Coming out of Denial and the Veiled Blessing of Thanksgiving during a Pandemic
By: Dr. Denise Renye
The holidays are officially upon us. For some, this time of year is usually filled with travel and/or family gatherings. For others, they are unable or unwilling to see family and instead choose to spend the holidays with friends, chosen family, or possibly on a sojourn or solo retreat. No matter who you are, the holidays look different this year. Maybe your holiday celebration is smaller than usual, or it’s happening over Zoom. Maybe the celebration is not happening at all.
I know some people are feeling grief about the difference this year while there may be a wide array of other feelings bubbling to the surface as well. While mainstream media may portray holidays to be joyous, celebratory and a time when families join together in warmth and closeness, you may be experiencing a wide range of feelings this week. Let’s make room for all of them. Spaciousness for our internal experiences is a key part to healing our individual and collective wounds.
A feeling that may not be easily and readily embraced during this anomaly of a holiday season is bittersweet relief. The shadow aspects of the holidays are not often acknowledged, but it seems only right to do so this unique year, more than ever. Relief because people don’t have to travel. They don’t have to see that family member who is loud and intrusive, or feels entitled to dominate with political views. They don’t have to hide parts of themselves into order to fit into a system they may have outgrown.
Many people have historically had to hide away or attempt to cut off parts of themselves in order to fit in and appear like one of the bunch. They have hidden behind alcoholic drinks, in bottomless bowls of sugary carbs, vomiting or vaping in the bathroom, or finding another way to twist their psyches into a pretzel to conform for familial acceptance so that the holiday can be exclaimed as “successful” from an outside in perspective. This can be especially painful for a person who isn’t out about sexual orientation, gender identity, religious views, or spiritual practices.
What can happen in families is a lack of acceptance for who a person is. Back when I lived in Philly, I worked at a refuge for LGBTQIA+ youth. “The Attic” was a place youth could go when they didn’t have anywhere else to call home. Each week we held “family dinners” and every year we put together holiday meals. When I think of “The Attic,” I’m reminded that finding a safe space – even if it’s in your room while on the phone with a trusted friend – can be life-saving.
What if this is the year people can decondition their associations with what they are “supposed to do” or how they’re “supposed to be?” And instead they’re able to get real about what they really want? Like maybe they don’t want to over/undereat to fit in or eat turkey or even celebrate Thanksgiving at all. Perhaps this year is a year to come out of denial of who we really are and what we really want to create in this one lifetime.
I bring that up because if we as a nation can look at the origins of Thanksgiving in particular, we start to come out of collective denial. Individually, the more we come out of denial about one aspect of our lives (like a holiday), the more that happens in other aspects as well. Coming out of denial means we can authentically say “yes to this” but “no to that.” That’s huge when it comes to integrating your whole self.
Some of you may know this, but for those of you who don’t, the story we’ve been told about Thanksgiving since elementary school involving the Pilgrims, Plymouth Rock, and native Wampanoag people all sitting together to eat in harmony is a myth. Truly, Thanksgiving as we know it didn’t start until 1863 when President Abraham Lincoln declared it a national holiday in an attempt to reconcile people during the Civil War.
Eryn Dion wrote an extensive article on the true history of Thanksgiving for USA Today. I won’t quote the entire article, which I highly recommend you read, but I will provide a summary. It’s important to have context for the Pilgrims’ arrival. First of all, the Pilgrims were a minority group on the Mayflower and they weren’t coming to the U.S. for religious freedom – they went to Holland for that. However, the Pilgrims found it hard to make a living in Holland and were concerned about the influence of Dutch culture on their children so they set their sights west, hoping to fare better financially in the American colonies.
And instead of disembarking on vast, untouched land, the Pilgrims entered into territory filled with indigenous people who were wary and distrustful of Europeans – with good reason. Native Americans already had numerous interactions with Europeans for more than a century. Many of those interactions involved raids, bloodshed, capture, rape, slavery and other forms of violence and abuse.
By 1620, the Wampanoag near what is now called Plymouth Rock were in a difficult position – their numbers had dwindled due to illness and they were fighting with their neighbors. Instead of driving off the Pilgrims, the Wampanoag made a tactical decision to strive for diplomacy, which would also give them access to guns, knives, and armor to intimidate enemies threatening their territory. Plus, they would have a firsthand source for coveted European goods.
Tisquantum, who is more commonly known as Squanto, acted a broker to work out a kind of alliance with the Wampanoag, who believed the number of Pilgrims would remain small. Dion writes:
“Several months later, after receiving help and protection from the Wampanoag, the Pilgrims held the harvest feast that would form the crux of the Thanksgiving myth centuries later. Wampanoag members were not even invited, but they showed up. A group of about 100 men and Massasoit came not to celebrate but, according to [Steven Peters, a spokesman for the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe], mostly as a reminder that they controlled the land the Pilgrims were staying on and they vastly outnumbered their new European neighbors.
“This is where the traditional telling of the Pilgrims and the Thanksgiving myth ends, with the two groups sitting down to dinner, celebrating their partnership and, for the Pilgrims, celebrating their successful colony and toasting to a future to come. But in the same way the real story stretches back before the arrival of the Pilgrims, it stretches forward.”
The story stretches forward to more colonization, more bloodshed, and more denial. But we don’t have to keep perpetuating denial. In fact, we cannot keep perpetuating it. Denial is killing people. It is killing people internally and psychically/emotionally and it is killing people physically. Denial and entitlement killed indigenous people then and it continues to kill BIPOC now. We can acknowledge the past and change the present, and thus the future. I think that’s what the pandemic, and this year, truly, are offering us. A chance to confront what’s real, what’s in our faces. What we’ve been shoving into a closet or sweeping under the rug. We don’t have to do that anymore. We can live with integrity, authenticity, and wholeness.
The holidays could be a freeing time to integrate your whole self and to become clear on what works for you and what doesn’t. Instead of being a stressful period, it could be a deconditioning one. Express gratitude to yourself this year for making choices that honor the being that you are. If you want support with the process of integration, or a safe person to talk to, reach out to me. I’m here.
For ideas and ways to stay connected to and learn more about the unconscious through the body, feel free to stay connected.
Reference
Dion, Eryn. “After a summer of racial reckoning, is America ready to learn the truth about Thanksgiving?” USA Today. November 23, 2020. https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/nation/2020/11/23/plymouth-400-mayflower-first-thanksgiving-pilgrims-wampanoag-massasoit/6343621002/