Strategies & Skills for When Your Birthday Doesn’t Feel Like a Time to Celebrate
Birthdays aren’t always times of fun and celebration. For some of us, birthdays can serve as a reminder of painful events or loss. We often associate birthdays with a time or season of the year, previous memories, or people. This can be a positive or negative experience, depending on our circumstances. In this blog, I’ll go over a few ways to help cope with birthdays that just don’t feel like birthdays and identify a couple of skills that might be useful in managing that very specific day.
Forming New Rituals
Rituals are more important than we realize. Defined in psychology as predefined sequences of behaviors often embedded in a larger system of tradition, meaning making, or symbolism. Humans have engaged in rituals for as long as we’ve been around. They can look a lot of different ways: religious ceremonies, cultural practices, or political processes. At its core, a ritual is just something we repeat in response to another part of life: the changing of a season, the celebration of love, or the birth of a new life.
What rituals do for us is establish an expectation and pattern. Our brains love a pattern. Check out this website if you’re interested in understanding more about the neurobiology of pattern-seeking. Birthdays are ritualistic in many cultures; we get well wishes, gifts, a sweet treat, pulled earlobes, and/or a visit to a religious space. When something painful collides with this time of celebration, instead of expecting joyful things, our minds predict more pain to come.
To work against this neural expectation, we work to replace that pattern with something new. This can look a lot of different ways. Something to consider is working in opposition to the emotion or painful event that comes up on your birthday. For example, if your birthday is associated with loss, spending time with someone you trust can boost your mind’s neural network to associate connectedness even when feeling grief. A few other pairings are listed below to inspire ideas for your own personal situation.
| Feeling lonely or isolated | Seeking out a structured social event like a volunteer experience, religious ceremony, or using online resources like meetup to connect with others. |
| Feeling unsafe or threatened | Safety resourcing or building physical mastery skills. |
| Feeling guilty or burdensome | Considering our own personal values and finding something concrete to act out those values. For example, if we value making a difference, we can donate time or money to local organizations. |
Managing the Emotions
Maybe working on adding something new to this time of year isn’t realistic for you yet. That’s ok! Instead, we can work on simply tolerating the day and allowing it to pass us by. In DBT, we focus on emotion regulation (ER) skills to manage less intense but longer-term emotional experiences. We also use distress tolerance (DT) to work ourselves down from very intense emotions in the short term. Below is a blend of the two skill modules to get your mind going on skills that might better support surviving the day.
Distract with ACCEPTS (DT)
We all use distraction to cope, but with ACCEPTS we seek to distract in a healthy way that doesn’t support the entire avoidance of our emotions, just a break. To begin, we first want to assess our next move in Wise Mind. Once we’re sure we’re proceeding within our own sense of wisdom, we can try the below methods of distraction.
Activities
Contribute
Comparison
Emotions
Pushing Away
Thoughts
Sensations
Check out this link for specific examples of ACCEPTS.
Willing Hands & Half Smiling (DT)
A skill that falls within the reality acceptance distress tolerance skills. This skill uses body posture to help tolerate negative emotions. To use willing hands, you first begin by becoming aware of the present moment. Next, you take notice of your hands and allow them to relax, palms open, willing your own determination, wisdom, and personal ability to fill you. To practice half-smiling, assume mindfulness again as above, but this time, bring awareness to your face. Notice any tension that exists and work to relax. Once relaxed or close to it, bring the smallest rise to the corners of your mouth. Both of these skills use biology to increase neurochemical responses that increase positive emotion.
Check out this website for more information.
Accumulating Positives in the Short & Long Term (ER)
When we look to add positives to our lives, we can reduce the experience of the negative ones. This skill is two-fold in that it asks us to seek short-term positive experiences and to also act in conjunction with our long-term goals. This can be a time to get creative and seek out things that maybe go unnoticed in our everyday lives but can bring us a sense of joy, even if just for a moment. A good friend of mine once said, “Truly it’s trying to find little things, and I mean down to ‘this bug is cool I like it’ and I know it’s temporary and I won’t feel like this forever.” This pleasant events list can help you get started on looking for your own small positive.
Finally, we look for positives in the long term by identifying what it is we most care about and finding small ways to live in a way that brings us closer to those values. This might be a skill to use before the big day rolls around so you can plan ahead to keep busy working towards the life you want. Check out the values and priorities list to help you get started.