3 Things No One Tells You About the Holidays as a Widow (That Actually Help) | BW: 216

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Join Brave Through the Holidays: bravewidow.com/holidays

This 12-week pop-up group includes coaching, worksheets, community support, holiday planning, communication guidance, and vision planning for 2027.

The holidays can feel painful, overwhelming, and completely different after losing your spouse.

And the second year does not automatically feel easier.

Brave Widow Resources  

• Book a call with me to see if Academy is right for you: https://www.bravewidow.com/call
• Free, Live “Four Seasons of Grief” Training + Quiz: bravewidow.com/live
• Rebuild a Life You Can Love Again in the Brave Widow Academy (join the waitlist or book a call): https://bravewidow.com/academy
• Create Calm from Chaos and Heal Your Heart inside Brave Widow Foundations:👉 bravewidow.com/foundations
• Join the free Brave Widow Community: https://bravewidow.com/free

The holidays can bring joy, but they can also bring powerful grief triggers for widows and widowers.

In this episode, I’m sharing three things people often don’t tell you about experiencing the holidays after the loss of your spouse:

1. No one may come to rescue your holidays.
2. Your nervous system may recognize holiday triggers before you consciously do.
3. The second or third holiday season may feel harder than the first.

You are not doing grief wrong if the holidays still feel painful. You are not required to participate in every tradition, attend every gathering, or pretend everything feels normal.

You can make decisions in advance. You can create a plan. You can choose what feels supportive, set boundaries, and prepare for the moments that may feel especially difficult.

If you want support navigating the holiday season, join us inside Brave Through the Holidays.

You’ll receive weekly guidance, worksheets, coaching, replays, and community support through the end of January.

Learn more: bravewidow.com/holidays

You can also join the free Brave Widow community at bravewidow.com/free.

Chapters

00:00 Why holiday grief can feel overwhelming
02:00 Why avoiding the holidays can make things harder
06:00 Thing 1: No one is coming to rescue your holidays
10:00 You get to decide what your holidays look like
11:30 Thing 2: Your nervous system knows the holiday schedule
14:00 Why holiday triggers can feel so unexpected
15:00 Thing 3: The second and third holidays may feel harder
17:00 Healing does not mean forgetting
19:00 Recap of the three things
20:00 Why join Brave Through the Holidays
23:00 Free Brave Widow community

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* Share this with a friend who’s facing grief or the holidays without their person

If you’re new here, my name is Emily Tanner. I’m the founder of Brave Widow and Brave Widow Academy.

I help widows move from barely surviving their loss… to rebuilding a life they can actually love again without feeling like they’re betraying their person.

By day (and for 20+ years), I’ve led large teams and complex operations in the corporate world. 

After my husband Nathan died in 2021, just shy of our 20-year anniversary, I took everything I knew about leadership, systems, and change — and started applying it to grief.

Since then, I’ve:

Shared my story publicly to make widows feel less alone.

Launched the Brave Widow podcast, now with 180+ episodes and listeners around the world.

Coached hundreds of widows 1:1 and in groups, and talked with thousands more through the podcast, communities, and events.

Built Brave Widow Academy, a 6-month coaching program with a clear framework for moving from deep grief to rebuilding a life you can love again.

I don’t teach “just think positive” grief tips.

I teach widows how to:

Heal their heart.

Stop waiting on “time” to fix everything.

Take small, brave steps toward a life that feels meaningful again.

How I Got Here…

2021: My husband Nathan dies unexpectedly. I’m 4 kids in, overwhelmed, and drowning in paperwork, decisions, and pain. Therapy helps, but I still feel stuck with no roadmap.

2021–2022: I start devouring books, interviewing widows, trying grief groups, and studying coaching — desperate to find something that actually helps me feel different.

2022: I start the Brave Widow podcast, recording episodes while terrified and crying between takes — but determined that no widow should feel as alone as I did.

Year 1: I begin coaching widows 1:1. Word spreads quietly. The same patterns and problems keep showing up, so I start building frameworks instead of one-off advice.

Year 2: I launch Brave Widow Academy — a structured, 6-month coaching program with a step-by-step path: from deep grief, to stability, to rebuilding.

