BW 180: First Christmas Without Your Husband? 3-Step Widow Survival Plan To Protect Your Heart

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MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

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If this is your first Christmas without your husband and you already feel that knot in your stomach… this episode is for you.

In Episode 180 of The Brave Widow Show, Emily shares a gentle 3-step survival plan to help you get through what is often one of the hardest days in a widow’s first year: the first Christmas without him.

You’ll learn how to:

•  Protect your heart instead of powering through and pretending to be “okay”
•  Plan your exit so you can leave events without guilt, panic, or drama
•  Choose one meaningful moment to honor your person without trying to make the whole holiday “magical”

We talk about:

•  Why the holidays can feel like emotional whiplash when you’re newly widowed
•  Guilt, “wearing a mask,” and feeling pressure to make it special for everyone else
•  How to simplify traditions, set boundaries, and bow out gracefully
•  Practical ideas for honoring your spouse in a way that doesn’t shatter you

If you’re facing your first Christmas as a widow and feel fragile, numb, or like you might break at any moment… you are not alone, and there is a gentler way through this season.

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

TRANSCRIPT:

[00:00:00]

Emily: If this is your first Christmas without your husband and you already feel that knot in your stomach. This episode is for you. Hey, and welcome to episode number 180 of The Brave Widow Show. Today I'm gonna talk about the first Christmas without your husband and a three step survival plan. That will help you get through Christmas.

But before I dive into today's episode, we have so much going on that I wanna make sure that you are aware of. So by the time you're listening to this episode, we will have already had the widow winter solstice. And while I'm recording this episode in advance, I have to imagine it was. Amazing like it has been every other year.

And also we are planning to announce for the very first time a Brave Widow Academy Scholarship. The Brave Widow Academy Scholarship is designed to [00:01:00] help widows who want to go through the Brave Widow Academy and receive some extra one-on-one coaching guidance and support, but maybe financially they're not able to invest or enroll in that.

This gives them the opportunity to be able to participate, and so our scholarship applications are going to be open through January 2nd so that people have a couple of weeks to get those in

The next week we'll select our recipient and the overall value of this scholarship is $5,000, which is really exciting. Also, if you refer or recommend someone to fill out a scholarship application and they list your name on the application, if they are ultimately awarded a scholarship, then you as the person who referred them, will also receive a scholarship. Or if you're already in the academy, we'll extend your time in the alumni group for that amount of time [00:02:00] at.

No additional cost. The scholarship will fund that. So the more people that you refer, fill out a scholarship application, the more likely your odds are that you'll be chosen as someone who referred the scholarship recipients. So again, you have until January 2nd to complete that. If you go to brave widow.com, it's right there on the homepage.

I try to make it as easy as possible. Our next Brave Widow Academy Group is starting on Thursday, January 22nd.

And we will meet from noon to 2:00 PM Central Time every week for six months, and I'm excited to get this extra group going. Also, I have just a couple spots left for Grief Recovery Method for those of you who want to go through that. We're meeting on Tuesdays from one to 3:00 PM Central Time, and we will pick up on January the sixth.

Grief Recovery Method is an evidence-based program that I am [00:03:00] certified to facilitate, and it's the number one thing that most of my clients say really helped jumpstart for them their ability to be able to get unstuck. Start moving forward beyond grief. So if you wanna learn more about that, just go to brave widow.com and up at the top there's a join Grief Recovery method tab.

Alright, let's dive in to today's episode.

My first Christmas without Nathan was in 2021, so this'll be our fourth one, and it was just five months after he had died. And I remember debating whether or not to put up the tree, whether or not to decorate and. We had just done it for so many years, it felt wrong not to do it, and

my daughter was really the one who would. Help decorate. And the boys were in and out, mostly just out of the way. And so I remember that she and I were [00:04:00] decorating and it just felt like I was in shell shock, like I was going through the motions, but there wasn't really any joy or happiness. I just felt numb.

Kind of like floating around and, ultimately just feeling like a piece. I felt like a piece of glass. I remember at that point in my journey where if someone were to touch me or if something too difficult came up, I might just shatter. Like I felt so fragile and empty during that time and it was really hard.

And I remember taking our first. Family Christmas photo together without 'em and that was weird. And so

I had no idea what to expect for Christmas and the holidays and if I was doing things right, and if there was something differently that I could do. So what I wanna share with you today. Are just some things that I wish I would've known. [00:05:00] Some things that I think may help you as you move through your first Christmas and as you start looking over the horizon to the new year.

Okay.

