For some, the holidays are synonymous with a strong sense of familial closeness and love. However, this is not the case with many family gatherings, where relatives trigger each other, and chaos quickly ensues. If this describes your experience with the holidays, then this article is for you.

I’ll never forget one Christmas break during my second year in medical school. I hadn’t been home for two years because of study and work demands. I was excited to see my family. Within five minutes, my mother launched into a fight that had started two years earlier. She picked it up almost to the sentence. I was both dumbfounded and upset. This wasn’t part of my vacation plans.

This isn’t an uncommon occurrence.  You’ve waited all year to be with those who you love, and people aren’t getting along. It goes both ways in that loneliness is also magnified. The medical wards are usually full because many patients have increased problems around drugs and alcohol. It doesn’t make sense, except it does if you understand the mismatch between the conscious and unconscious brain and the nature of triggers. So what happens?  Happy holidays – not

Triggers

Any time you are anxious or angry, you’ve been triggered. Your nervous system has connected a current situation to a similar unpleasant past event. It doesn’t matter if the present or prior event represented a true threat. It just has to be perceived that way and the body will secrete stress hormones in its effort to resolve the problem. The sensation created by these chemicals is anxiety. Anxiety is the result of the reaction, not the cause. When you can’t solve the issue, more hormones are secreted, and you’ll become angry.

The reason why family dynamics can be so volatile, is that most of your reactions are programmed by your parents during the first 12 years of life, especially the first two. It matters little what your parents teach or preach; it’s their behaviors and attitudes that become embedded in your nervous system. If you have come from an abusive family, your reactions to the present will be intense, although the present “danger” might be minimal. It is well-documented in the ACE (adverse childhood experiences) studies that the incidence of chronic pain, anxiety, depression, obesity, heart disease and suicide are higher than the norm. You needed to be hypervigilant as a child and it doesn’t change as you age. You are and will continue to be hyper-reactive out of proportion to the circumstance. All of this is exacerbated in families dealing with chronic pain.

During the Holidays, you are around the sources of your triggers from your parents, siblings, children and other relatives. No wonder they can be problematic. Landmines are everywhere.

How did this happen? I watch parents with babies and young children laugh, hold and play with them. It’s a precious time and they would do anything for them. Yet by five or six years-old, there is often a lot of arguing and fighting between parents and children. Suffering from chronic pain doesn’t help. I don’t have to detail what frequently happens during the teen years. The household can be a battlefield — a war without any hope of an end. I don’t how common this scenario is, but I am seeing it frequently in my practice. I only need to ask a few questions and be observant. Many family situations are intolerable.

Learned behaviors

The problem is that we program our own triggers into our offspring. They watch their parents become upset with them or each other and they learn their own behaviors in response to similar stressors. Then they become the cause of deep reactions in their parents. Why else would you yell at this person who used to be this incredibly wonderful child you brought into this world? But you are the adult and you are now in the same boxing ring as your 12-year-old. It’s your role and responsibility to provide a safe environment where your family can feel safe and nurtured. Only then can your child connect with his or her creativity and thrive.

You also may be critical of them. Really?? Anytime you are critical of someone, you have projected your view of you onto them. Remember that you are the one who taught them these behaviors that are now upsetting to you. It is remarkable the number of friends we have whose parents continue to be incredibly critical of them well into adulthood. The negativity is often intense and occurs in the face of the son or daughter doing the best they can to help and be supportive. The intensity of the verbal barrage is unbelievable to me and seems to worsen with age.

So, you have planted your own landmines. Would you yell at a stranger with the same intensity that you talk to your child or spouse? How do you think you appear to them when you are upset? Is that what you want your children to see?

Now it’s the Christmas season, and these deep triggers are coming back into your world. You have missed your family and want to be with them. What are you going to do? How are you going to handle being triggered, because it is inevitable you will be set off at some level. The two faces of Christmas

Here are a few suggestions, most of which I have learned the hard way.

• Remember the problem with the strong familial triggers and concentrate on enjoying your family. Play may be challenging, but it’s also the reason you want to be with them.
• Don’t give any unasked-for advice. They have survived the year without you and have you ever heard of a child listening to a parent’s criticism at any age?
• Remember that when you are volunteering advice, you are really saying, “You aren’t good enough the way you are.” That is probably what your parents did to you when you were young. It’s also why most of us have the “not good enough” voice in our heads.
• Visualize yourself being angry and what your family is seeing when you’re in that state. Be the person you want others to be.
• If you get upset, quickly leave the room. Nothing is ever solved in a heated argument.
• Be curious and genuinely interested in what your family is up to.
• Don’t discuss your pain, medical care, politics, religion, or complain – about anything. After all, it is the season of joy regardless of your belief system.
• Read Parent Effectiveness Training by Dr. Thomas Gordon. It is a classic and the most influential book that I have ever read on any topic.