Year 3: Brave Widow has listeners around the world. I’ve personally coached hundreds of widows and spoken with thousands more through consults, lives, emails, and DMs. 

Today: My work is simple:

Help widows stop surviving each day… and start rebuilding a life that makes them genuinely glad to be alive again.

TRANSCRIPT:

[00:00:00] If you find yourself dodging holiday grief triggers and notice that you're starting to look like Neo from The Matrix as he's dodging bullets, then today's episode is for you. Welcome to episode 216 of The Brave Widow Show. Hey, guys. Today I wanna share with you three things that people don't tell you about going through the holidays as a widow, and some ways that you can actually empower yourself so that you're not a victim of holiday grief, but you're someone who is calmly navigating through what may be some difficult waters, may be a really heavy and tough season. If you're out and about or even watching TV, even though right now it's just October, you may have noticed that holiday triggers are everywhere. My own daughter started playing Christmas music this week. Yes, this week in October. It is [00:01:00] crazy. We also went to Hobby Lobby yesterday, and fall, fall decor was hanging on like a piece of lint to a sweater.

It was, like, barely hanging on by a couple of aisles, and Christmas is just dominating most of the Hobby Lobby store. It's everywhere. The sounds, the smells, the Christmas candles, the gingerbread decorations, the commercials on TV, all of that is already starting to come out. And I am going to be the person who helps empower you, who helps prepare you.

I'm not the person who's gonna tell you n- just don't think about the holidays, just try to avoid it, just, instead of going to the grocery store, do grocery pickup. Or instead of planning for the holidays, just, just keep putting it out of your mind as long as you can. I'm not gonna be that type of leader and [00:02:00] guide for you.

I am gonna be the person who looks at you and says, "Yes, this is a tough season coming up for many of you." I've been getting tons of messages and emails from you. "I'm really worried about the holidays. I'm really dreading this. I don't wanna think about it. I'm worried. I wish I could just feel normal for the holidays.

I can't even just feel normal. Like, this has to be something really hard and heavy." And so today I'm gonna share with you three things that most people won't tell you about holidays and experiencing the holidays as a widow or widower. Okay? This is in order to help you. Before I dive into that, by the time you see this episode, it will be the day before we kick off our Brave Through the Holidays group.

So Brave Through the Holidays, you may have heard me talk about it recently, but I'm gonna be guiding our group of widows and widowers over the course of 12 plus weeks as we prepare [00:03:00] for and map out your plan of navigating the holidays over the next couple of months.

Because the thing about it is avoiding thinking about the holidays, avoiding making decisions, trying, feeling like it's too painful to look all of that in the face might help you in the short term, might pacify some of the pain or help you to distract yourself and think about something else. But long term, it's much harder because long term- If you wait until right before the holidays, now all of a sudden you might find yourself in a panic.

You might find yourself waffling with decisions of like, "Well, what do I wanna do? And I thought I wanted to do this, but actually I wanna do that, and I haven't even told anybody." And, and then you feel the guilt, and then you feel like you should show up, and, and it shouldn't be this hard 'cause it's been two or three years.

Why is it still so hard? And you're, you're just spinning and spinning and spinning and spinning. And it's just not helpful. So we [00:04:00] created Brave Through the Holidays. Last year was our first year because I observed that so many people struggle with moving through the holidays as a widow, even if they've been widowed more than a year, more than two years, more than three years.

And so instead of just trying to avoid this, trying not to think about it, trying to just bunker down and recognizing that the holidays are just gonna be hard is actually giving people a plan. There are some things that we can do that will make the holidays easier and lighter. It doesn't magically solve for grief, it doesn't magically make the pain go away, but it allows you to feel empowered. It allows you to feel like you have a plan.

Childbirth is a great example. Childbirth is often an excruciating process for a woman. It's extremely painful. Your body doesn't function the way that it did before childbirth, before going to labor, before delivering [00:05:00] the baby, before the flood of all the hormones after you have the baby. But what can help is having a birth plan, having a plan of what you're going to do after the baby is born.

By having those plans in place, it makes that experience easier, more tolerable, more... it boosts your confidence in being able to navigate it because you don't feel like you're floundering without any sort of plan or support or anything that helps you. You have a plan. And as we know with kids, we may adjust our plan, but we have a plan.

