The Holiday Blues : This is the time of good cheer, but behind the merriment can lie pain and dread for people who think it’s not OK for it ‘not to be OK.’

It happens around this time every year. Families get together, eat too much and drink too much. Most presents were opened Friday, cheering millions. But others told white lies about being happy.

For some people, the pressure to fit into a Norman Rockwell portrait of Christmas becomes more than they can handle, mental health experts say. Budgets are stretched threadbare. Nerves are frayed. Patience is about worn out.

“This is the time to act happy and be merry,” says Sandra Ackerman, a volunteer counselor at Orange County’s Family Crisis Hotline. “God forbid anybody should stand up and say, ‘Dammit, I don’t enjoy this.’ That’s just not the American Way.”

“When I think about Christmas, I remember the fear and apprehension,” says Jean, 53, recalling her father’s drunken binges and the inevitable terror that followed.

“It was a way of life, I don’t remember any happy holidays,” she says, sobbing at the memory. “I don’t like Christmas. I don’t like the celebrations. I don’t like the responsibilities.”

The Wild Night in Singapore

People suffering from holiday blues may feel forced, by tradition and guilt, to smile as a drunken relative recalls, for the umpteenth year in a row, that story about the wild night he and his Navy buddies had in Singapore.

Or they feel compelled to shrug their shoulders when their children complain that their friends got just what they wanted for Christmas, so why didn’t they?

This is the stuff of everyday common stress, experts say, but it takes on larger proportions during the holiday season. Expectations are high. Tradition is at stake. People ache to have a good time.

And that could be trouble.

According to interviews with several mental health experts in Orange County, the American style of coping with stress is to try to push aside feelings of depression, anger and frustration, especially during Christmas time.

Yet as stressful a time as Christmas can be, experts say, the suicide rate actually drops during the holiday season, and visits to counselors and psychiatrists are fewer.

At the Family Crisis Hotline, a service funded by public agencies and private donations, Ackerman says, the number of her calls has fallen about 25% since the beginning of December.

“We don’t have a lot of people in here, because it’s not OK for it ‘not to be OK’ during the holidays,” adds Lee Ann Donaldson, manager of community outreach and counseling services at St. Joseph Hospital in Orange. “But it’s back up in January. People no longer feel the pressure of being happy.”

Dr. Christine Padesky, a clinical psychologist and director of the Center for Cognitive Therapy in Newport Beach, says January and February are her busiest months, when what she calls the “extra energy” most people muster to cope with the holidays wears out.

Problems Still the Same

“It’s similar to times like earthquakes and other big changes,” she says. “People tend to do pretty well with their stress during the actual event.” It’s after the dust settles, she adds, that coping problems usually surface.

“The problems are not changing at the holidays,” Ackerman says, “and many of them are not shocking, the kind you read about in newspapers. What we have is a lot of lonely people.”

Many holiday problems arise from people overextending themselves and trying to live up to what they believe others expect of them, says Dr. Justin D. Call, chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at UC Irvine Medical Center.

“Christmas, like almost all ritual feasts, can be a big cover-up operation,” he says. “Someone has to be nice when he doesn’t feel like being nice to certain people, and that can be stressful. It also means swallowing one’s own negative feelings.”

And even when people try to suppress those feelings, the stress may show up in physical illness.

“People who have a great deal of physical and emotional stress sometimes have chronic pain syndrome,” says psychotherapist Lois Rubin, director of the Stress Control Center in Santa Ana. “They seem to almost get worse during the holidays, suffering from chronic neck pain, shoulder pain, back pain, migraines and ulcers.”

Trouble for Children

Children, the experts note, may not be able to suppress negative holiday feelings, and the outcome could be trouble sleeping, crabbiness and becoming demanding and disruptive.

Louis Stoetzer, executive director of the Adult Childrens Center in Orange, which caters to the grown children of alcoholics, says children may become “nervous wrecks” even before the holidays in anticipation of their parents’ excessive drinking.

Holidays may also pose special problems for the elderly.

“Elderly people have had so many losses oftentimes,” says Judy Friesen, counseling coordinator for Project PACE, a counseling service for the elderly at St. Joseph Hospital.

“We’re not just talking about death, but maybe they have lost their health; there are economic losses and losses of freedom to make their own choices.

“At holidays it becomes more exacerbated for seniors. They remember more of what used to be.”

SECRETS TO SURVIVAL

Mental-health experts offer these suggestions for coping with holiday stress:

Make sure you don’t expect too much of the holidays. It is unlikely that years of family problems will melt away during one holiday season.

Remember that you have choices. For example, you are not forced to visit a relative’s house--you choose to.

If you’re on a tight budget, don’t overspend, even at after-Christmas sales.

Make a list of your chores and break them down into steps. Set realistic goals. Instead of trying to do everything, choose the things that are most important to you.

Schedule some quiet, relaxing time each day. Listen to music, read a book or take a walk.

Don’t change your eating, drinking or sleeping habits. Try to avoid drinking too much caffeine, and avoid sweets. Eat foods high in protein and B vitamins.

Make your own holiday traditions.

Brighten your house or apartment. Pull back the drapes and open the windows.