Home for the Holidays: A Survival Guide

Every year around this time, thousands of Angelinos venture back to where we came from.

For some of us, the trip home means relaxing, reconnecting, maybe partying a little. We might even get to feel taken care of for a few days – something we rarely get to feel when we’re deep in the hustle of a big wild city like LA.  

For others, going back to the family’s house can feel like slipping through a time warp into an old version of ourselves – and into an old labyrinth of dysfunction or abuse. We may leave feeling embarrassed about how we acted and deeply wounded by our family members’ continued inability to show up for us or treat us with respect.

For many, the reality of family is… complicated. There may be fun moments, true family love, and traditions that warm our hearts. These positive experiences may be coupled with dynamics that kick up old feelings, beliefs or behavior patterns that don’t feel good.

Whatever your family situation is, here are a few simple things you can do to set yourself up for the most positive possible experience.

1. Check your expectations.

When you anticipate spending time with your family, are you anticipating spending time with the family you wish you had or the actual family that is there? Most of us carry vivid fantasies about how our family members should be. These fantasies are so powerful that they can eclipse reality.

You can try practicing radical acceptance around who your family members actually are, including their strengths and their limitations. Radical acceptance means opening up to the reality of how things are and having compassion for your feelings about that reality. Radical acceptance centers on the idea that we suffer more, not less, when we resist reality. 

 Radical acceptance in the context of family might sound like this:

 I wish I could tell my dad about the work I’m doing in therapy and have him just listen and maybe express curiosity or pride in me for doing the work. But listening is hard for my dad. His parents didn’t listen to him, and he never learned how to listen empathically. Instead of listening, he often offers me advice to try to fix my problems.

Knowing this about your dad gives you a choice about what to do: you can talk to him about what you need from him, you can only share a little bit of what’s been going on, or you can totally avoid that topic of conversation. Whichever way you go, you are meeting him where he’s at instead of setting him up to let you down.

The more realistic our expectations are, the more we can be present to whatever love and warmth our family members offer in whatever way they do offer it. Does your dad get up early to make waffles? That’s love too. It just looks a little different from what we were hoping for.

2. Set intentions of how to perceive difficult family members

Alongside radical acceptance is the skill of cultivating helpful interpretations of our family members’ behavior.

When we are children, we tend to believe that our family members’ behavior is personal and that we are responsible for it. Did your sister ignore you or point out the negative in everything you told her in a more pervasive and biting way than is normal for teenagers? Most children, not having greater context for these behaviors, would tend to take this personally. They may interpret their sister’s behavior as, “my sister doesn’t like me,” or, “there’s something wrong with me that is making my sister hate me.”

Then we grow up. Our family members keep acting the same old way. And unless we’ve really looked at how this is operating for us, we tend to hold on to the same old interpretations of what’s going on.

Luckily, as adults, we get to come up with updated interpretations of our family member’s behavior that can better help us keep calm(ish). These more helpful thoughts might sound like, “my sister is doing the best she can and this is about her depression, not me.” Or even simpler, “my sister’s behavior is not about me.”

The new thoughts can support you in increasing compassion for your sister, for example, “my sister is hurting,” or “my sister has so much trouble with relationships. It must be hard for her.”

Or the thoughts might serve to reinforce your radical acceptance work, for example, “my sister can’t be any way other than how she is in this moment,” or, “it really upsets me when my sister acts like this. I’m going to take a breather.”

When you land on a helpful thought, you can use it like a mantra, calling it up repetitively in your mind whenever you start to feel yourself getting sucked into personalizing a non-personal situation.

2.5. Set intentions not to be the difficult family member.

Did you just roll your eyes at your mom and storm out of the room? It can be tempting to act like a teenager when we get around our parents. But acting like a teenager is going to tempt everyone around you to treat you like one.  This goes without saying, but it will totally help to be kind, validating, direct, fair and curious. If you catch yourself sulking, lashing out, or being passive aggressive, it’s time to take a break and do some grounding. 

Yes, this is easier said than done. But it shouldn’t be impossible to make some adjustments.

3. Set helpful boundaries and limits.

Because we often didn’t have a choice about coming and going from the family home when we were kids, we often forget that we have a choice about coming and going when we are adults.

The cool thing about being an adult is that now you get to take a break. You get to go out for a walk, read a book in the other room, take a walk after dinner, and go to bed when you’re tired. You get to plan an activity with an old friend a few days into your trip or borrow the car and run to the grocery store… or the museum. You even get to stay at a hotel or rent a car if that’s what works better for you. 

 On a more micro level, you get to set boundaries around topics of conversation. For example, if you are having a tough time with your career and your family is misattuned or unhelpful around this topic, you have every right to politely set a limit around advice giving. Or if you are working on your relationship with food and your body, you have every right to ask your family members not to comment on what you eat or how you look. 

It’s totally possible to be both loving and firm when it comes to setting limits and boundaries.

