Surviving The Holidays

Many of us have complex relationships with our families, and no time brings that out more than the holidays. Today I am sharing some tools to help you navigate the nuances of your family dynamic and hopefully skip some of the drama so that you can enjoy the time with your loved ones. 
    

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Transcript

Welcome to " You need a coach bitch with Chris Hale. I'm your host Chris Hale. I'm a certified life coach that helps queer creatives. Take their passion, turn it into a purpose and get paid. If you are looking to make an impact on the world with your work by dismantling internalized, oppressive thought systems by using coaching spirituality and a lot of cursing, you are in the right place.

So let's get to work.

 Hey friends, how is everything? How are you feeling? I'm doing pretty good today. Um, I'm recording this on a Tuesday, which is not normal. I normally record on Wednesdays. Um, but it's been a pretty chill day. I didn't have a lot to do today and I was able to kind of get this all sorted. But if you're listening to this on the day it comes out, it's December 15th.

What are you making that mean? ? Uh, some of you might not even know what you're making that mean, and some of you might have very clear thoughts about. It means for it to be December 15th, and this just could be a good time to check in. I was actually chatting with a coach friend yesterday and we were talking about something our teacher, Brooke Cillo, used to recommend, and that is to schedule time to think, like intentional time that you just think about your life, your goals, your business, et cetera.

Um, and it can be such a fascinating thing to just watch your mind. , it's like a very meta mindfulness activity. Um, it's kind of like that part of meditation where you just allow thoughts to pass, right? And we, and you just, you know, you're like letting them pass by and you're not getting wrapped up in them.

But we're like taking that and making that the entire exercise and actually like paying attention to them. Right. But like, not with judgment. So we're kind of just looking at what our brain is offering us and using it at the time to like ideate and iterate and all of that stuff. So you could like pick a circumstance to focus on and just let your mind offer whatever it wants.

No judgment, just pure curiosity. Don't try to coach yourself or change what you think. Um, you're just gonna like watch your thoughts and. . See how that goes. Right. I have not specifically done this myself, but I might give it a try. I work from home and I spend a lot of time alone, so I kind of take for granted that I'm always thinking, but it, this is different, right?

This as a purpose, other than just like allowing the mind to wander. Um, we're using it to learn a little bit more about ourselves and like deciding what we want to be open to, right? Like what do I wanna be open to learning or understanding about what's going on in my. That's not what I'm doing all day when I'm moving from task to task, um, or like waking up from an nap or killing time or between clients.

Right. So anyway, I'll let you know how it goes if I actually decide to do it. And maybe you can let me know how it goes for you if you decide to just. Be intentional about scheduling. Time to think. Today though, we're gonna talk about how to prepare yourself for the holidays. So maybe you've already been around family and friends at Thanksgiving, um, and maybe you noticed that you didn't exactly have the time of your life.

Well, this is a great time to prepare for how you might want to show up for whatever holidays are coming up for you. You may even wanna like save and bookmark this episode as there are obviously lots of other occasions for like forced togetherness throughout the year, uh, no matter what like your religious or cultural traditions are, right?

Like maybe it's birthdays, whatever. It's like there will be togetherness. The first thing that I really wanna say is that if you like me, are queer and are a geriatric millennial or older, it's likely that you have a complex relationship with your family of origin. Now, obviously, that doesn't have to be true of you, and it also can be true.

For younger folks, right, who come from like conservative backgrounds or for anyone that's experienced like adverse child events that resulted in trauma, like regardless of sexuality, gender, age, et cetera. I do know. That it's, it's not always a given for younger generations though, that like family time means stress and drama, at least not necessarily for being Q plus, whereas I think a lot of us from older generations are still healing really from what it meant to grow up queer in a time where it was less accepted.

Um, and I wanna acknowledge the complexity because it's important to me that you know, that I know that this can be hard and I want to maybe help you let yourself, let it be okay that it is right, that it is hard. You don't need to try to fix it. Um, you don't need to try to make it better. But there are also some things that you can adjust.

so that you can enjoy the time more if an, if that's in fact what you want to do. And you know, maybe after this episode you'll decide you don't want to, that you're like, Nope, you know what? I'm good. I don't. I don't wanna see my family. But if you do, , some of these tools are gonna help you to just have a better experience.

