Before my career in psychotherapy, I worked as the head of marketing at a university. Whilst I was reasonably good in that field, I wanted a change and I started my professional training in 2005.
My work is long-term, open ended psychotherapy with individuals. I am quite analytical in my approach and my patients usually stay with me for a significant period of time. Typically, they visit me the same day, at the same time, every week.
Increased conflict around Christmas time
I take periodic breaks throughout the year, which my patients know well in advance. However Christmas tends to be the most difficult one as I find many of my patients start to struggle. They bring their own stories of what is happening within their own relationships and families, but there certainly tends to be an uptick in arguments.
I feel Christmas is loaded with an enormous amount of expectation. Many dates, like anniversaries or birthdays, hold similar pressure—but during Christmas time, there is almost this collective expectation we all buy into.
I believe a good example of how that manifests would be Christmas adverts. Usually, they present something extraordinarily removed from reality, in relation to how the day plays out and how families interact. I feel this unconscious process means we, as society and as individuals, have a habit of projecting a lot onto the day.
Paradoxically, Christmas is not going to sprinkle magic on any of your family dynamics, and because of the pressure we collectively put on the day, it’s actually likely to exacerbate any problems within them.
Why families argue more around Christmas time
One reason we have arguments around Christmas is the propensity to regress. This means we might be a fully functioning 30-year-old man or woman, with a successful career, a mortgage and responsibilities in the world, but when we go back into our family, especially with our siblings, we regress to being about twelve or thirteen.
We may then start squabbling over who got the biggest piece of Christmas cake or who is getting more attention from Mom and Dad. While these can seem like trivial issues, resentments can build up throughout the day.
Every area of contention can also be exacerbated by alcohol, because when we drink it, we usually lose the capacity to hold on to our thinking minds and be diplomatic.
Often we struggle to hold on to the bigger picture, which is that Christmas is only a day, it doesn’t really matter if we disagree about certain things—but throw alcohol into the mix and it’s like throwing a lit match into a powder keg of other issues.
The most common arguments at Christmas
In my experience, arguments start to brew well in advance of Christmas. I think one that is always quite high on the radar, but is particularly prevalent this year due to the cost-of-living crisis, is how much to spend on gifts.
The giving of gifts carries a lot of symbolism. In an ideal world, a gift should be given without any expectation of receiving something in return. But I believe, to a certain extent, all of us have a side to our character which feels the amount spent on someone else is a reflection of how much we love them and hope that in return they will reciprocate that love with a similar spend on us.
So, I think this is an area where there is real potential for conflict—unless there is a willingness from all parties to have an open dialogue about spending and put boundaries in place in advance.
Another issue I see come up quite a lot is disagreement about who we are celebrating the day with. Despite what we might see on television, we’re not only dealing with direct in-laws. Families could be navigating children from different parents or multiple sets of grandparents. So, who gets invited? Does everyone get on? Those questions can often cause conflict.
Another area where arguments can arise is when it comes to who is hosting the day. On one hand, it can appear like hosting is quite the sacrifice; after all, that person is obviously making their house welcoming, perhaps doing most of the cooking and arranging everything.
However, it also puts them in a position of power, because if you’re hosting, you can decide what happens on the day. For example, what time you sit down to eat and what’s on the menu. There can perhaps be resentment or envy towards the person who is hosting.
I would suggest envy is a feeling that arises quite a lot around the holidays. For example if someone is hosting and able to spend more money, that can evoke a lot of jealousy in some people.
Rather than to be able to sit with that feeling, make sense of it and think: “What does this mean about my own life?”, the way some of us cope with envy is to try to attack the other person and perhaps try to take something good away from them by making a personal comment about their home or their appearance.
How to deal with conflict at Christmas time
It’s important to remember that the majority of topics we argue over at Christmas hint at deeper issues. In my experience, families may fall out over politics or the size of the turkey, but it is never really about that. There are usually other problems that can’t really be spoken about, so they focus on these smaller issues on this particular day.
I often say to my patients that when it comes to relationships, there is a world based on power and control—where we might broadly say a lot of narcissistic relationships exist—and there is a world based on love.
If we’re living in a world based on love, and our relationships are based on love, then we can tolerate differences and things can be negotiated. But, if relationships are very much based on power and control, then any change or deviation from how things “should be” can feel very confronting.
What I would suggest is thinking about our needs well in advance of Christmas: What do I want to get from the day? What will ensure that my needs are met, without requiring me to be ruthless or selfish? For example, consider how much alcohol do I want to drink? How much money do I want to spend? How much time do I want to spend with certain people? What is a fair compromise?
After deciding what your needs are on the day, find an ally. If we’re in a partnership, our ally might be our partner, but it could be a friend or even our therapist. Recruit them and talk to them about what you are worried about and what is important to you.
You might say: “I’m a bit worried about spending too much time with my uncle, it would be really helpful if we can have a certain look or a word” or ask: “Could you just be mindful of the fact I am going to find this difficult.” We can ask our ally for support, so we don’t feel so alone with our experience on the day.
Setting boundaries
When it comes to negotiating your needs, consider: “What are my firm boundaries and what are my flexible boundaries?” A flexible boundary may be agreeing to drink a small amount of alcohol, but stopping after one or two, while a firm boundary might be a particular dietary requirement.
For example, I have a patient who has celiac disease, but for years felt unable to tell her sister she could not eat wheat. She feared she would belittle her and say: “Oh, just another of your fads.” So, this person would eat wheat on birthdays or Christmas and be very ill for days afterwards.
For her, it was hugely difficult to put those boundaries in place. So on the day, my client refused to eat wheat and her sister did exactly what was expected. But because the patient had recruited an ally, we had planned in advance and she knew that her needs mattered, my patient was able to protect that firm boundary and say: “No, I can’t eat that.”
I recently had another situation where a patient in their mid-twenties was struggling for money. They were saving up for a deposit on their first house and did not want to spend vast quantities on their family’s Christmas gifts.
However, they come from a home where love is expressed through spending quite large sums of money. To this specific family, it appears the more you spend on someone the more you love them, but gifts are also used as a weapon to shut down any further dialogue or doubt there might be about the relationships.
So, in advance of Christmas, the patient said: “Look, I am trying to save a deposit, I am making priorities about the things that matter most in my life, so I am setting a budget of £20 per head and I ideally would only like to buy for the children.”
This initially went down like a lead balloon, because their actions threatened the whole family structure. After that, there was a really difficult process of negotiation. However the client stuck to their firm boundary and said that, particularly during the cost-of-living crisis, spending large amounts on gifts felt extravagant and unnecessary.
They chose to stick to their guns in the face of the family and if we do that, we have to risk abandonment. Even though that may be unlikely, going against the herd can be very difficult and can invoke feelings of abandonment.
Setting boundaries can be tough, but I believe the best way to do so is to calmly identify them well in advance of the event and find your ally. It becomes very difficult to maintain boundaries alone, because in family settings around Christmas, there is usually “group think” playing out. It’s almost like each family has its own culture and set of unwritten rules. So anyone going against culture is going to face backlash.
An expression which I use a lot in my clinical work is: “Just because you see a car crash, it doesn’t mean you need to join it.” When it comes to arguments, it may be they erupt around us and there’s not very much we can do about it. But just because other people are arguing, regressing and choosing to engage in conflict, it doesn’t mean we need to get involved. We can step back and hold on to our own thinking mind.
Mark Vahrmeyer is an integrative psychotherapist who co-runs psychotherapy clinics situated in both Brighton and Lewes in East Sussex, offering psychotherapy to individuals, couples, families and groups.
All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
As told to Newsweek editor, Monica Greep.
