The Holidays Can Raise Conflicting Feelings About Families: We Should Feel Them All
December 18, 2023
When choosing whether or not to go home for the holidays, there is a tendency to ignore feelings that conflict with our decisions
As the end of the year rolls around, the much-awaited (and often much-dreaded) holiday season arrives faster than anyone is prepared for. Along with it comes big decisions about whether or not to go home for the holidays. Maybe you feel like keeping your distance would be healthier for you this year. Maybe you logistically can’t be with family and miss them terribly, even though you also know things might have been difficult if you were home. Or maybe you are returning home and have a hard time being plunged back into a hurtful family dynamic.
As a therapist, I see how these holiday choices weigh on people’s minds. Each of these decisions brings with it a deeply rooted, interwoven connection of feelings related to our families and holiday traditions. There is a tendency and a temptation to lean heavily into the side of these feelings that supports your holiday plans. If you’re staying away from family for your own well-being, you might feel great relief to be estranged from family members who have hurt you, suppressing the parts of you that miss holiday traditions and feel nostalgic. If you cannot travel home to family, you may only feel the sadness of being far away, ignoring the part that knows you’d have struggled to be there. If you are going home, you might only want to feel the holiday spirit during celebrations, shutting off any negative emotions that come up. However, it is important to sit with all of these feelings—the hurt, the nostalgia, the relief, the loss, the loneliness, the love, and more.
Splitting off the feelings about family we’d rather avoid during the holidays doesn’t change the fact that they’re there
Jumping to one side of a situation splits us off from the complexity of our feelings. Particularly when considering how we feel about families during the holidays, the complexity of feelings mirrors the complexity inherent in family relationships. Family can be the people who know you the best and yet also don’t know parts of you at all. They can be the people you feel the most love from and also have been historically hurt by. Family can elicit so many different responses—anger, sadness, old wounds in various stages of healing, love, playfulness, and comfort. Of course, each family and each member experiences various mixes of all of these.
Moving away from the messiness of these feelings about family to just get through the holidays doesn’t change the fact that these feelings are there. It’s like throwing a pretty cloth over a pile of clutter. The cloth doesn’t get rid of anything; it just makes it easier to ignore and eventually, may attract bigger problems like mice. Similarly, overlooking the feelings we’d rather avoid about our families can begin to impact how we relate to others.
Avoiding our feelings about the holidays can affect other relationships in our lives
Ignoring the entirety of our feelings around family during the holidays is to also ignore how dynamics in our families play out and our own role in them. Our families of origin have such a significant role in forming our relationship blueprint, which means how we relate to them can also affect how we act out the same things in other relationships in our lives.
This can come up around the holidays in particular. Take, for instance, someone who stays away from her family of origin to avoid the almost-certain holiday fight. Part of her also desperately misses the feeling of everyone gathering and being together, but she splits off these feelings. This can cause her to not want to plan anything around the holidays with her partner or children even though these gatherings are meaningful to them.
We need to notice and feel all of our feelings about the holidays rather than push them down or explain them away
How do we stay conscious of not splitting off some of our feelings about family holidays, no matter what our plans are? The first step is to notice these conflicting emotions, bringing the messiness to the surface, being aware of it, and not rushing to push feelings down or explain them away. Sometimes doing a holiday tradition on your own terms can help you sit with conflicting feelings. For example, watch a favorite holiday movie or bake a family recipe to honor that nostalgia while allowing yourself to also feel relief that you aren’t participating in the annual family conflict this year.
For some, it can be harder to parse out all of their feelings about the holiday by themselves. Therapy can be particularly helpful in not taking patients at face value and asking questions when they express that they couldn’t be happier that they’re celebrating alone this year or can’t wait to go to their mother’s house even though it seems there are more complicated feelings at work. A therapist can observe and reflect back when the pull to be black-and-white about the holidays comes up. Therapy can also help people notice and identify what physical sensations these emotions bring up. This can be an especially useful way of connecting to a feeling and owning it, in direct contrast to moving away or splitting from the emotion.