So the first thing I wanna bring attention to is the fact that a lot of us feel obligated to spend time with our families around the holidays. And this is often what is leading to our heightened emotional state. It's all the shoulds, and we've discussed shoulds before. Shoulds never feel good and they can lead to resent.

A lot of us are people pleasers and are codependent because of the family dynamic we grew up in, and this results in us putting others' desires ahead of our own. , some of these shoulds. They surround family traditions and believing that we need to uphold them. Some of them just come from the, the definitions we have for the roles we see ourselves in, right?

Like being a good child means letting your parents stay at your house for as long as they want, even if it's not convenient for you. Uh, being a nice person means you go at the flow and do things you don't want to, to be easygoing and amenable, and amen. . Being polite means you listen to your homophobic uncle.

Go on about drag queens being groomers, and how being gay is being pushed onto children too young. Well, fuck that noise. First of all, there is very little in your life you actually are obligated to do. , you're not obligated to do any of those things if you don't want to. You do not have to uphold family traditions.

You do not have to listen to anybody talk about anything that you don't want to to hear , right? You certainly don't have to go or participate in anything that you do not wanna participate in. And I like to always kind of go to extreme examples to help people wrap their brains around this a little bit more.

And that is like if you have kids,  or someone else, you, you take care of, you don't have to take care of them, right? You don't. Or maybe you take care of your, your parents, right? You don't have to take care of them. Literally, no one is making you, you are choosing to do that. Now, if you don't, there may be consequences for not taking care of your children, and they vary depending on your race and socioeconomic status, but you do not have to.

So if that's true, you certainly don't have to do any of those other things. You do not have to spend Christmas with your family or tolerate conversations or behavior that offend you or upset you. But let's talk about why you might do some of those things. Even if you're telling yourself you don't want to, you probably have some conflicting desires and one is winning out over the other.

If we go back to the kids example, you may have a desire that your children are not taken away from. . And again, this is not really a fear for white middle class families. They're not as heavily policed as black and brown low income families, and that's just facts. But still, you might be motivated by a fear of a negative outcome here, like whatever that might mean for your family.

So you tell yourself you do not have a choice. . And so your desire to not take care of them, right? Like maybe in a moment, I'm not saying all the time, but like you might have a moment where you're like, oh, I really don't want to cook dinner tonight. Or I really don't want to have to do carpool or I really like whatever, insert whatever.

Whatever thing is you're really feeling like you don't wanna have to do, you don't have to do it. But like that desire to not take care of them or not meet their needs is outweighed by your desire to both care for them out of love, cuz that is true. That is real. And it's also. Driven out of your avoidance of some other insert negative consequence, right?

Like it's a twofold, you obviously love your kids and you want, you wanna care for them, but there's also that fear of the negative consequence, even if it's just your own shaming for not being quote unquote, a good enough parent, right? That's often, we've talked about this before, we're trying to avoid our own negative self-talk, right?

The way that we are gonna beat ourselves up for not living up to our expectations of ourselves. . So if we look back to right, knowing that it's, there are no obligations, if we go back to tolerating your drunk, toxic uncle, you're avoiding some other possible discomfort and accepting the one that you're currently feeling, right?

So maybe you're believing that if you confront him, it might cause a scene or that your mom might get upset. So you choose the piece of others over your own. You're prioritizing your imagined. Like peace of your mother, cuz we don't know whether she'll be upset or not, but you've imagined that it, it might upset her and you're prioritizing that imagined piece over your own piece in the moment and you're like making yourself tolerate this negativity.

And this is just good to know. We wanna just be aware of this. And also that you're not obligated to do it, you're, you're doing it right for a myriad of reasons, which probably includes some level of people, pleas. , right? But it's also some level of self-preservation too, right? So, you know, you don't know my, what might happen if you disagree with this uncle or you voice your actual opinion.