It's the same for going through the holidays. It may feel heavy. It may feel hard. It may be painful. It may be a difficult time, but we are gonna work now on developing our plan on how we can make it a little easier, a little lighter, what we can do if we start to feel overwhelmed or like we're being pressured to do something we don't wanna do.

So that starts Wednesday, [00:06:00] October 21st. And because some of you won't be seeing this until maybe later in the week, we're gonna leave the doors open until Sunday, of this week. And that will be on, look at my calendar, October 25th. So we'll leave the doors open until midnight October 25th. And then after that, the only way that you can join us will be by joining Foundations or Academy.

So let's get into these three things. The first thing that people don't tell you is that no one is coming to rescue your holidays

Pizza. As widows, we tend to hold on to this hope that someone will reach out to us, uh, someone will step in, maybe a family member or a friend will notice. They'll, they'll realize, like, we probably need extra help and support during the holidays. Maybe we think that time is just gonna pass and it's gonna get easier, but the reality is that no one is coming.

[00:07:00] If you are a widow who has family and friends that are rallied around you, they're fully supportive, they're making this as easy as possible for you, and that's happened year after year after year, you have an incredible gift of people who love you and support you. That is amazing

Most of my clients can't say that

And so instead of wishing and hoping and wondering why people don't see me, why don't they realize this would be hard for me? I would have people that would ask me, like, "Aren't you excited about the holidays? Isn't it fun having the holidays with your four kids?" And it would just blow my mind of how people could not realize how insensitive that was.

Like, oh yeah, my husband just died. We're stoked about Christmas. We're so excited. It's not gonna be hard at all. It's a little bit of sarcasm. I'm like, seriously? Seriously. No one offered to help wrap Christmas gifts. No [00:08:00] one offered to help take the kids to do any Christmas activities. No one offered to fill the stockings.

My direct family, they're amazing, and help with making Christmas dinner and just, we just really enjoyed spending some of that time together. But the vast majority of people that I knew didn't come in and, and scoop me up and save me from the holidays. No one said, "Let me do your Black Friday shopping for you.

Let me help in some, some respect." And that's what most of my clients also experience is this deep loneliness and sense of feeling unseen, misunderstood, no one caring, no one reaching out. And so if that's you, just know there's nothing wrong with you. It's not that people don't care.

It's not that they don't like you. People are caught up in their own lives. People are caught up in their own holiday planning, and scheduling events, and work [00:09:00] parties, and church parties, and family get-togethers, and, and people just get caught up. So a lot of times I don't think it's even that people don't care, it's just that they're caught up in their own life, their own immediate family, their own little bubble.

And sometimes they forget that could be a really difficult time. So we really wanna lower our expectations and recognize that we can choose to go through this holiday season being empowered and with making decisions and hashing out some options, versus feeling like we have to go through this holiday season as a victim of our circumstance, as someone who has no options, no choice, who is so sad and lonely because no one reached out to us, no one cares about me, therefore I will sit here alone M- you actually have a choice, and you might have some options that are limited, and you [00:10:00] might have some options that aren't the best.

You might have some options that feel intimidating or that feel very black and white, it has to be one way or the other. So one of the things that I'm gonna help you do is, is make some decisions around what you want your holiday experience to be like. We're gonna empower you, we're gonna equip you, we're gonna help you sort out what would feel the most supportive to you.

And let me be clear. There's really no right or wrong answer, whether you want to just spend time at your own home by yourself, you don't wanna participate in holiday activities, or you wanna go all in and you wanna figure out how that's gonna be possible and you know exactly what you wanna do, and it's very busy, a flurry of activity.

Or most likely, it's kind of somewhere in between. There's nothing that says, Emily says this is the perfect way to go through the holidays. This is what you're supposed to do. [00:11:00] This is how social you're supposed to be. No, you get to decide what that is. I'm gonna give you some tools to help you decide. I'm going to be there to coach you as you're walking through, like, "Okay, I think I wanna do this, but then also sometimes I just wanna be alone, but then I'm gonna be sad because I'm alone."

Like just kind of coaching you through that. Ultimately, your goal is to make a decision from a place of peace, and then sometimes we have to remind ourselves that we made that decision. Well, this is what I decided I wanted, and my plan B was gonna look like this if I knew I was starting to feel a little lonely.

