[Editor's note: Read all our holly jolly HOLIDAY GUIDE articles here. Looking for a print copy? Good! You can find it in more than 500 spots across Portland with this handy map!]

Back in the olden times, I used to host a public radio show that recorded in front of a live audience. In December of 2011, we decided to do a segment about how to survive the holidays with your family. We brought on Shelley McLendon, a therapist who is also a brilliant comedian and friend, along with my funny, tiny, holiday-elf-like mother to do a little experiment. 

We set up a table where I could make my mom’s famous chocolate peanut butter balls with my mother on one side of me and Shelley on the other. At one point, when my mother was telling me how to make the peanut butter mixture into balls (something I’d been doing myself for years and KNEW HOW TO DO BECAUSE DUH), I asked Shelley what we could say to family members who won’t allow us to create our own versions of family traditions. 

Shelley replied with an oft-repeated phrase among the show staff in the ensuing years: “Isn’t it great that there are so many different ways to do things?” 

The audience laughed. I repeated the phrase to my mother. 

“Y’know what I was just thinking, mom? That it’s really great that there are so many ways to do things.” 

“There are,” my mother replied. “There’s the right way and the wrong way.” 

The audience went feral on me, laughing and whooping for so long that all I could do was stand onstage as the peanut butter ball in my palm turned into a sticky puddle. My mother had roasted me like a Thanksgiving turkey on my own goddamn show and I still bear the emotional scars. 

Most people don’t have PTSD about their mother scorched-earthing them in front of 600 people during the holidays, but many, many different emotional issues can come up during the season. 

Maybe you’ve married into a new family and you want to take on some of their traditions, but are getting pushback from your family of origin. Maybe you’re worried about political differences weighing so heavily on holiday conversation that they finally break the janky folding table you use for kids and late-comers. Or maybe you’re so finished with your family that you’re spending the holidays on your own this year and you’re worried that while spending the day catching up on Love is Blind season 7 with Chinese takeout sounds good, that you’ll be too steeped in a pool of shame about your day not looking like the end of every Hallmark movie that it will finally break you.

Whatever you’re going through, I spoke to two Portland therapists who specialize in family dynamics to procure some holiday coping mechanisms to help get us all through. 

I started with Wayne Scott, MA, LCSW, a marriage and family therapist.

The first thing we talked about was how we deal with emotional triggers in interpersonal environments. Most of us don’t feel provoked because we think others are going to physically hurt us, we’re afraid they’re going to say or do something that will make us feel awkward, angry, embarrassed, or ostracized. Essentially, unsafe. 

That anxious feeling you get? It’s called a threat response.

The Holiday Threat Response, Illustrated

Imagine you’re stirring the gravy on Thanksgiving day and your aunt Barbara approaches you, lit Virginia Slim in hand. 

“Oh. You’re cooking the gravy?” she asks. 

“Yeah,” you reply. “I thought I’d try it this year. Ina Garten has this recipe that looked so delic—“

“—you chose THANKSGIVING to try a new gravy recipe,” she responds. “What were you thinking? You have a house full of people!” 

“Um. Well. I mean… I don’t have to… maybe?…. Can you excuse me for a moment?”

And you go and hyperventilate in the pantry, questioning every decision you’ve made up to this point, but especially the “trying a new gravy recipe on Thanksgiving” one. 

Why does this happen? Why can family immediately make us feel this way? 

I’ve heard one reason I tend to believe, though it’s not backed by research: our family knows how to push our buttons because they installed them. 

But knowing why we’re upset isn’t as important as knowing how to deal with it.

I asked Wayne Scott what he thought about this. 

“That’s your autonomic nervous system,” he said. “It’s programmed to respond reactively the moment we feel we’re being threatened in any way—emotionally or physically—so we can’t control it. Unless we train it.” 

Scott suggests that before the holidays, to think about what activates our threat responses and create strategies to avoid them before they happen. 

Just a few of his ideas: 

Ask for what you need: In this case, you could send an email to the family letting them know you’re trying something new this year and it might not turn out perfectly, but the holidays are really about togetherness, so they should support you in your freakin’ gravy journey, BARBARA. 

Another great way to get family members on board is to ask for their help/ideas in integrating new traditions ahead of time. If you include them in the conversation, they’re much more likely to buy in.

Neutralize the threat: One thing that tends to catch aggressive people off guard is to call them on their aggression. Something like, “Wow, Barb. That made me feel like crawling into a little ball under the sink. What was your intention with that comment?”

Or, if addressing the problem overtly causes you to feel more triggered, Scott suggests trying self-talk. 

“Something like, ‘There goes [Barb] again, invalidating my reality,’” he suggests. “Or simply exiting the conversation or even going outside to do some deep breathing.” 

I’ve found this to be quite helpful, especially if it’s cold outside. The cool air on my skin helps to ground me in my body, while the dead leaves on the ground remind me that we’re all going to die someday and that means there are only so many Thanksgivings we have left to live through. 

Don’t engage in the first place: Of course it’s difficult, but there’s also the choice not to go at all. If the discomfort outweighs the joy for you, it may be time to simply bow out or—a slightly less nuclear option—to give family members a time parameter like, “I have another party to attend at six, so I can only stay for a couple hours.” This serves the purpose of setting healthy boundaries with your family and making it appear you’re more popular than you actually are.

