Your family is nuts and you still visit during the holidays?
Why do we visit people we dislike visiting? Sense of duty and guilt, usually.
The holiday season for family get-togethers is here, and numerous clients reach out to their therapists for an inoculation of protection meant to shield them from the verbal and emotional land mines they will encounter when stepping into their extended family war zones. A therapist can assure a client that if it isn’t safe, for whatever reason, it is perfectly OK not to go at all, but few back away and insist on running into the burning house anyway.
“I will never hear the end of it if I don’t go,” they insist. “And I can’t see the relatives I like without seeing the ones I don’t.”
Family gatherings are so hard on many of us because family dynamics almost always include at least one person who will meddle, offer unsolicited observations about other’s lives, and say things that almost no one else beyond the family environment would ever have the nerve to say. This will happen either behind your back, while you’re standing there, or perhaps at the dinner table during holiday events. Back when my biological family was still speaking to one another, I vividly remember my oldest sister telling me the way I wore my makeup made me look like a geisha.
“Is that I bad thing?” I asked.
She also guessed my recent weight loss was due to AIDS, cancer, or anorexia. “Which is it, Becky?”
“Are there any other choices?” I asked. “Would you pass the custard pie, please?”
My mother would chime in. “Becky, you need to stop dying your hair. It looks cheap. Your face looks old, and your hair looks young, and people don’t like that.”
“Thanks for your support, mom.”
In a family where negative assumptions and harsh criticism are the order of the day, no wonder most people drink more alcohol than normal and take weeks to recover from overexposure to toxic people. For years, I thought my family’s ways were funny, and I always wanted to be together with the whole family, under the delusion that we were a close and happy family. and to feel and celebrate the holiday spirit together. Still, as I got healthier, I couldn’t tolerate the negativity anymore. I grew up in a family with no boundaries, and part of my new life journey was to create healthy ones…
