Things are not always fa-la-la at family gatherings. All that cozy togetherness gives space for old issues to appear in new forms.
In a time when politics are polarized, it's quite possible rancor will get served along with the turkey. But there are things you can do to prevent this.
Hone conflict avoidance skills. Start with a resolution to be nimble at conflict avoidance. You can’t stop others from being pissants, but you can decline to be baited. Avoidance is a great conflict style for situations where you don't have any real goal other than staying out of difficulty.
You probably already know which people and circumstances can handle candor and which cannot. Prepare lines for conflict harmonizing and avoiding that you can easily pull out when needed. To that annoying relative who can’t resist a verbal poke about politics or some other dicey topic, come back with responses that re-direct or de-escalate.
You don’t have to be witty or cute to succeed with a conflict avoiding response. You just need to be firm in redirecting the topic. You’re more likely to pull it off if you’ve given forethought to the actual wording of your redirect.
Shore up your personal boundaries. Give some thought, before the holiday gatherings begin, to the concept of healthy boundary management. Boundary management is about recognizing that you and I are different people, and we have differing ways of experiencing things. We can challenge each other's ideas, but not each other's experience of something. We each take responsibility for our own life and choices. We each respect the other person's experience, even if it is very different than our own. When we have good personal boundaries, we have no strong drive to change the other. You are you; I am me; we let each other be.
If I have healthy boundary maintenance:
If I have poor boundary maintenance
Small children have no emotional boundaries and as a result are easily stirred to intense emotional responses by criticism or differing opinions. Boundaries develop and grow stronger in adolescent and adulthood, but maintaining and expanding healthy boundaries is a lifetime challenge.
A large number of people in mid-life and beyond have never developed strong boundaries. Family gatherings seem to bring out the worst in bad boundary management. When that happens people interact on the basis of old boundaries of long ago, as though they’d never grown and matured since the original years of being family together.
A clear understanding of healthy boundaries defuses such dynamics. Staying connected to family members in a relaxed way over time has the same effect. Being in touch as we grow and change across life helps us to learn new patterns of interacting that reflect our unfolding life as adults.
You can do a simple reflection exercise in a few minutes that will prepare you for relaxed interaction with family members. The exercise guides you in reflecting on how you have changed and grown since childhood and teenage years. It's probably far more than you realize.
Draw the diagrams below on a sheet of paper.
Then fill in some names. Start with your life at age of twelve and fill in the names of people in your family and network of friends who had a big affect on your daily sense of the quality of life. Then do the same in the circles for "Some affect" and "Little Affect". Then fill in the second diagram fill with names for today.
I’m not talking about distant people. Names in these lists should only be those people where there was or is a personal connection.
When you are done, compare your two diagrams. Notice and appreciate fully the extent to which those two lists differ.
Take the exercise a step farther by listing personal strengths, talents, abilities, or accomplishments that have emerged in your life since the time you left your nuclear family. When you feel secure and grounded in these, you are less vulnerable to being suckered back into the vulnerabilities that every child lives with by virtue of being a child.
When we get together for holidays, we return to relationships of long ago. But of course we’ve lived and grown since. We now have resources of knowledge and personal foundations from other relationships and roles that did not exist in the old days. If we keep our inner boundaries updated, we draw strength and stability from our recent life experience. We are less vulnerable to difficult dynamics from long ago.
But if we’ve failed to update our inner boundaries, we react emotionally from our ancient and much less powerful sense of self. We’re like twelve year olds (or whatever age we were when we suffered the greatest difficulties with the person we are interacting with now) in adult bodies.
You can prepare for re-connecting to complex relationships by refreshing your awareness of who you are today. When your brother/parent/aunt/grandparent makes a move that pokes your emotional buttons, remind yourself of your current reality. Odds are high that the person has little to no capacity any longer to have any impact on your daily life, so long as you keep your focus on your current network of family and friends.
Spare yourself the energy required to react. Just let it be like water off the back of a duck. Shrug, grin, smile. Change the topic. Find someone else to talk to. Resist the temptation to try to change that person or fight back - if you do, you are already participating in the old patterns.
Draw strength from knowledge of who you are today and where you get the energy and joy that make your life meaningful.
