WRAP for the Holidays

The media presents this as a time of great joyfulness for all. And yet many of us, perhaps even most of us, go into the holiday season with a sense of dread, anticipating loneliness, disappointment and reminders of past hurts. In the past, the holidays have been difficult for me. One year I decided to ignore them altogether, did not engage in any of the festivities and rejected overtures from family members and friends. I spent the time alone. I thought it would feel good and right but it didn’t. It felt awful, like a terrible waste. 

Since making that discovery, I have decided to make good use of my WRAP to make my holidays the very best that they can be. I have my WRAP on-line so it is easy for me to make adaptations. First I will think about how I would like my holidays to feel to me, what I would like to do and who I would like to include. Then I will review my wellness tools and use them to adapt each part of my WRAP to make this holiday season special and enjoyable. I will be paying special attention to the section “When Things are Breaking Down”. As I have gotten older, have retired, and have developed some health issues, have family members with difficult issues and the world situation seems more and more uncertain, I seem to find myself in the “When Things are Breaking Down” section more often. My adaptation of that section for the upcoming holidays will be particularly specific. 

Mary Ellen Copeland PhD is the founder of the Copeland Center for Wellness and Recovery. She is recognized internationally for her work in studying how people can recover from mental health challenges using simple, safe, non-invasive, widely available and usually free self-help resources. She began these studies in 1988 in her efforts to find acceptable answers to her own mental health issues. In 1997 she worked with a group of people with lived experience to develop the well-known, widely used and now evidence-based Wellness Recovery Action Plan.

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