For many people, this is a time of year when we spend more time with family than usual. While this can be a heartfelt joy, it also brings with it a fair amount of extra stress.
As an important aside, what follows is not meant to apply to cases of actual abuse, but to the “normal” wear and tear that otherwise loving families find themselves dealing with, because of lack of communication and growth in their relationships.
Adult children might find themselves back in the family home, sleeping in their old bedroom, now converted into mom’s office. It might be too easy to fall back into patterns of behaviour they thought they had left behind, fighting old teenage battles with their parents.
Siblings who had a rocky relationship in childhood might find themselves resurfacing old hurts, fighting old wars, holding on to grudges of the past that might have grown beyond all proportion, sucking the life out of their adult interactions.
No wonder so many people dread “going home for the holidays”. This time of supposed joy and peace to all becomes a source of stress and resentment. Add overeating, overdrinking, overcrowding and overspending to the mix, and it can truly become a toxic brew. What to do?
I might be going out on a limb here, but I would venture that a lot of this seasonal misery comes down to unresolved control issues, ancient power struggles that went underground once the combatants separated themselves physically. Time is said to heal all wounds, but sometimes they are merely dormant.
The term “reconciliation” gets bandied about a lot these days, especially here in Canada. It usually refers to the long, slow, painful process of healing the wounded relationship between Canada and its Indigenous peoples, but we can take it into our personal lives, as well.
Even if the painful scenario I described above does not apply to your family (lucky you!), chances are there are still control issues between parents and children, older and younger siblings, that could use a dose of reconciliation.
Often, we don’t broach the subject because we are afraid of the strong feelings that might be unleashed if we start talking about the issues. We are afraid that everything will be swept away in that childish anger and hurt, like a tsunami destroying everything in its path. We prefer to keep our heads down, talk about meaningless surface things, and vent to our friends afterwards.
Recently, I talked about the masks we wear and the huge amount of energy they drain from our lives. Keeping that tsunami under control is also very draining. Wouldn’t our lives be so much better if we didn’t have to spend so much energy not feeling our feelings, or at least not showing them? “Conceal, don’t feel” didn’t work very well as a strategy in Frozen, and it doesn’t work well for us, either.
Sometimes it takes time for people to accept the hurt they have caused, take ownership and be willing to change. Sometimes that time extends beyond a lifetime. It is important for us to understand that we can only control our own feelings and actions, not those of others. We can offer reconciliation, but if the other party will not receive it, it is up to us to let go and move on. The knowledge that we tried frees us from guilt.
If you are afraid to open the conversation with that family member you are struggling with, you don’t have to do this alone. The road to reconciliation runs through openness and honesty, but sometimes it is better to have an impartial third party to help channel the feelings and mitigate the damage. A family therapist or life coach can provide this safeguard.