I want to re-emphasize the powerful irrational nature of being triggered. It is only you and not them that is responsible for your anger. (I well-know that it still feels like it is him or her that upset you). Own it. It is yours.

You’re the one who created the behavior in your child that is now upsetting you. Own that too! Remember how excited you were when they came into the world. Remember the good times and don’t spend time on past differences. Why? It’s done.

A Cigna insurance study in 2018 demonstrated about 40% of Americans feel socially isolated.(1) During my pain experience, loneliness might have been the one most crushing aspect of my ordeal. It was brutal. Connect with gratitude and remember how lucky you are to have friends and family. If you are someone reading this who is socially isolated, work on finding a way to re-connect with someone or give back. I am aware how terrible a feeling this is, and I’m really sorry. The Holidays do make it worse. But by being aware of the impact, you have a higher chance of dealing with it.

Make a commitment to enjoy your holiday season and if you detonate a landmine, use the situation as an opportunity to practice your own tools of staying connected and centered. Become the source of Holiday cheer!

1. Cigna U.S Loneliness Index (2018).

The post Holiday Landmines – Your Family first appeared on Back in Control.

The post Holiday Landmines – Your Family appeared first on Back in Control.

Our Christmas

Whatever holiday you celebrate, this time of year seems to revolve mostly around family, friends and re-connecting. There are lights, a sense of giving, and celebration. It was the one time of the year when my mother would calm down and we could relax for a few days. We had a quirky Christmas by any measure but it also added to the charm of it. We never put up our tree until Christmas Eve. After dark we would go to several Christmas tree lots and find a forlorn tree. They were always pretty bad. But we had some ornaments and bubble lights that seemed to make up for it. We covered almost every inch of the tree in tinsel. It worked and I loved sitting in the room with the tree and gifts. My father would take time out of his 100-hour work week as a small town doctor to spin the car on the empty, icy streets in downtown Newport, New Hampshire. We caroled with our church group for a couple of weeks, which was both fun and frightening, asking people for donations. A few times my father had the owner of the Western Auto store open it up on Christmas Eve to do our Christmas shopping. Over the years our family somehow seemed to rally together and enjoy Christmas. In the midst of a chaotic childhood it was magical.

Christmas 1964

Christmas lost

Then it wasn’t. Anxiety began to creep in without me recognizing it and when I tried to relax I would experience it even more strongly. As I dove deeper into depression in the midst of my chronic pain ordeal, Christmas became increasingly miserable. One of the hallmarks of anxiety and depression is that you feel that everyone else has it made except you. I was obsessed by what I did not have and became emotionally and socially isolated. Much of it was in my head as my friends were still around. I had no way of reaching out to them. As I interacted less with people my anxiety increased. I was convinced that no one wanted to hang out with me. My world was dark and the magic of Christmas made it worse.

The nightmare of Christmas

Christmas can be a nightmare for people suffering from chronic pain. One of the major causes of pain flare-ups is personal loss, and I see it in my patients every week. It takes only a few minutes to figure out which loss is driving the flare-up. The losses are significant and often catastrophic, such as losing a spouse, child, job, physical function, or reputation. Christmas magnifies this problem in that you are now reminded of a lifetime of losses. There are many friends and family who are no longer with you. There is also the loss of small children running around the house, jumping up and down to open their presents, and the knowledge that those days will never return. For myself, there were many holidays where I skied steep and deep powder and now my knees are not working so well.

What could have been

A friend of mine sent me this piece from Wikipedia:

Sehnsucht is a German noun translated as “longing”, “pining”, “yearning”, or “craving”, or in a wider sense a type of “intensely missing”. Sehnsucht represents thoughts and feelings about all facets of life that are unfinished or imperfect, paired with a yearning for ideal alternative experiences. It has been referred to as “life’s longings”; or an individual’s search for happiness while coping with the reality of unattainable wishes. Such feelings are usually profound, and tend to be accompanied by both positive and negative feelings.

Loss is permanent

As I discussed loss with my patients I have slowly realized that it is not possible to fully get over a deep loss; and the harder you try, the worse the pain. You are still thinking about it. The better alternative is to realize that you don’t have to get over your loss and understand it is now part of the fabric of your life. It is healthier to continue to acknowledge it, live with the unsettling emotions and continue to embrace your life. Remaining stuck in your pain is just another creative way of holding onto the victim role.

Then it hit me that living a successful life involves navigating loss. The list of losses you will experience over your lifetime is limitless. Memory, strength, endurance, friends, family, prestige, jobs, reputation–you can choose to dwell on them or understand that loss is at the core of living, with the final loss being your own existence.

Can you honor your life by enjoying the magic and connection of the holidays? Or will you get mired in the quicksand of frustration, consumed by what was or what might have been?

The post The Two Faces of Christmas first appeared on Back in Control.

The post The Two Faces of Christmas appeared first on Back in Control.