick, easy, it can be very personal and private opportunity for you to bring yourself right back into this moment. Into that moment, because nobody has to even know you're doing that.  It's like a little peaceful meditation.  You can also do breathing work, which we've talked a little bit about in several of the episodes.

You can use box breathing, you can just use nostril breathing where you breathe in one, you hold nostril and then you breathe out, and then you switch your fingers and you breathe in the other one, switch your fingers, breathe out. There's several different kinds of breathing techniques. Some of it's just deep belly breaths, like in through your nose, deep into your belly, filling it all the way up, and then slowly releasing.

That's my personal favorite.  So make sure that you take all of this in. Of course, there are professional support options for you if you are struggling, or you feel like you know some things are going to come up, or if you are, have already been working with a therapist, or you've been wanting to, make sure you reach out.

Find a mental health provider in your area. I personally love EMDR therapy. I think it's the most powerful tool that we have for healing at the molecular level and also neurofeedback. It's been a complete game changer. Plus the neurofeedback that I offer is remote. So you can do it right at your own house at your own pace, whenever it fits into your schedule.

There's also tons of online support groups. You can use 12 step programs or other modalities, but just make sure you find.  Either professional and or support options that work for you and your lifestyle that are gonna feel good, that are gonna provide for you the kind of support and healing you need.

Make sure you practice a lot of self compassion, right? Self love, really. I want you to say things to yourself like, I'm healing.  I'm stronger than my past. My feelings are valid. I deserve peace. My wounds do not define me. Really embrace these kinds of statements. I'm fine as I am.  And see how you can change your neurosis, your body, your physical response, your nervous system as you begin to work on those things right in your own mind.

The emotions of the holidays don't have to overpower you this year. And if they do, these three things will be right at your fingertips. Make sure that you use them. Make sure that you are not afraid to ask for help. And remember, you are not alone.  Your healing journey is yours, it's sacred, but you don't have to do it alone.

The holidays don't have to be something that you survive. They can be something that you gently and lovingly navigate. And they don't also have to be what you've always done. They can be new and fresh and different, and that's okay. Just remember,  you are always worth healing. You're always worth having the joy and peace of that.

It's such a blessing to be able to be sober, to do this work. and to be able to show it for yourself because, when you were out there, you were not doing that.  So make sure you either re listen to this episode, take some notes, go back and jot down those three things. Pin out the ones that work for you.

Sometimes we just need one or two things that we can put in our fingertips and have ready at all times. is one more powerful tool for healing and I already mentioned it. It is remote neurofeedback therapy and neurofeedback therapy is an evidence based healing modality for things like ADHD, anxiety, depression, even insomnia, and you can do it right in your own home.

This is a neurologically based form of treatment that trains your brain. while you watch your favorite Netflix show, literally in 30 minutes, three to four times a week, in your own living room. So if you feel like this might be interesting for you, are you ready to learn more? You can visit my website at shelbyjohn.

com and you can even schedule a free 15 minute consult so we can talk a little bit more about what remote nerve feedback looks like for you.  Thanks for listening to the Confident Sober Women podcast. And if you love this episode, please make sure you leave a rating and review and share with your friends.

I'll see you next time.