'I'm a therapist—here's how to avoid conflict at Christmas' Read more:
Another area where arguments can arise is when it comes to who is hosting the day. On one hand, it can appear like hosting is quite the sacrifice; after all, that person is obviously making their house welcoming, perhaps doing most of the cooking and arranging everything.
Rather than to be able to sit with that feeling, make sense of it and think:"What does this mean about my own life?", the way some of us cope with envy is to try to attack the other person and perhaps try to take something good away from them by making a personal comment about their home or their appearance.Mark says Christmas often exacerbates existing family dynamics, which may already be difficult. Stock image.
What I would suggest is thinking about our needs well in advance of Christmas: What do I want to get from the day? What will ensure that my needs are met, without requiring me to be ruthless or selfish? For example, consider how much alcohol do I want to drink? How much money do I want to spend? How much time do I want to spend with certain people? What is a fair compromise?
For example, I have a patient who has celiac disease, but for years felt unable to tell her sister she could not eat wheat. She feared she would belittle her and say:"Oh, just another of your fads." So, this person would eat wheat on birthdays or Christmas and be very ill for days afterwards. However, they come from a home where love is expressed through spending quite large sums of money. To this specific family, it appears the more you spend on someone the more you love them, but gifts are also used as a weapon to shut down any further dialogue or doubt there might be about the relationships.
They chose to stick to their guns in the face of the family and if we do that, we have to risk abandonment. Even though that may be unlikely, going against the herd can be very difficult and can invoke feelings of abandonment.
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