How to deal with family stress during the holidays

Why do we feel so stressed with our family, especially during the holidays? It can feel like it’s more stressful during the holidays to be with family and there's more family conflict that happens than other times. Why? And how do we deal with it?

Why it feels more stressful during the holidays

We have deep, unconscious connections to our family, even if we don’t feel respected or treated well by them and have distanced ourselves. If you grew up with the people you tend to spend holidays with, you developed an attachment to them. Families, or groups of people, work in a system and when the system operates a certain way, it’s very hard to change it unless more than 1 person wants it to change. When we go back to spend time with our family, the same patterns of communication and conflict tend to happen because that’s all “the family system” knows to do.

Your nervous system, which is part of the memory for your mind & body,  gets stuck in what it used to know and it can feel horrible for us. You might feel lonely, isolated, judged, criticized, just to name a few. Your anxiety or depression might increase or you may have more disordered eating habits come up.

3 tips to help you get through triggers with family during the holidays

1. Set boundaries and know that they may not respect them

Boundaries are a hot topic these days but what does it really mean? When we set boundaries, for example, how much time we spend, when we see them, and what topics are off limits, we are respecting our energy and what our nervous system can handle. 

Setting boundaries does not mean they will be respected. This is the important part-

2. Take a pause to regulate our nervous system when we get triggered

Even when you set boundaries, it doesn’t mean they will be respected, so when you get triggered, work on pausing before you react. THIS IS POWER. When you can pause and take a step back, ask yourself-

Is it really worth fighting back or shutting down? When you’ve done that in the past, does anything actually change? Most likely, no. 

When you can take a pause, literally leave the room if needed and take some deep belly breaths- you can come back to what’s important to you and it's not their reaction, it’s how you respond. 

Their response says more about them than it does about you. Unless your family is also working on themselves, they may not have the awareness to NOT trigger you. THeir response to your boundary says more about their emotional and mental dysregulation than it does you. 

3. Respect your energy

When you need to take a time out, do it, even if the judgment from others comes, you have to give energy into yourself before being around others. When you do this, you won't be triggered.

If you can’t stay somewhere else, how can you take some time maybe in the mornings or evenings, or afternoons to give to yourself? Go for a walk, drive to get a coffee, do something just for you.

Important to Remember

Even if you’ve grown within yourself outside of your family, it doesn’t make you immune to the family system. Once you enter that environment, you may feel like you used to when you grew up. That’s normal and doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you or you aren’t “handling it well”

Give yourself compassion. It's ok to feel like you just took 5 steps back when in the presence of your family if you’ve been working on yourself. It’s completely natural. I’m a therapist and I have so many tools and insights and really love the life I've built that resulted from healing from family trauma and I still get triggered when I’m around them. 

The important thing is that I I know how to set my time - how much is too much. I know what topics are off limits and how to respond to topics I’m uncomfortable with.

How to work with loneliness

If you find you need support around your family triggers and how to feel more calm around family and others that bring you stress, I have a few ways of supporting you:

Therapy for Loneliness

If you’d like individual support, I offer individual therapy for anxiety, depression, family conflict, and disordered eating. 

If you’d like an intro to working with regulating your nervous system, go ahead and sign up for my Nervous System Reset course where you will learn how to understand your specific triggers and learn how to work with them from a mind-body perspective. I give you tools and lead you through mind and body based exercises including journaling, breathing exercises, meditations, and physical yoga therapy.

Other services I offer

I am honored to help people along their healing journey. Specifically, I help people address anxiety, trauma, disordered eating, and nervous system dysregulation. I help through combining nervous system regulation, holistic psychotherapy, and yoga therapy. If you want to grow in your healing journey and make exponential changes, I would love to be the guiding support. Check out my blog for more about my practice.