4. Stay grounded.

Even if you’ve practiced skills 1-3, it’s highly likely that at some point someone is going to rile you up and get your nervous system activated. Maybe you have a brother who can’t help but insult LA (which he’s barely visited!) at any possible opportunity. Or maybe you have a mom who can’t help commenting on your clothes in a way that is not, shall we say, helpful.

Or maybe the family home is a place where it used to be much more emotionally dangerous than it is now and certain rooms, situations, or dynamics trigger overwhelming memories, emotions and sensations. This could be the case if a parent suffered from severe alcohol abuse or mental illness when you were a child, or if you survived childhood abuse of any sort.

Either way, it helps to come prepared with some concrete tools for soothing the nervous system.

What works for you? Yoga, or going for a run? Do you ever try taking a sip of water, doing a minute of box breathing, reading a book, taking a bath, taking a walk, doing a meditation, listening to some music, noticing the temperature of the room, or petting the family cat?

It can also help to bring a grounding object with you, like a photo of your dog (or your actual dog!), some essential oils, or a rock or something textural that you can carry around with you. Ideally these objects will have positive associations outside of the family home. You can think about them like a portal to a time and place when you felt your safest and most resourced. Connecting with these objects on a sensory level can help the mind and body remember that you are older and safer than you were when you were a child.

If it still isn’t safe in your family home, please skip ahead to number 7.

5. Stay connected.

Family is important, but it’s not our whole world. Many of us who live away from home have developed strong community ties – an urban family that we rely on and who know us and love us for who we are. It can be helpful to make a mental list of a few people you can text or call either in a moment of crisis or in a more ambient ongoing way throughout the trip.

Does someone in your family have a habit of casually mocking your job? Does just being around your family make you feel really insecure about many of your life choices? Try getting away to call a friend.  Even calling a friend to talk about something unrelated can help remind your mind, heart and body of the confidence you have built away from home.

6. Watch the booze.

Yeah, this one’s tricky. But bear with me a moment.

For many families, celebrations involve cocktails. In some families, drinking is not an issue – whoever drinks is able to have whatever amount of alcohol works for them, and people generally remain loving and respectful until the evening ends. 

Obviously this is not the case for all families or I wouldn’t be bringing it up.

Are you more likely to lock horns with your mom after the wine comes out? Does alcohol regularly pave the way towards meltdowns and misunderstandings that ruin the night?

A few things to remember about alcohol: 1) Alcohol is a disinhibitor, so you’re more likely to react emotionally, get into gnarly arguments or engage with family dynamics that aren’t good for you once you’ve got alcohol in your system. 2) Alcohol is a depressant. If you have a few glasses of wine, you’re more likely to feel crappy in the morning, or even later in the night. And by crappy I don’t just mean a little headachey – I mean ashamed, angry, lonely, guilty, irritable… depressed.  This shift in mood can amplify a dangerous behavior loop of seeking certain kinds of affection and validation from family members who aren’t able to show up in that way.

Some people are able to have a glass or two of wine and generally maintain their mood. Some people are able to do this in LA when they are around friends… but not at the family home when they are around triggering family members. And for some people, even a whiff of the stuff is catastrophic to whatever fortress of healing they have built in their years away from home.

So before you get on the plane, you might want to ask yourself – what kind of alcohol consumption sets you up to have the best possible visit?

If the answer involves not drinking or making a change around your normal drinking, you definitely want to decide this before you’re in the moment. After all, it can be really hard to turn down another glass of wine when the bottle’s going around the table if you haven’t already practiced this moment in your mind. And on a practical note, planning ahead also means you can help yourself out by preemptively procuring other beverage options – tea, mineral water, etc.

Finally, if the family has an alcohol problem and being around that problem is damaging for your own sobriety or mental health, you may want to think more about your limits and boundaries – or skip ahead to number 7.

7. Consider not going.

It can be helpful to really ask yourself why you are going. If the answer is, “to spend time with my family because I love them and it is emotionally rewarding to spend time with them even if it is difficult sometimes,” then there is your answer. Go if you can. Deep connection with the people we love is the stuff of life. A reasonable amount of discomfort is both tolerable and unavoidable.

But if the only answer you can come up with is, “because I’ve always gone” or, “because they’ll be mad at me if I don’t,” then you might want to check in with yourself about this.

Are you threatening your recovery or mental health to go? Have you historically come back to LA feeling substantially worse about yourself? When you go home, are you more often than not a target of abusive behaviors?

If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then I’ll invite you to ask yourself, is it worth it to put yourself in this situation?

If you don’t go, you get to put together a holiday with friends, or colleagues, or your Al-Anon community, or your church, or whatever it is. And that holiday gets to be reflective of the person you have become, and it gets to be safe and warm and festive and may even be able to hold space for the heartbreak of having to wave goodbye to a dream for a certain kind of holiday that your family may not be able to provide. And that, at the end of the day, may be better for you. Which matters. A lot.

Plus, as a bonus, you get to spend those days driving at full speed from the east side to the beach on an empty freeway while all the other suckers are stuck in LAX.  

Whatever way you decide to go with things, I hope these tools can support you in getting more of what you need this holiday season.

Onwards.