We all know that the Holiday Season is upon us. Depending on where we live, many of us began being pummelled with Christmas commercials on TV even before Halloween had come and gone. As we move into December, we are seeing the familiar media ads depicting gloriously happy families, all enjoying being together—opening gifts by the lavishly decorated tree and having sumptuous meals at their festive dinner table—smiles all around, nice and cozy. It all looks quite wonderful, doesn’t it?
But the truth is that very few families are actually like that at holiday time these days. For those reading this, more and more of you are becoming very aware that Addiction is all too often an uninvited guest in our families—creating all sorts of problems and draining us of our emotional energy and good will.
That is actually becoming the norm in most families, all over the world—but the reason we don’t see this reality depicted in the holiday commercials is obvious: retailers want us to buy their products and addiction doesn’t ‘sell.’ That being said, the reason they show us these happy families over and over at this time of year may well be to assist us in knowing what we’re missing so we can feel badly about our lives. If people feel bad about themselves, they think, they’ll buy more and more of our goods just to distract themselves from their pain.
Here is the way I see it: we each have a choice about what we want to buy into. It’s totally up to you whether you want to go along with this somewhat nasty marketing scheme. Your other choice would be to face your reality head-on and make your decisions from that place. Your holiday season this year does not have to be a bad repeat of the one last year, with Addiction as an uninvited guest yet again—there are ways for you to avoid this from happening.
Please click here to find out what I’m doing to help you through the holiday season, and beyond, if you are the loved one of an addict.
