I asked listeners to share the tough scenarios they expect to encounter during the holidays and Christmas. I will start with Part 1, going through the themes of scenarios and sharing an idea on a shift you can try to make this season, from a counsellor’s perspective.  The goal is to give you some tools on how to handle the reality that life can still be hard and things can feel tough, especially around this time of year.

The interview with Brandi Hofer of Colour Me Happy Community 

• On Youtube – Brandi Hofer Studios


• On the podcast – Colour Me Happy Community

Main topics covered in this episode:

• The expectations of Christmas/The Holidays vs the emotions we carry as humans
  
  
  
  • 156. 3 things to know about feeling negative emotions
  
  
  
  


• Anticipatory anxiety, one way to deal with it
  
  
  
  • 174. Christmas hygge ideas + understanding how the window of tolerance impacts your stress in motherhood
  
  
  
  


• Tough scenarios during the holidays, lack of routines
  
  
  
  • 115. A Controlling mom, or a capable mom?
  
  
  
  


• Overspending to make the holidays FEEL good
  
  
  
  • 141. When shopping isn’t making your life better (mindful and minimalist tips for shopping)
  
  
  
  


• Being alone or missing family during the holidays


• Times of transition during the holidays 
  
  
  
  • 67. Making motherhood harder than it needs to be (Mom Martyr)
  
  
  
  


• Simple Christmas (all posts here)

FULL TRANSCRIPT

0:10

Hey friends, it’s Shawna Scafe, your nerdy girlfriend and counsellor from simple on purpose.ca I thought I would add my last name in there because I never say it and you’re probably reading it and don’t really know how to pronounce it. So nice to meet you guys. My Instagram used to be Shawna Scafe. But the way it was written everyone thought it was Sean is cafe. And people were genuinely wondering where my cafe was. And that would be so dreamy to have a cafe so but I don’t, I don’t have a cafe. So I just changed my instagram name to simple on purpose. Anyways, here you are, you’re at the simple and purpose podcast. Welcome. And today has been a really busy day. This morning, I did an interview with brandy Hofer. She is a Canadian artist. She’s a muralist. She’s a portrait artist. She’s an educator, she’s a speaker, and I have followed her work for actually a lot of years now. And I just love her work. It’s so beautiful. It’s like a feast for the heart. It’s just so wonderful. And I recently had commented on one of her Instagram posts, and she wrote me right back, and she asked me to come on your podcast, which was so cool. On one hand to be asked, because I just admire her so much. And on the other hand to realize she had a podcast, I hadn’t missed that in the Instagram algorithm. So I said, Yes, I started listening to her podcast, it’s called Color Me happy, which is also the name of her book that I just ordered. I’m excited about it. Because the more you talk to her and the more you listen to her podcast, the more you see just how have a real deal. She is like genuine, honest, open and passionate, like you can feel her passion for what she does, and for empowering other women. So her podcast is about being a community for motherhood and art, you don’t have to be an artist to listen to it really like I listened to it. And it’s women talking about issues that women deal with in different areas of entrepreneurship and motherhood. So I’m gonna link her in the show notes, I recommend following her everywhere, and getting your book in follow your podcasts, especially because she’s Canadian. And we let just love fellow Canadians around here, don’t we? So then, after I did that, I went to put on my long johns, because there’s snow here today walk down to my kids school, because they’re all in the same school this year. And because they’re in the same school, I thought I should probably help out, I should be more involved. So I signed up to become a noon hour supervisor, which as I say it, I’m like, you could have done other things. But this is what we chose. Because I knew there was a little bit of a gap there that some more supervision was needed on one certain day of the week. It has come with some reluctance from my kids, for sure. And if I’m honest for me, too, but today, I went down first time went to learn the ropes. And the bonus of all of this is a couple of my besties work there. So I’m gonna get to see them more often. And I just hope it all outweighs the hard parts, right? hard enough. There’s going to be hard and awesome. Moving on to the issues of today. winter holidays coming up, whatever you’re celebrating, whatever background you have, whatever celebrations you partake in, at this time of year, it most likely involves some get togethers, some parties, family events, and all of that naturally comes with expectations, expectations on what it should look like, what it should feel like what you should be doing what you shouldn’t be doing. And in my young, 41 years of living and spending hours talking with people and hearing the things away on them. I know just enough to say that the holidays do not always feel good. They don’t always look like they should they don’t feel like they should. But we live in this culture where we’re fed that steady stream of Hallmark Christmas perfection everything works out and twinkly warm cheese commercials where families are laughing together in their sweaters and those stock photos of smiling couples sipping in their coffees in front of the fire. Like everything we’re bombarded with, it just doesn’t leave much permission to feel mad at Christmas, or lonely or sad or grief or disappointed overwhelmed, annoyed, anxious. These feelings still exist at this time of year. And my very wise supervisor has reminded me these feelings are often magnified this time of year. Here today, I wanted to offer you a place to talk about the reality that Christmas holidays whenever you’re celebrating does not always feel good. And I want to offer you a few ways to approach this season. What I did was I asked the Facebook group and I asked on Instagram for women to share topics that feel hard around this time of year. And I feel like there was such a range, really real and relatable situations that were shared. I would love to go in depth on each and every situation in you probably by accident I probably will but I’m going to touch on each one

5:00

For short, of course, we won’t solve all the situations in 120 minute podcast with some ideas in it. Or even in one Christmas, really, because this is years of history, relationships, roles, habits, coping and pain. And it takes a lot of time, a lot of intention, a lot of awareness, a lot of practice and work to reconcile these things. But that being said, my aim here is to offer you one simple shift one thing to focus on the season one different way to show up a different approach. And I’m going to just share ideas, I’m going to share ideas on things that could work in some of them might be a fit for you, some of them might not, maybe it’ll get you thinking about an alternative that could work for you. Because the goal here is to just try something, make one shift in the system. And really, we make that shift with us because we are the only ones in the system that we can intentionally make changes in. And ideally, if we start making shifts, maybe other shifts will happen in response over time. It’s always worth saying this episode is not a replacement for therapy. And I will let you know that I feel like these episodes are jam packed, it might take two parts, we’ll see I might do two episodes, they’re going to be jam packed, I’m going to try and load up the show notes to be a place where you can come and get a little bit of a bullet version of everything and additional resources, because so much of what we talk about here has been touched on other episodes that might be helpful for you. So stop by the show notes. If you want more. And you can always scroll down to the bottom of the show notes and read the full transcript as well. If you’d like to take your time with things, as we start this conversation about the things that feel hard at Christmas, I want to talk about what happens before the gathering or event or whatever even happens. And gearing up to the holidays, you might notice a lot of what’s called anticipatory anxiety, which is anxiety we get about that upcoming situation. And it might even be anxiety we feel about the anxiety we’re going to have, in my experience, a difficult p