Often there is an identified patient in a family, the person who gets blamed for everything. In family therapy, understanding all of the family dynamics are possible instead of pinning all of the blame on one person. While there may be a person who struggles outwardly and gets in trouble, everyone else in the family is affected and often the subtle family dynamics get lost because all of the focus is on one person. Learn how to understand all of the complicated family relationships, even more so in blended families, address what alliances have formed and triggers between people. Often, the parents stop working as a team causing a breakdown in the parent child relationships as well. Learn how to improve communication in all of the relationships in the family and understand and how to manage everyone’s feelings.
They can be a big support and they can challenge the most highly functioning person. Most often, they are a combination of both. Too often I see people go down, get depressed and anxious when parents come to visit, particularly when the visitor stays in the home. Of course, it’s very difficult to ask parents to stay in a hotel, would just add fuel to the fire, so to speak.
It’s hard not to regress around parents, no matter what age you are. The degree of difficulty usually comes down to how successfully you were able to separate from your parents, in other words, how much you were able to become your own person.
The rate and degree of depression actually increases over the holidays. This seems counterintuitive to what is expected and yearned for. Commercialism goes to great lengths to market a certain fantasy of what holidays should look like. Movies, television shows, commercials, and advertisements spoon feed us what happiness means. Beautifully wrapped packages under the tree, wonderful food, and big families deeply connected with lots of laughter and affection. So where is the disconnect?
One difficulty can be the struggles with memories of the past. People are filled with experiences from their families of origin. Sometimes people just feel badly the same time each year and don’t associate earlier bad experiences as the trigger, the feelings seem to just come from nowhere. When people start talking about early experiences, though, the memories and struggles become more conscious. Often times people question drudging up these old experiences, thinking it best to leave the past in the past. Trouble is, these experiences are in us and we react to them, whether we utter a word or keep the lid shut tight. The paradox being, feelings of the past not talked about in the present have more power and affect us far greater than taking the time to understand and talk about all of the messages and feelings internalized from long ago.
Whatever the reasons are for each individual striving for perfection, whether trying to make up for a childhood filled with deprivation (financial and psychological), or trying to have the perfect family like in the commercials, the reality will fall short. Perhaps there will be disappointment with gifts (“how could he get me that, doesn’t he know me at all?”) or a family member is disrespectful, again, or further evidence that the marriage is not going in the direction that you would like, or the kids cry in disappointment about a gift, or siblings fight , or reignited sadness in divorced families, or just the plain ol’ pressure of making everything just right sets you on edge.
This holiday season, think about what you are wanting and how past life experiences might be contributing to these wishes. Think about expectations and how pressures for perfection might be undermining the fun that you are going for. As we say in mental health, go for progress not perfection. Enjoy the good, and know that family difficulties happen during the holidays too, actually more so because extended families spend intense time together. If depression levels increase in you, know that is often the case, and then get the help that you need to tease out the forces at work inside of you. Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, Happy Kwaanza, and Happy New Year.
