If you're estranged from family, or the parent of adult children, the holidays can feel complicated.

You might feel lonely, regretful, or hollow after years or decades of a busy holiday season giving way to silence.

It can seem like everyone around you is making plans with big, extended families, and you're the only one on your own, cut off from the people around you.

Maybe the distance was your choice, because you stepped away from toxic family members or people who weren't healthy for you to be around. Or maybe you keep wondering what you did wrong. Are you unloved? Did you do something to deserve being left behind by the people closest to you?

There are practical ways to find some solace, and even joy, in creating new memories, new traditions, and new experiences. Being alone at the holidays doesn't have to feel lonely and depressing, but it can take some work to get there.

All too often, we push our feelings aside because they're too confronting. Sometimes it's hard to process our most vulnerable emotions, even privately. But pushing them down doesn't work. They never go away. They just stack up, collecting new feelings and experiences along the way.

It's easy to watch the holiday movie channel and feel like you're the only person in the world going through this, but you're not. Many people spend the holidays alone, and feelings of loneliness or grief are completely normal.

Sitting briefly with those feelings, naming them, and letting them be felt and expressed, even if only to yourself, can help enormously.

In IEMT (Integral Eye Movement Technique), we explore feelings in a non-confrontational way. Instead of asking why you feel this way, we ask how you learned to feel this way about this thing. When is the very first time you remember feeling it?

Complicated feelings around the holidays rarely began when your family life became complicated. They often started much earlier, creating a kind of muscle memory that pulls your mind back to uncertainty, sadness, or wanting. That unconscious muscle memory forms an invisible string that's easily tugged in everyday life. These old patterns can keep us from moving forward, because even when our current reality is peaceful and happy, part of us still feels unsettled.

Processing these emotions doesn't mean going from Scrooge to Santa Claus overnight. But it might give you relief from the past, so you can move into the future as who you are now, not who you were then.