We’re heading into the holiday season, which typically means more time around your family. If you’re lucky, that’s good news. But if you’re like a lot of us, holiday family time means even more anger, frustration, anxiety, and generally feeling like shit about yourself than 2020 has already gifted you with so far.
So, if you have a challenging family (and if you can’t use Fauci as an excuse to avoid them altogether), I have some advice for how to survive (and maybe even enjoy!?) your family this holiday season.
See your family members as they are, not as you think they should be.
I’ve found that, for my clients (and for myself!), much of the pain of being with family comes from the anxiety that comes before the interaction. You might spend weeks leading up to a get-together, dreading that the old patterns you’ve always found so painful are going to reappear. You worry that Mom’s going to criticize your weight, or that Dad is going to say something condescending when you mention how much you love your new job, or that angry Uncle Larry will try to turn an otherwise Hallmark Christmas into a Q-Anon recruiting session...again.
The gap between the way things are and the way you think you they should be is called frustration. It comes from comparing your family to the image in your mind of what a “good” family should be. Frustration causes pain when you hope that your family members will or won’t act a certain way and then you get disappointed when, sure enough, they fail to live up to your expectations. The idea that you have of what their best self should be, is your idea of it, not theirs. Maybe pounding the table about the “Clinton News Network” (aka CNN) is how Uncle Larry finds his bliss, who knows?
So, strategy number one this holiday season is to practice letting go of how you think your family should or wish they would, or believe they could, be. Try not to judge them or make them wrong for what you see as their shortcomings. Instead, see if you can love them—or at least allow them—exactly as they are. We all have character flaws, failures and limitations, and we do the best we can with what we have. Your family is no different.
When you manage to quiet this feeling of wishing for things to be different, see if the pain of frustration lifts. Because the truth of the matter is you can’t change anybody but yourself. If you remain deeply triggered and affected by other people, it’s a sign that you have some work to do on yourself. Instead of complaining about your family, focus on finding acceptance for your past, gratitude for your present, and excitement for your future. The better you feel about yourself and your life, the harder it will be for other people to affect you.
Take nothing personally.
When a family member angers or upsets you, it’s because you are taking their behavior personally. But, when you consider why your family members are the way they are, you will see that it actually has nothing to do with you. Hurt people hurt. People who judge others, judge themselves. Anybody who makes someone else feel small, doesn’t know a better way to feel bigger. Practice having empathy and understanding for why they are the way they are.
Maybe Mom criticizes your body because she comes from a time and culture where a woman’s prospects in life were largely determined by how she was perceived by men. Maybe Dad judges your work because it reminds him that his children have careers they’re passionate about, but he always had to take what he could get. Maybe they’re jealous of you. Maybe they’re scared for you. Maybe they’re full of regret. Maybe the reason they seem selfish is because their rough childhood taught them that “you have to take care of yourself because no one else is going to.”
Whatever the reason, when you stop to look at your family with empathy and compassion, you will see that their hurtful actions are a manifestation of their own feelings of insignificance, not yours. Their capacity to make you feel loved and “enough”, depends on their own self-love and ability to feel enough themselves. We cannot give what we do not have. It’s your choice whether to respond with anger (possibly aggravating their deep fears of insignificance even further), or with the acceptance and love they probably never received.
Set boundaries.
Accepting and having compassion for someone else’s limitations is no replacement for protecting your own sense of self-worth. So, strategy number three for having a happy family holiday is to set boundaries.
Boundaries are the lines you draw between the potentially hurtful behavior of others and your own comfort zone. Put a more positive way, boundaries are the healthy balance between love for others and love for yourself.
Setting a boundary can mean many things. It can mean establishing physical boundaries around your body or personal space; emotional boundaries around how you feel and what parts of yourself you share; resource boundaries around your time, money and energy; and material boundaries around your things and how they are used and treated. So, set boundaries with your loved ones in a way that allows you to interact with them and still feel safe and strong.
However, it’s not enough to just set boundaries; you also have to keep them. If you’re not used to setting—and sticking to—boundaries with your family, it can be scary to start. Especially if you are infamously a “people pleaser”, you may have no experience with this at all.
But just because something is uncomfortable or scary doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. In fact, it usually means that’s exactly where your most important personal growth lies. Learning to stand up for yourself, asking for what you need, and expressing what you don’t like in a respectful way, is a powerful act of self-love and a crucial skill for any healthy relationship.
It’s important to note that setting a boundary with your family doesn’t mean starting a fight. If yours is an especially troubled family, you might even feel that you have to rev yourself up with anger to protect yourself. But in that case a fight is almost guaranteed, which—uh oh, plot twist!—might turn you into the difficult family member!
To help defuse your defensive or aggressive energy, it’s helpful to set a positive intention for your time with your family. When you brace yourself in anticipation of the bad, things are pretty much sure to fall apart. Instead, try to go in positive and intentional, giving what you want to get. Do you want to feel loved and accepted? Great, set the intention to go in loving and accepting of your family.
Focus on what’s good about your family members.
What’s bad will always exist, but so will what’s good. The things on which we choose to focus will determine how we feel. Training yourself to find what’s good in any person or situation is the secret to happiness.
Your dad may seem selfish and unreliable, but he probably has some wonderful qualities as well. Maybe he’s the life of the party, always full of incredible stories. Those stories might be one way you get laughter and joy and lightness in your life. Similarly, maybe his selfishness, looked at another way, is a fierce independence, a trait that you share and learned from him. There are a lot of ways to view the same behavior.
Your dad may not be the person you turn to for comfort (you have friends you can depend on for that), but he might be the one you call when you just need a laugh. He might be a role model or a sounding board when you need someone to encourage you to stand up for yourself.
You don’t need one person to be everything to you. Focus on what’s good about each of your family members, and seek out other relationships to help fulfill your other needs.
Remember that one day your loved ones aren’t going to be around. When they’re gone, how are you going to wish you interacted with them during the time you had? Are you going to wish you hadn’t picked that fight or wasted your holidays debating issues you already knew were a waste of breath and energy? Make the most of your time together by accepting them as they are, having empathy for their limitations, exercising boundaries that help mitigate their shortcomings, and enjoying what’s good about them and the time you have together.
Ultimately, you are an adult with the power to choose what you do with your life and whom you spend your time with. You absolutely have the right to avoid the things and people that make you feel bad—yes, including angry Uncle Larry. But you also have the opportunity to choose to approach things differently; to try to release old triggers, change old patterns and remove any internal barriers that block you from giving love freely. The antagonist in your life is also the angel, put at the dinner table to help you grow. Take the lesson, practice the acceptance, find the empathy, give the love, and grow beyond your previous limitations. Maybe, just maybe, that’s the real gift your family has for you this holiday season.
Much Love,