The holidays and Christmas are really difficult because it's not just a moment where you're feeling sad and you're with your family and you have that gaping hole that's missing, but the holidays are loud. The holidays bring up lots of triggers and memories, and this is one of the things that we are actually gonna be coaching on today.

In our brave through the holidays group is on triggers and how sights and sounds and smells, and places that so closely associate our person with that memory can bring up just a flood of emotions because we've had so many of those holidays together. Our mind is reaching for our person who isn't [00:06:00] there.

And then we get flooded with these waves of grief and sadness and how it shouldn't be this way. And every song is about joy and happiness and loving our person, and it just reminds us of what we don't have. We can start to feel guilty or like we need to wear a mask and we need to pretend that everything is fine and not ruin the holidays for other people and to show up for other people and to still make it as magical and wonderful as we always have.

And ultimately, that's not the way that we have to handle it or to walk through the holidays. So today isn't about giving you a pep talk. It's not about telling you to put on that game face and get out there and have a good holiday. It's a three step survival plan for what? For many widows is what is often one of the hardest days in their first year.

Okay, so I'm gonna give you three simple steps. The first one is to protect your [00:07:00] heart. The second is to plan your exit, and the third is to choose one meaningful moment. Not to make Christmas perfect to make it survivable.

When we're newly widowed, we often feel like surviving the holidays or getting through the holidays is about brute force. It's about being tough and strong and pushing through and getting through it anyway, and. Raw, this energy, right? And the reality is what I coach widows to do is to actually do less and not more.

And recognize that what you choose to do this Christmas doesn't necessarily mean that's what you're going to choose to do every Christmas. Going forward this year, this holiday season, I just need to look a little bit different. So while our goal isn't to try to avoid all the triggers and try to hide away from the world, our goal is to allow this [00:08:00] to be a simple and gentle day that we can navigate, especially when it's the first year or two that we're navigating this holiday season.

As we think about protecting your heart, we wanna lower the expectations that you have for yourself. Give yourself lots of grace, lots of moments to rest. Even though physically it may feel like you're not doing a lot when you are going through a traumatic experience. When you are wrestling with processing things mentally and emotionally, your brain is flooding your body with chemicals, with emotion, with wrestling, with these big waves of how your life isn't how you thought it would be and how.

Much you miss your person, and so of course you're physically exhausted because physically a lot is happening in your body. And so instead of trying to push through and power through and do more and more, we want to [00:09:00] simplify and to do less, and to be able to honor the love that we had for our person in a way that doesn't send us to the brink.

In a way that allows us to gently get through the day, survive this holiday season, and start to figure out how we're gonna get our feet underneath us and be able to step forward. So Brave through the holidays was a pop-up group that I ran as a Black Friday deal. We have about 15 or so people that are part of that group and we've done some, a lot of deep dives around things like planning what traditions you're gonna keep and not keep identifying things that trigger you and how you wanna handle those.

Scripts and boundaries with family and friends, and so I can't condense it all down into this one segment of protecting your heart. But ultimately those are the things [00:10:00] that I would work on is look at as your, as an attempt to protect your heart and to keep things simple. Looking at things that you've done in the past, traditionally.

Looking at things that maybe earlier this year you've committed to already and saying, of these things that we normally do or that I'm planning to do, what do I want to gracefully bow out of? I just don't wanna do that anymore. Or it feels like it's too much. What are things I still want to do, but I wanna simplify them?

So maybe I wanna go to the big family dinner, but I only wanna stay for 30 minutes, maybe an hour. And what are things new or different that I wanna incorporate that maybe I've never done? Maybe that's taking a trip. Maybe it is giving gifts to a toy drive instead of trying to find gifts for everyone in the family.

But it's just something completely different. Spending some time thinking about how you would like the holiday to [00:11:00] go. What. How you would like to handle those things differently, who you need to communicate to and knowing what your backup plan will be are all really helpful things as you think about.

The day. What I tell widows is that, there's no right answer on what you wanna do for Christmas. If you wanna stay home alone, you can. If you wanna go and do all the things you can. If you wanna take a trip and change up your tradition, you can. It. There's no. Wrong answer really on what you wanna do for the holiday.

The biggest struggle that I see widows face is when they've avoided thinking about the holiday. They have put it off, they don't wanna think about it, and then they wake up on that day and they just spiral all day long. They think about how they weren't invited to a certain event or how they told people they weren't gonna show up and now they wish they had, or they committed to [00:12:00] something they wish they didn't and they don't know how to get out of it.

And it's Christmas day. So the people they can reach out to for help is very limited and they're just spiraling and my heart goes out to those individuals, and so my goal is not to tell you what you should and shouldn't do. You can decide that my goal is to help you love why you are deciding to do that.

