Handling Stress For The Holidays (Part 1: Prioritizing Your Principles)

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It’s become a predictable pattern: a past client who has “graduated” from therapy reaches out to me to get back on my schedule again for a few sessions in November or December. The holidays often bring up relationship tension and family conflict, as well as the strain of trying to figure out where your faith fits in and how to find your own sense of peace and joy in the season. And to top it all off, you start thinking about what you need to do differently in the coming year. There’s nothing like the stress of the holidays to trigger old anxieties, relationship tension, or the familiar overwhelm that comes with navigating complicated family dynamics. So, in an effort to help you manage your holiday hand-wringing, here is part 1 of 5 in a series of blogs to help you handle your holidays with more ease.

Picture Your Ideal Holiday

I firmly believe that the biggest key to feeling good about the holiday season when all is said and done is to identify your most important values and principles around the holidays and make sure you are prioritizing your top ones.

I can remember seasons in my own life when the momentum of tradition, demands of someone else’s calendar, and the desires of everyone but me ended up driving the holiday plan. Sure, my kids were elated, my mother-in-law had no disappointments and my husband and I weren’t in couples therapy, but I felt disappointed and compromised. If I had designed my perfect holiday, it would have looked pretty different than that. Eventually, I asked myself what a “perfect” holiday would look like to me. If I could make all of the decisions, how would I structure it? Where would I go? Who would be included? What would we do?

Identify Your Top Values and Prioritize Them

Once I had that picture in my head, I identified one or two of the most important elements of that picture to me. Those one or two elements became my “non-negotiables” for the holidays, and I accepted compromises and was flexible around the rest. I gave other people we were celebrating with the decision-making power around most of the events, and held firm on the one or two things I had decided would make the holidays meaningful to me. At the end of those holidays, I felt I had been able to honor both my own needs and the needs of those around me, and the disappointment I had felt in the past was replaced with satisfaction at having had a meaningful holiday.

When my kids were younger, my top value ended up being creating a tradition that was specific to my new nuclear family of my husband and kids. Rather than schlepping them around for several days trying to take part in bits and pieces of OTHER people’s traditions, I wanted one of my own. We decided what we wanted that tradition to be, and informed the rest of our family that we would make ourselves available at other times to celebrate with them, but this specific time was being set aside for our family.

Now that my kids are older and have their own “others” to spend holidays with, my top priority has been to have my kids all together and have quality time with them. I want them not to have to choose between households where to spend their time. I want them to be able to spend relaxing time, not rushing to or from another gathering. I want them to be able to celebrate not just with me, but with their siblings. This has meant being flexible on which day we celebrate, oftentimes celebrating on alternative days to the actual calendar holiday.

These aren’t the right values and priorities for everyone, but they are what is important to me. Identifying and advocating for what makes my holidays special has made for less stressful, more meaningful holidays for me and our family.

Choose Your Compromise or it Will Be Chosen for You

Whether you are the parent with little kids trying to fit in all the parents’ and grandparents’ gatherings and have some of your own traditions too, or the empty-nester trying to figure out how to spend time with all of your precious kiddos, you're likely going to end up compromising somewhere.

A couple of years ago, I did family therapy with an adult daughter and her mother. This very topic was at the heart of their conflict. The daughter and her brother had their own kids and spouse’s families they were also trying to navigate the holidays with. The mom I was working with was struggling to prioritize two competing values: she and her husband did not want to be alone on Christmas Day. She also wanted both of her kids and her grandchildren to all be together on the same day, but did not want to compromise on the day. With all the families involved, the kids could not make things align. For a time, they tried to do several different gatherings in one day, but were burning out. What I began to sense was that if mom did not decide on what she would be willing to compromise on, her kids were going to decide for themselves, and she would be at the mercy of whatever they decided. Eventually mom focused in on what really mattered most to her, and yielded on the rest. The net result was that she got the thing she valued most and her kids didn’t feel like they were letting everyone down.

Identifying and advocating for what makes your holidays special can make for less stressful, more meaningful holidays for you and your family.

We all want, and likely deserve our ideal holiday. But deciding for ourselves what we are willing to let go of is actually a win-win. It allows us to hold onto the most important things to us and prevents the people we care about from feeling like the bad guys for taking away what matters most. Identifying and communicating to your loved ones what your most important values are sets you up for a holiday season you can look back on with joy.

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7 Minute Shift

(Because you can’t do anything with quality in 5 minutes and who the hell has 10 minutes lying around!)

1.Picture and/or write down what a “perfect” holiday would look like to you. If you could make all of the decisions, how would you structure it? Where would you go (or not go)? Who would be included (or not included)? What would you do (or not do)?

2. Make your “perfect” holiday into a bulleted list (i.e., I would see these people:___, I would host/not host, etc.)

3. Star the top 5 items for your ideal holiday and then circle the top two from that list of five.

4. Make at least one of those two things a “non-negotiable” for you this holiday season, and be willing to compromise on the rest.

Looking for More?

If the holidays bring up old or unaddressed pain in yourself or your relationships, you don’t have to manage it alone. At All Things New Therapy, I help women and couples in Minnesota connect to themselves or each other again. Schedule a free consultation or learn more about Therapy Intensives today.