Coping with Holiday Family Gatherings
Well, it’s the middle of November and the holidays are in full swing. We’ve just finished off Halloween, and now we are approaching Thanksgiving on the way to the end-of-year holidays.
Before we know it, we'll have family gathered around a table and a picturesque perfect scene where of course no one is throwing anything, and there's no yelling or screaming or cursing about the turkey or the football game or fill-in-the-blank for whatever works for your family.
This time of year, we get caught up in, you know, the pumpkin spice lattes, the pumpkin pie, and all the food, but what a lot of us deal with is the conflict around the table. Oftentimes we haven’t seen these people in a great deal of time, and this is the one time during the year when we feel obligated to sit down and just be present with a group of people that we might not like very much.
“Family sucks sometimes.”
Maybe it's the brother who treats you like a stranger, the father who acts like you don't matter, the mother who never stood up for you in the house, or it could be the sister that tormented or terrorized you when you were kids. We all have someone in our family that fits one of these categories. As one of my friends put it, “my family is crazy, I'm just the less crazy of the bunch.” As a therapist I hear it often, and my response is super succinct: Family sucks sometimes.
As the seasons change, and we start getting into the full swing of the fall season, depression, anxiety, those things skyrocket. The days get shorter and it gets colder (unless you live in Texas where it's like 90° outside right now), but we're all faced with these struggles, these things that we really don't want to face yet feel obligated to do so because it's family.
If this describes your typical holiday season, I encourage you to reach out and talk to someone that you know or find a qualified therapist to help you walk through these difficult times. We all need someone to lean on, especially during times like this.
Another thing you can do is learn coping strategies to use while you're in the middle of the events. Practice your deep breathing, learn to ground yourself, and stay away from rumination (thinking about all those things that just kind of come up and stay there and cycling through them over and over again). Distancing yourself from those thoughts is easier said than done, but it's something you can learn to do so that during these more intense stressful times, you can focus on that instead of focusing on the negative. Making small changes like these can help you begin to enjoy the holidays for what they are, a time for loved ones to come together.