It could end up feeling like a very unsafe situation for yourself. So there are like several, could be several different motivations here. So you can prepare for that, right? And decide how, what you might wanna.  in that situation that maybe feels like some sort of compromise, um, right, that doesn't feel like it's going to blow up the event or cause more drama, but allows you to take care of yourself.

So maybe you excuse yourself from the conversation, right? You do not have to stay engaged in any conversation that you don't want to out of like an obligation to come off as being a nice person. And that's a great segue into. Like talking about expectations because you have them for yourself and you have them For others, it would be insane for you to go into a family event with said uncle and expect him to be any different than he always is.

But we do this all the time, like we think to ourselves. Maybe this time he'll be different. Maybe this time I'll have, you know, a nice quiet holiday where no one yells at each other. Maybe my mom won't be oblivious to my needs. , but like coming from a family like, but for me, right? Coming from a family where like chairs have literally been thrown at people, it's unlikely that there's not gonna be some kind of drama if my extended family gets together.

Hence why I no longer get together with my extended family, right? . But this is the shit that gets us into trouble. Like the, the, the places where we're hoping for things to be different, right? We're hoping that our family is going to be different. We start to idealize these events, right? Instead of being real about them.

And so what we want to do is expect that everyone's going to be and do exactly what they always are and do, and that includes, . Do not expect that you will all of a sudden be a completely different person no matter how much personal work you have done. Get real. . Now you might be better than you were before, and I even hate the using the word better, but like you might be able to show up more present or more embodied than you have in the past, especially if you've done therapy and coaching and you've done work on yourself.

So I want you to like applaud yourself and expect that you're gonna be able to access some tools, but I don't want you to be unrealistic about showing up and being some Gandhi, right? Like that's just not gonna happen. . Um, if you have experienced trauma, expect that your nervous system's gonna be dysregulated and prepare for how you will manage yourself once you realize that it is, we talked about this in the burnout episode, right?

Sometimes we don't realize when we're triggered, and then we go into dysregulation, and then we realize after the fact, so we don't have control over these kinds of triggers. . Um, and we can't expect ourselves to, but we do have control over the not so subconscious ones. Like when your dad asks you, when you're planning on giving him grandkids, you know, he is gonna ask.

You know, and right now you just work yourself up. You get mad now and don't prepare yourself for how you wanna handle it. You just prepare yourself to get mad, but not for how you're going to deal with being. And I don't, I'm not talking about planning for like a snarky reply. I mean like preparing for what it's actually going to feel like in your body when he asks it.

Like when he says the words, the way we do this is by identifying what you make it means when he asks this question, so maybe you make it mean something like he's trying to control my body. And when you make it mean that you get angry, and your response from anger is Stay out of my uterus. Which Avi, he should do, no one should be in your uterus, but if you were responding from love provided you do love your father, um, you might.

Interpret this question different. Like think about what it might like, what, how you might actually hear that question if you were hearing it through love. And then how might you respond? There is no right answer here. You might still want to ask him to stay out of your uterus, but that can come from love and not from anger, right?

It can come from a better feeling, feeling.  than the one you tru. You the one you currently have by default, because you haven't managed your mind around that interaction. And managing our mind around those, in those interactions means managing our expectations, right? Managing your expectations is how you can truly take control over the experience that you have.

And then in terms of the roles, we talked about roles earlier, you get to define the roles you play. So how do you wanna define your role as a. How does that differ from the other roles that you play, right? As a partner or a child or a sibling, you might think that you should just be the same person for everyone by default, but who do you actually want to be?

That's a really good question to ask yourself and remember how we show up, right? The actions that we take are going to be driven by the thoughts and feelings we have, so. You wanna choose the thoughts that you're gonna have about your family and yourself ahead of time, and practice them and practice embodying them and dropping into the emotion that they create so that you are ready for them when you are with these people.

