I had the impression that only substances gave me cravings. As I learned in recovery, it’s not that easy. Cravings may come back from memory, environment, and people, all of which can be triggered during the holiday season.
Always, and consistently, family holidays have been the biggest triggers for me. It has nothing to do with how my family conducts itself, since it’s more about those versions of me I have yet to outgrow. Holidays bring everyone together, yet they also bring up the old stories, old roles, and old wounds.
I just sometimes step into a family gathering territory and from one moment to the next, I find myself far from an adult in recovery and healing and back at being overwhelmed with a need to go away for a drink or to get a smoke only to get through the night.
The old dynamics just linger on… awkwardly. The standard of putting up with being “good.” The imperative not to discuss things and just swallow it all. The tension of an uncropped history. The stinging remarks. The hurtful silence.
And with so much of this comes the desires—no one to keep the drug but the trip, the bit of numbness, the familiar something’s not right, here comes the holiday triggers.
The biggest part of me becoming better would have been the realization of some very key values:
I am allowed to have feelings.
My feelings are valid.
My boundaries are valid.
My sobriety is more important than anyone’s weird sense of comfort.
Now, before any family event or thing, what do I do to myself? I smartly ask myself:
Which version of me feels safe showing up in this gathering today?
Sometimes, the answer is the brave one. Sometimes it’s the quiet one., Sometimes, it is the one who chooses to stay home.
But that is OK.
If I do go, I try to prepare myself emotionally.
I tell myself I don’t have to take part in conversation.
I don’t have to defend my recovery.
I don’t have to get sucked into old pain just because someone brings it up.
I can choose to leave the table if I get overwhelmed.
I make sure to have support before, during, and after—a friend whom I can text, a sponsor I can call, a meeting I can attend. I keep my recovery tools in my pocket, literally and in my head.
The hardest part is determining what is my business and what isn’t. Not every family issue is my responsibility. Not every comment is an attack. Not every unresolved conflict calls for my reaction. I can choose peace over participation.
Of course, triggers show up—whether it is a certain smell, person’s tone, or memory. And cravings follow at times. Then I must remind myself, cravings are feelings, not commands. They pass. They give me a window of ten minutes.
What has changed the most is how I see myself within my family. I am no longer that person hiding in the bathroom with shaking hands. I don’t pretend. I don’t drown.
I heal.
And come old memories trying to pull me back, I remind myself I have worked too hard just to revert to a version of myself I fought so fiercely to leave behind.
For now I’m learning to create my Christmas experience-old-memories replaced with new strength. I do not live the past; I honor it.
Detachment, not loosing oneself, is magnified through another lens.
Above all, I choose my recovery, even when it means changing how I show up with the people who’ve known me forever.
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