So it isn't about going through the holidays hoping someone else is going to bail you out, but being empowered to make decisions in advance and to have a plan for what you want the holidays to look like the second thing that people don't tell you is that your nervous system already [00:12:00] knows the holiday schedule, even when you're trying not to think about it. Your nervous system and your body often can remember times of year, can be triggered by sight, smell, sound, colors, touch, taste, all of these things, and can leave you feeling blindsided or confused.

Like, why do I feel why am I feeling sad? Why am I feeling a certain way? And even though consciously you might not be thinking about something or you might be trying to avoid thinking about something, your body, your nervous system, all of that remembers and has very close associations of the holidays happening with your person.

And this is often why so many things around the holidays can feel very triggering, can feel like they're blindsiding [00:13:00] you, can feel like they're a cruel reminder of what you don't have anymore. Because every time you're, you're seeing that thing or you're being aware of what that is, your mind has an association of you and your person together.

And so it can feel disorienting and really hard to feel like you're seeing that, you're experiencing it, and you're used to experiencing it one way, and now all of a sudden everything has changed. Everything about the holidays has changed. And so even though it may feel a little counterintuitive to think about the holidays, to come up with a plan for the holidays, to think about that earlier on than maybe what you want to think about it, it actually is more helpful to do that than it is to try to avoid and distract and, and dodge.

Like, I I thought about that movie The Matrix, right? [00:14:00] And there's that scene of Neo, like, dodging all the bullets, and it's like, oh, Christmas carols. Oh, it's Christmas lights. Oh, it's songs on the radio. Oh, it's seeing the Christmas trees in the grocery store. Like, it's everywhere you go. Can't escape it.

Can't escape it. And so even though it's hard and you may feel helpless, and you may feel under-qualified, and you might feel like there's nothing I can do. I'm just gonna ... I'm just, as, as one of my clients told me, "I'm just praying that I can wake up tomorrow and it'll be January 15th." Like, I can just get through all the holidays, all the birthdays, all the big milestones, and just be at the middle of January and all that holiday stuff is behind me.

It's okay to feel that way. It's okay to wish that you didn't have to go through something painful and hard. And also, the reality is that I would much rather you experience going through the holidays with a plan that you feel [00:15:00] at peace about, rather than feeling like you have no autonomy, you have no ability, you have no voice.

You're just going to be smacked around by all these triggers, and waves of grief, and what everyone else wants to do. And that just feels very disempowering. It feels can feel very hopeless, and I don't want you to walk through the holidays going through that. All right, the third thing that most people won't tell you is that the second and third holiday season can sometimes actually feel harder than the first. And this is where people love to get into the great debate over whether the second year is harder than the first year. But a lot of times, the first year, you're expecting the holidays to be hard.

You're expecting- You're in shock, and so maybe everything's kind of a blur or a haze, and you don't really remember it very clearly, or you just through survival mode just kind of got through them. [00:16:00] And so you're anticipating that the second year, the third year, that those will all feel easier.

Those'll feel more like normal because you've already gone through the first. You've already gone through the worst. But what I see happen so many times is people really get blindsided. I feel like I'm saying blindsided a lot. They get blindsided because they expected the second set of holidays to feel easier, and they didn't.

And it felt more like the gravity of the- their reality was sinking in, of like, oh, this is not a bad dream. This is really happening to me. This is really real. I'm really having to face the holidays without my person. I wasn't expecting it to be this hard. It also can be hard because family and friends stop really reaching out as much as maybe they did the first year, or they assume that, like, you're fine now.

You're better now. You're [00:17:00] over grief now. Like, you know, it's been over a year. It's been two years or three years. You should kind of like be over that now, right? As if grief was the flu, and you got sick for a while, and you weren't good, but now you're better, and you're doing good, and so we can, like, go back to the way we've always done things, right?

They don't always anticipate that the second year, third year, fourth year, fifth year might actually still be hard or difficult or challenging. The thing about grief is n- healing through grief, coming out the other side of deep grief, is not that these painful associations with our past memories get put on a shelf, and we walk away from them, and we forget about them, and now we're only focused on the future.

