I spend a significant part of December helping people prepare for Christmas. No, I don’t mean I lend them a hand with boiling the pudding or sorting out the Christmas presents for the children but I help them prepare for the emotional impact of the holiday.
We’re constantly bombarded with images from movies, songs and advertising of what a family Christmas should look like but for many people that bears little resemblance to the reality they experience with their own family. For those people Christmas is a time of stress, disappointment and conflict.
So, in order to help you through this holiday season, I have gathered a few Christmas survival tips for you:
1) Adjust your expectations
Consciously correct your expectations of what Christmas is going to be like based on how it has been in previous years rather than what you would like it to be. The bigger the discrepancy between your (unrealistic) expectations and how reality is the more upset and disappointed you are going to be. Often this involves lowering our expectations. If it then turns out better than you expected you can consider that a bonus.
2) Limit your exposure
If anything is toxic we want to reduce our contact with it. Remember the movie “The Hunt for Red October” where they send navy crew in to fix the broken nuclear reactor in the submarine? They send the crew in with very strict time limits in order to lessen their radiation exposure.
Use the same principle with your family: if you know from past experience that things tend to fall apart or get ugly after 3 or 4 hours make a commitment to yourself to only stay that amount of time. Beforehand think of a way to make a graceful exit.
3) Limit your alcohol intake
Tricky family dynamics mixed with alcohol is generally a bad combination. It is tempting to have a few drinks in order to manage your anxiety/ anger/ disappointment/ sadness/ frustration/ latent hatred or whatever negative emotion your family brings out in you but alcohol has a tendency to increase family conflict rather than decrease it.
Much better to have a few drinks as a reward after you’ve made it through Christmas without being sucked into the old dysfunctional family patterns.
4) Use the de-arousal strategies you’ve been taught in therapy
Now is a good time to challenge negative or catastrophic thoughts, apply the slow breathing technique or use the mindfulness and acceptance strategies that you have been taught in therapy. The less reactive you are the less likely it is that a conflict will escalate.
5) Put it in perspective
The mind can be extremely unhelpful at times and will catastrophrise and ruminate about hurtful events and you end up with an emotional response that it completely out of proportion to the trigger event. Remind yourself that this is just one or two days out of the year and that there is life on the other side of Christmas.
6) Look at it as an opportunity to practice kindness and compassion
Most people, if given the opportunity, would be prefer to be loving, relaxed and fun to be around rather than angry, passive-aggressive, up-tight, stressed and depressed. Thus people often treat us poorly due to their own trauma or unresolved psychological difficulties. Once we can see that clearly it becomes a lot easier to show kindness and compassion.
7) Get away from the table and do an activity together
As a wise friend of mine always says about dealing with dysfunctional families (he’s an expert after dealing with his own for years): “get out of the lounge room”. I agree that it can often take a lot of pressure off if you go and do something together. So go for a swim or a walk, play back yard cricket, or take everyone to the park.
If all these survival tips fail and your Christmas end up being exactly as horrible and traumatic as you feared it would be, at least observe the whole catastrophe closely. It’ll give us a lot to talk about in therapy.
‘Tis the season to be jolly…..but if you’re not that’s okay too. That doesn’t mean you’re a freak.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all of you 🙂