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Strategies for Surviving Holiday Dinners, Family
Events, and Other War Zones
Excerpt From
The Relationship Handbook: How to
Understand and Improve Every Relationship in
Your Life
No matter how
well we may have weathered our basic training,
nothing can fully prepare us for the front lines
of family gatherings. We’re in the thick of it,
dodging live ammunition, and fighting the urge
to return to our old, reliable patterns that
helped us to survive while we were growing up.
We may have mastered our relationship skills in
one-on-one relationships.
We may have
improved our romantic relationships, our
professional relationships and our friendships.
And we may have even improved our family
relationships—one family member at a time. But
when we’re sitting around the holiday dinner
table or socializing at a wedding reception with
our entire family, it’s an entirely different
experience. For one thing, when we’re with our
entire family, we have to juggle a number of
different relationships at the same time.
Our attention is
divided at best, and for many of us, our
awareness deserts us completely after the first
major skirmish. We feel like we’re surrounded
and have to defend ourselves from sneak attacks.
We often feel that retreat is not an option.
When we are cornered, we often believe that the
only way that we can survive is to fight our way
out, new relationship skills be damned. While
most people assume that General Sherman was
referring to the Civil War when he stated, “War
is hell,” in fact, he was referring to a
particularly memorable Thanksgiving dinner with
his family. This also explains why he could send
his troops into battle without a second thought,
but that the very mention of cranberry sauce
would reduce him to tears. Bearing this in mind,
here are some essential tips for surviving your
next family gathering.
TIP #1: GO
EASY ON YOURSELF!
The first, and most important survival tip is to
remember that navigating and surviving family
gatherings takes exceptional skill and often
quite a bit of practice. We will not be able to
transform our entire family dynamic between the
salad course and the pumpkin pie. In fact, we
may not be able to change our family dynamic at
all—and it’s important that we accept that we
don’t need to. It’s not our responsibility to
help our family members resolve their issues.
We’re only responsible for resolving our
responses to their issues. Our objective is to
maintain our own safety and validation accounts,
focus our awareness, and survive the family
event reasonably unscathed. However, maintaining
our awareness while we’re relating to our
families takes practice! We must go easy on
ourselves. We may react when we would rather
respond. We may be drawn into old arguments.
Whatever happens, we need to accept that it is
perfect. We are doing our best, and that’s all
we can ever ask of ourselves. And remember that
our awareness that we’re acting out an old
pattern is, in itself, a change in that pattern!
As we develop our awareness, we will spend less
time caught in our old patterns. Over time, our
awareness will help us to make lasting and
permanent changes in those patterns.
TIP #2: GO
EASY ON YOUR FAMILY
This piece of advice is equally as important as
going easy on ourselves, but it’s often a bit
more challenging to follow. Essentially, we must
be willing to forgive our relatives for
everything. We must be able to accept that they
only ever did the best they could at any given
time. We need to begin to recognize and relate
to our families as people instead of as family
members. We need to begin to know them for who
they are, and not simply for who they are to us.
When we embrace the truth that even our family
members are individualized aspects of All That
Is, our relationships with our families will
shift dramatically. Our family members are some
of the most powerful teachers we will ever
encounter in our lives. They also tend to be the
most accurate and powerful mirrors for us,
which, of course, is why we often find it so
difficult to love and accept our family members
unconditionally. In order to love our family
members, we would also need to be able to love
and accept ourselves. Even so, we can love our
family members unconditionally and still only
choose to sit down to eat with them once a year.
TIP #3: USE
THE BATHROOM AS A SANCTUARY WHEN NEEDED
When we are aware that we feel triggered by a
family member, we can simply choose to excuse
ourselves and visit the bathroom. The bathroom
is the one place that we can be assured of our
privacy, and we can stay there as long as we
need to. We can use the bathroom as a sanctuary
where we can regain our composure and gather our
strength so that we feel safe enough to return
to the battle. If any of our family members are
indelicate enough to comment on how much time we
seem to be spending in the bathroom, we can
always plead an upset stomach or a weak bladder.
TIP #4: LOSE
THE BATTLE TO WIN THE WAR
We have to be very clear about our objectives in
terms of our family relationships. If our
ultimate goal is to improve our family
relationships, we have to be willing to stay
focused on the big picture. The most difficult
lesson for most of us to accept is that in order
to win the war, we have to be willing to lose
the battle. Our long-term objective is to feel
more safe and more validated in our family
relationships. To reach this goal, we must help
our family members to feel safe and validated.
In order to do this, we must be absolutely clear
that we are capable of meeting our own safety
and validation needs. We often experience our
families as competitive environments. Our old
blueprints tell us that there’s a limited amount
of safety and validation available, and that we
must compete with the other members of our
family to meet our needs. We insult and snipe at
each other because we can only feel safe and
validated if the balance in our accounts is
greater than the balance in everyone else’s
accounts.
The more we care
about earning other people’s approval and
validation, the more vulnerable we are. When one
of our family members makes a comment designed
to make us feel less valid, we do not need to
defend ourselves. We can recognize that this
person is asking to be validated, and we can
validate them. Sometimes, this means letting
them think that we are less successful,
accomplished, and generally wonderful than we
truly are. We must be willing to lose every
single family argument we encounter. Letting our
family members win the argument allows them to
feel safe and validated. As long as we remember
that we create our own safety and validation,
and we do not need to compete with our family
members, we can lose the argument because it
will help us to win the war. We must let our
family members believe that they are right about
whatever the issue is, no matter how blatantly
wrong they actually are. We know the truth. That
will have to be enough for us.
TIP #5:
ALWAYS, EVER, NEVER
If we want to relate to our family members as
they are now and not as we remember them being
in the past, we must eliminate three words from
our vocabulary: always, ever and never. In the
lexicon of family “discussions,” always, ever
and never are relationship air-raid sirens. They
signal that an attack has been launched and it’s
time to duck and cover. Specifically, we must
avoid some of our favorite statements in our
family relationships such as, “You always behave
this way,” “When have you ever supported me?”
and “You never give me any credit.”
If we find
ourselves using any of these words in a similar
context, it’s a red flag that we’re focused on
the past and not on the present. Likewise, when
our family members use these words about us,
they’re relating to us as we were, not as we
are. As soon as we become aware that we are
using these words, we must stop. It’s likely
that our use of these words has made our family
member feel unsafe and invalid. We can apologize
for having used one of these words, and
acknowledge that we have been unfair. Something
about the current discussion has triggered an
unpleasant association for us.
If appropriate, we can rephrase
the statement, keeping it specific to the
present. If we’re on the receiving end of
always, ever, never statements, we can choose to
respond, rather than to react. In the middle of
a family get-together, the wisest choice is
often to deflect the statement, perhaps even
acknowledge that the statement may have some
validity when applied to the past, and then
change the subject. If the discussion has
uncovered an old wound, the wound will still be
there for us to heal at a more appropriate time
and in a more appropriate environment.
Kevin B. Burk is the author of The
Relationship Handbook: How to Understand and
Improve Every Relationship in Your Life.
Visit
www.EveryRelationship.com for a FREE report
on creating AMAZING Relationships.
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