When you choose to disengage

The last two options were also suggested by Joan Laguzza, LCSW, a mental health therapist who works with many folks who are estranged from their families and are now used to spending the holidays on their own. She suggests that in the same way people prepare themselves mentally to be with problematic family members, people should prepare themselves when they’re going to be on their own. You don’t want the holidays to sneak up on you without a plan. Just a few ideas Laguzza suggests: 

Create distractions: The holidays are often about community—family, friends, church. So lean on yours. 

“Go out in the world and be in community with other people,” she says. “Volunteer. Plan a ‘Friendsgiving.’ Arrange for a call with a friend or family member.”

Don’t have a community? Be a good friend to yourself and make a plan so you don’t have downtime to marinate in a family-sized tub of Comparison Sauce. Comparison is truly the thief of joy and there is no time of year that we compare our lives to others’ more than the holidays. So don’t give yourself the opportunity to ruminate. 

“Go see a movie, go to a restaurant you love, read a book,” Laguzza suggests. 

Or just stay home and write a poem called “Ode to Not Exchanging Pleasantries” about the sheer joy of avoiding polite chit-chat with 15 people about bunions and boring jobs and the annoying parents at Kayden’s gymnastics class and the myriad minutiae of the year you all spent passively avoiding one another. 

Stay the hell off social media: This is good advice for everyone, all the time, but especially during the holidays. Countless studies show that we are made more anxious, more lonely, and more depressed after a trip down a Meta rabbit hole, no matter the time of year. But during the holidays, we’re more aware than ever of what our family looks like because we compare it to every movie, holiday special, and Fred Meyer ad that tells us the holidays are all about “togetherness.” So your friends and family will only post photos that mirror those depictions.

The only media depiction of a holiday that’s gotten close to reality for many of us was “Fishes,” the Christmas episode of The Bear that included a terrifyingly chaotic kitchen, flying forks at the dinner table, and an emotionally vampiric, drunken mother accidentally driving her car through her own house.* There’s no way, after that Christmas, the Berzatto family posted pics of a fork in Uncle Lee’s forehead or Donna with smashed drywall all over her rich Corinthian leather seats. 

“Social media is totally unreliable,” Laguzza says. “When there’s an estrangement, each person develops an inaccurate narrative about what’s going on in the other person’s life. Social media just feeds that narrative.” 

Two apps that are great for blocking social media sites are Freedom and Opal. They make a great holiday gift!

Plan to honor those who aren’t around: While making your holiday plans, consider a way to pay tribute to those family members you’re estranged from. Whether they’re not speaking to you or you’ve chosen to take some space from them, you can still honor the affection you once had for them and may again. 

“If your estranged mother loves dahlias, put some on the table Thanksgiving day,” Laguzza suggests. “If you’re with a sibling, you can plan to make your mother’s pumpkin pie together, or play a piece of music that meant something to her—have a thought for her and silently wish her some good cheer for the holiday.” 

This sounded counterintuitive and even difficult when she first suggested it. Still, it ultimately reminded me of a beautiful quote that’s often (but wrongly) attributed to the Buddha that a friend once quoted at just the right time: “In the end, only three things matter: how much I loved, how gently I lived, and how gracefully I let go of the things not meant for me.” I can’t think of a better way to spend a few holiday moments than by offering some grace and forgiveness to friends or family members we’re struggling to continue to love.

Finally, making the holidays actually bright

Whether you’re spending time with family or without, beware of holding too tightly to traditions. Or at the very least, attempt to parse out which traditions you love, and which you’re struggling to keep because you’re trying to meet other people’s expectations. Traditions can be a strange trap, because they’re what makes the holidays joyful and nostalgic, but they can also cause tension. 

“Holiday traditions always imply that you have money,” Scott suggests. “The tree, the food, the gift extravaganza. But we don’t bring that up because, like politics, there’s this agreement that we don’t talk about this thing that is very visibly in the room.”

As you’re navigating these waters—trying to turn the holidays into a season that doesn’t stress the fuck out of you and empty your bank account—remember the reason people get defensive when you try to make new traditions.

“They’ve studied the human threat response, and one of the biggest threats is the threat of not belonging,” Scott says. “The holidays, to get down to the meat of it, are about feeling connected in the world. Feeling like you've got some mooring. Like you have people who have got your back.”

So tread lightly, but know that you shouldn’t have to compromise your own mental health to make other people happy. 

And remember that, if you’re a person being driven nuts by the fact that you have all this activity and all these people swirling around you during the holidays, you may have friends being driven nuts by the fact that they don’t. So if you know someone you feel could use the company, invite them over for the holiday. They’ll probably say no, but it makes a huge difference to know that you actually have a place you could go if you wanted to. A huge difference to feel wanted. To feel like you belong. 

Happy holidays. 

---

*For the record, my mother is neither emotionally vampiric nor drunken, but she did actually drive her car through the back wall of her garage once. I attribute it more to the famously bad “Hameister Sense of Direction” than anything else. I think she just saw it as the most direct route to the backyard.