Right? So you're ready to like call on those thoughts and feelings and to act from them. And so this is where like being honest with yourself is gonna be really important. Um, if only so that you're, you are validating your own desires, right? Even if you're not gonna act on them, we wanna be like, clear about what we want.

So an example would be like, everybody wants to go to a movie right? On like Boxing Day, but you really wanna stay home for some alone time, but you have this story that you need to do what? But you have this story that you need to do what everyone else is doing. Well, at least be honest with yourself about your true desire without judgment, right?

That actually what you would prefer is being alone, but that you're gonna go, but that you're choosing to go. And why are you choosing to go? So, like we talked about earlier, you might be doing it to avoid conflict, and that's totally okay, right? We wanna be kind and gentle to our. With wherever you're at in your journey.

Like a lot of times when my clients learn about boundaries, they can get very rigid and demanding with themselves, right? To never people please again, and to have very clear boundaries that they always uphold. But the truth is, any change in behavior is going to feel uncomfortable for you, and it's gonna feel uncomfortable for the other people and not because of some nefarious reason.

Like I, I fucking hate all these me. About setting boundaries, right? And people saying things like, the people who get mad when you set boundaries are mad because they benefited from the person you were before, like blah, blah, blah, whatever. And they're trying to control you and they're just, you're not useful to them anymore.

Listen, that might be true sometimes, but I want you to hear this. Most people are not crazed, narciss. That word gets thrown around way too much, right? They're just thrown off by changes in the dynamic. And when you believe it's about them wanting to control you, it just makes them the enemy, and it has you setting boundaries from a defensive place, and that is not what we want because you'll end up trying to control their behavior.

Boundaries are for you. But they're not meant to be used as a defense. They aren't meant to be used to control how other people behave.  and setting these boundaries is gonna feel uncomfortable for you because you're asking yourself to do something other than what is pre-programmed and therefore known and easy, which is really what your brain likes the most.

It wants to continue to do things that are easy. So just expect that any process of setting boundaries, and I'll probably do a whole episode on it. I think this is a good enough little taste of it for now, but like that process is always gonna be uncomfortable. The last thing I think is very important to note is that when you're making the decision to spend time with your family and they're gonna be exactly who they are, you need to accept the fact that you are choosing everything that comes with it.

Everything is positives and negatives. If you know that you're triggered, and I mean like in the trauma sense, not just like that, you have unpleasant feelings around your family, um, and you decide to spend time with them, you're choosing that emotional and physical experience. This is where acceptance for ourselves.

And your experience really comes into play. These are just feelings and sensations in your body, and they're temporary. If you have tools to regulate, be ready to rely on them. Make a plan for ways in which you can take space to implement them.  if you don't have tools. There are lots of them on the gram, different accounts that focus specifically on like the vagus nerve and the parasympathetic nervous system and right how to access that.

Like there's so much out there. But this could also be a great time to start considering, right, that like therapy could be really helpful and that's just something to think about. In the meantime, if you're down to the wire and you know you're gonna be seeing your family really soon. Hit up the resources online.

There are so many, but like we wanna be taking care of ourselves. I want you to take care of yourself and don't be in judgment of the reality of the way things are for you. Because the real pain comes from telling ourselves that we should be different. And let's be honest, we all got told that enough from everyone else when we were growing.

We really wanna stop doing it to ourselves, like, don't continue to bully yourselves by trying to make yourself wrong for who you are. And that's what this really, this whole episode is about, is really about that like absolute acceptance, radically accepting everything for what it is, gives us the opportunity to show up and be who we want to.

in any situation. I hope this helps. If you have any questions or anything that comes up for you listening to this, let me know and I can probably address it in next week's episode. Um, other than that, if you're not on my mailing list, Get on it because I'm sending out weekly emails with like a recap of the podcast and the link to sign up for single sessions.

If you're interested in single sessions, remember that's for anyone who has had a relationship with coaching in the past, right? Whether with me or with somebody else. Um, and if you're new to coaching, you've never had a coaching, you are interested. Book a consult bitch. Get on it. Let's talk about how we can work together in 2023.

Have an awesome day, friends. Bye.



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