To make a decision from a place that feels empowered, and a place that feels that you are making a decision. Versus from a place of I'm a victim, I have no choice. I have to do this. People are gonna be upset if I don't do this. Or realize on the big day that you don't have the energy you thought you would, and so now you're spiraling with guilt and shame and all of the things.

My goal is just to help you have a plan for how you want that day to go and to have a backup plan. If for some reason it's just harder than you thought, or it [00:13:00] takes more energy than you thought, which is totally fine. So step number one, protect your heart. Step number two is to plan your exit. One of the fastest ways to feel safer in attending events or going places is to know that you can leave and.

If you're an introvert or someone who doesn't like going to a lot of places, or it just takes a lot of energy to go outta places, you might already be a pro at planning your exit, knowing that you have to get outta there, right? Oh, I gotta let my dog out. Oh, I have some other things I need to do. But it is helpful whether or not you're accustomed to doing that is to have a way out. And maybe it is just setting the expectation in advance of Hey, I would like to go, but I'm only gonna be able to stay 30 minutes. And then you can change your mind if you wanna stay longer or just by saying, Hey, I just don't know that I can fully commit, so if it gets too hard or heavy, I need to leave.

But doing things like. Driving [00:14:00] yourself places so that you have your own ride to get out. Knowing that you might just wanna go for a little bit, and if that's all you can handle, that's perfectly fine. Setting a time boundary for how long you want to be there, and then identifying once you get back home, how do you wanna decompress?

Do you wanna take a shower? Do you wanna read a book? Do you wanna sit with a blanket on the couch? Just again, just having an idea, having a plan for your exit is having a plan to be able to breathe. Because when our emotions are really high, when we're triggered, when we're really upset and we start to spiral, that is not the time that we can think clearly or come up with a plan or decide what we wanna do.

But if we will plan these things in advance the best that we can, then we can default back to our list. This something similar just came up in one of our academy calls this week when, one of my clients was saying, I tell myself I [00:15:00] don't have anyone I can call when I'm feeling upset or emotional, and I know that isn't true.

I know I do have people, a couple people I can call. I just can't ever remember who they are when I'm in that moment. And so one of the things that we talked about was on her phone, on the front screen. To save that contact as a favorite or to save them like on the front screen of her phone, in the phone app, so that when emotions are high, she just has to go there.

That's all she has to remember. And then she sees the names of the people that she might choose to call, and then she can call them. So does that mean she's not gonna ever spiral again? No. Does it mean that she won't need to reach out to people? No. But now she has a plan when that happens, what to do to be able to come down out of the emotional spiral and to reach out to people for support?

And that's what we want to do today. All right. [00:16:00] So we talked about protecting your heart, planning your exit, and then. Number three is picking one meaningful moment. So many times we feel that we have to make Christmas magical, and maybe that's if you were the person that created the magic at home, or you did it for the kids, or you were the person who got everyone in the extended family stockings or whatever it is.

And so Christmas is like this. Big, huge event, and we just feel the pressure that we have to do all of the things instead of trying to do everything, my suggestion is to pick one meaningful moment. And so maybe it's a moment where you light a candle and you say their name out loud and you talk about them.

Maybe you write them a letter on Christmas morning. Maybe you take a walk and you listen to a song that both of you loved. Maybe you decide to do one tradition and let the rest of them go.

Maybe you decide to serve someone else by [00:17:00] volunteering, donating, or fixing a meal. One meaningful moment is enough for the whole year and the whole holiday season.

This Christmas, my heart is with you. I'll be thinking about you. I'll be praying for you, and I hope that these three simple steps will help you in preparing your heart for Christmas and the holiday season and being able to navigate that.

When and if you're ready for more support, for more guidance, for more help with planning and navigating some of these tough days, you can always set up a consult. Call [email protected]. During the consult call, I take my time to learn more about you, about the current struggles that you're facing, and whether the academy or one-on-one coaching could be the best fit for you.

Go to brave widow.com and I would love to speak with you

this year. I wish you [00:18:00] and your family a gentle and a peaceful Christmas and New Year.

Emily: If you're tired of feeling lost, lonely, and second guessing every decision, my coaching program is meant for you. I help clients find clarity, create real connection, and build confidence up for good. Inside

the Brave Widow Academy

Emily: you'll learn real tools that you'll be able to use for a lifetime.

If you're ready for the next step, go to brave widow.com to book a consult. It's free. It's no pressure, and it can be your brave next step to healing your heart and building a life you love again. Go to brave widow.com today to book your consult.