It's that the emotion, the experience that occurs when that memory comes back up, when that association comes back up, is very different. [00:18:00] So it's not that you're gonna get to a place and around the holidays where you don't ever think about your person, and you're like, "Oh, well, that was my life, then this is my life now."

Like, no. Of course you're gonna think about your person, especially for many of my clients who are married 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, 50 years, 50-plus years. 60 years. Crazy. Amazing That many years of holidays together and within a year or two, all of a sudden you should just be fine and not be sad and, and those shouldn't have as much weight as the ones that are coming up?

Of course not. Of course that's not the way that we think about that. And over time, the more Christmases you have, the more holiday experiences you have, the more new associations you make, the more that you change the way you're recalling some of those memories, what you do when you recall those memories, the emotions you feel when you're recalling those memories, all [00:19:00] of those things are things that you can start to influence and you can start to process differently so that the deep, stabbing, overwhelming pain of the first year or two isn't the same as what you experience more so in the future

Okay, so let's recap the three things that no one tells you. Number one, no one is coming to rescue your holidays. Number two, your nervous system already knows the holiday schedule and grief triggers. And number three, the second and third holiday seasons can actually feel harder than the first. So if any of this has resonated with you, if you would like a plan and support and guidance through this holiday season, through the end of January of 2027, and even looking into the future of 2027, something that feels bleak and dark and hazy.

If you want that guidance [00:20:00] and support, I would love for you to join us inside of Brave Through the Holidays. We kick off on Wednesday, October 21st, and the doors will stay open until midnight on Sunday, October 25th. We meet for an hour once a week. We have worksheets, we have tools, we have a process I'm gonna walk you through to help you learn how to navigate the holidays in a way that feels easier, lighter, and more structured, rather than frantic and frenzied and overwhelming.

So I asked a couple of... I'm just gonna pull up their comments. I asked a couple of our members why they joined Brave Through the Holidays. Like, what was it they wanted to get out of Brave Through the Holidays? So I'm just gonna read a few of these comments to you. One person said, "I don't wanna... I joined to not feel a sense of dread or anxiety about the upcoming holidays that come along with all the memories."[00:21:00]

Yes. "To have a plan for the unexpected and unknown that might come up. Those things that didn't use to throw me for a loop or send me into a downward spiral, but tend to now. To feel more normal and to be part of the happiness that others are enjoying. Another one of our members said, "This is the group that I found Brave Widow through originally." It's how she found me. "I was a pretty hot mess at the time, and it was a God moment miracle of even finding it. But it is through Brave Widow that I'm learning to pursue hope and healing in my life. It isn't always easy, but it does bring peace.

You are in the right place." I couldn't have said it any better. That's amazing. So thank you, guys for posting those things and sharing that, and just being able to bring hope, bring empowerment, bring peace to a time that can feel scary, overwhelming, heavy, [00:22:00] and hard. So I would love for you to join us in Brave Through the Holidays. We're gonna meet starting on Wednesday, October 21st, starting at 1:00 PM Central, and meet pretty much every week on Wednesday at that same time. And you'll have access to all the replays, to our private group chat and community through the end of January. So you have plenty of time to go through everything that we've done together to get coaching, to get feedback, to get guidance, to get support, to be in a community with other people who are also navigating this difficult time of going through the holidays.

So if you would like to join us, you can learn more at bravewidow.com/holidays, or click the link in the show notes of wherever you are watching or listening to this regardless of what you decide to do, I really encourage you to come up with your plan for the holidays. Don't avoid [00:23:00] it. Don't procrastinate. Don't try to just shove it all down, but sit down and come up with your plan of what you wanna do and how you wanna do it and who all needs to be communicated with so that you feel like you have autonomy and you're able to make decisions in advance before all the big emotions and overwhelm of the holidays come up. All right, I'll see you inside

Speaker 13: Hey, thanks for spending this time with me today. If you're listening and thinking, "I don't wanna do this widow thing by myself," I'd love to invite you into the free Brave Widow community. It's a private, faith-based space where you can connect with other widows who really get it, join gentle live calls, and get resources to help you take the next small step forward.

To join us, just go to bravewidow.com/free or click the link in the show notes. You don't have to walk this road alone. I'll see you inside [00:24:00]