3. How to Handle Critical Family Comments (Especially During the Holidays)

Managing family interactions during the holidays while protecting your mental health. Family criticism. Hurtful comments. Emotional triggers. If spending time with your family often leaves you feeling tense, angry, or not enough, you’re not alone — especially during the holidays. 

How do you handle unsupportive comments from family?

In this episode, I talk about what makes criticism from parents and relatives hit so hard, and why even the smallest comments can leave a lasting mark. 

I posted about my Korean parents on LinkedIn, which opened up a flood of responses across cultures, kicking off this episode around how to handle critical remarks from family, especially our parents.

This isn’t about blaming anyone or cutting people off. It’s about seeing clearly, responding intentionally, and protecting your peace — even when nothing around you changes.

If you’re walking into family gatherings already bracing for impact, this conversation might help you choose a different way to show up.

Transcript

If your family leans a little more critical like mine, where they’re always making comments about your weight, your work, or your love life, that doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t love you. Today, we’re talking about how to handle those moments with more grace—especially with the holidays coming up. Because let’s be real: this time of year means family get-togethers for a lot of us, and that can be stressful. If family time tends to push your buttons, this episode will help you create a little more peace and hopefully less emotional chaos.

You’re listening to This Is How You Think, the podcast that helps you build a healthier mindset. I’m your host Jule Kim. Let’s dive in.

I recently wrote a post on LinkedIn saying how the first thing my mom will say is, you’ve gained weight, or, are you gaining weight? This is how she says hello. She doesn’t start by asking how are you, or I’ve missed you, no because that would be too easy.

That's just how it’s always been in my family. My parents have always made comments like get your hair out of your face, why are you walking like that, your voice is so annoying.

They obviously don’t hold back. Case in point: you should have seen my mom the first year I went to college. It’s my freshman year and it's the holidays. I’m back home for vacation, and I have not only put on the freshman 15, it's more like the freshman 25. 

I arrive to their house from the airport, and I'm standing outside at the front door. My mom opens the door and she literally gasps: I never thought you’d be one to get fat. For the rest of that visit, I wouldn’t even be done eating and she would take my plate and say, you’ve had enough. 

If you’re thinking that I hate my parents, I promise you I don’t - we have a very good relationship. And the truth is also that they are the typical savage af Korean parents.

Now the comments I got on my LinkedIn post prove that this isn’t unique to my parents or even the Korean culture, because there were comments like this one from Yinka: Wow Asian parents are clearly cousins of Nigerian parents. 

And she wasn’t the only one - there were so many more people chiming in: and Caribbean parents, and Madagascans, and Indians, and Jamaicans, and Soviets! 

Honestly, I wasn’t expecting that level of response, so it’s nice to know that I’m not the only one with savage parents who obviously love you but also don’t feel the need to hold back, like ever.

As I was reading the comments, I saw this question from Krystell: What happened that made you realize that criticism equals care? I find it hard to deal with unsupportive remarks, especially from family.

This is a really good question, and and a lot of people feel the same, so let’s get into it. 

In a lot of ways, I think that learning to deal with your family, it's kind of like having the final boss in a game. If you have ever played a game that has levels you have to ascend, a lot of times, games are designed where to finish the game you have to beat a final boss, and the boss is really really hard. You often try and fail multiple times before you finally win.

This is pretty similar to us dealing with our families, especially when it comes to setting boundaries and speaking up and figuring out how to just be with the people in your family. In all of the clients I’ve coached, there are two buckets of people that’s always the hardest to handle: the people at work and your family, and it’s almost always harder for clients to deal with their family because most see a job as something you can move on from, but not your family. 

What I’ve noticed is that as you grow up, as you redefine your identity, as you come into who you really are, adjusting how you exist with your family isn’t easy because you have patterns on both sides of how you’ve always reacted to each other. Plus, family will often hang on to an outdated image of who they think you are and vice versa, which is where a lot of the friction comes from.

What I have learned over the past 10 years is that if you want any measure of real peace with people in general, but especially your family, the name of the game is acceptance. And what I mean by that is to see the reality of who these people are, whether it’s your parents, your siblings, your cousins, your aunts and uncles, or your in-laws–and instead of resisting who they are, acceptance is seeing the reality and working with that.

And no, acceptance doesn’t mean you’re okay with or approve of what people have done or what’s happened. It means you’re letting the truth of what is, be there. When it comes to family, acceptance is seeing your family clearly — their patterns, their limitations, their humanity — where you stop expecting and pushing them to become people who they aren’t.

In essence, acceptance is neutrality, because it’s seeing the truth of what’s really going on, without judgment or putting your spin on things. If you can get to this neutral space, that’s when your family’s words stop cutting as deep. Because you’re no longer waiting for them to change in order for you to feel okay.

And just to be clear - you can accept who your family is and set boundaries. I accept that my mom is critical AND I still tell her when she’s crossed a line. You can understand where someone's coming from and still say 'I appreciate the concern, let’s leave it there.” And then walk away if you need to. 

Acceptance isn't about being a doormat and it doesn't mean you have to put up with abuse or stay in situations that harm you.  It's about seeing clearly through the noise so you can choose how to respond instead of just reacting.

So when people ask me how do I laugh at my parents and how do I not take what they say personally, this is it right here. I accept who they are and I'm not resisting it. I also know who I am, and I don't feel the need to resist them or push against their perceptions of me. The reason I’m able to do this is because I’m always asking myself the question I give to my coaching clients: what’s really going on here? What’s the objective truth?

And when I answer that question, the truth is that my parents are really old at 85, meaning they’re from a completely different world, a different culture, and a different generation. They immigrated to the United States, and their entire mindset has primarily been about survival. When I was born, they had a grand total of $600 in their bank account, which is roughly $2400 today, not a whole lot of money.

They haven’t been taught how to regulate their own emotions, nor have they had access to the wealth of self-help and therapy tools available to me. In their world, they see these critical comments as their way of protecting me and making me better.

A classic example of this is when my mom says, “You’ve gained weight,” what she’s really saying is, “The world is cruel to women who don’t maintain their looks, and I can’t protect you.”

That’s when I realized that the underlying truth here is that their criticism wasn’t about my worth. It was about their fear.

So ask yourself - what’s one thing your family says to you, vs what might they really mean? And if you’re brave enough to have a real conversation with them about this, I would. But the key is to go into the conversation without expecting anything to come out of it, other than you being honest - not judgmental - about how you feel.

And I get it, not everyone has a family or parents where you can have a safe conversation without them lashing out - I’d actually say even I don’t have that with my parents because my mom is the epitome of hurt people hurt people - like when I ask her not to do something, sometimes she gets pissed and she retaliates with her words. It’s uncomfortable, and I get upset sometimes too, but I also know that we’ll be ok.

We would never have gotten to this place if I hadn’t finally opened up to my parents and told them how hurtful their words have been for me. I told them, sometimes the things you say really hurt my heart, and it lingers for a long time. I was 38, and that was the first time I’d ever confronted them and used my words to tell them how hard it’s been for me. All the other times, I might have acted mad, or I cried when my parents said some pretty messed up things, but I never came out and said I was hurting.

That ended up being the turning point for us - that’s when our relationship reached a new level of trust, because they knew I would tell them what I really thought or felt, which I hadn’t been doing before because I was afraid of them.

And again, I know that we all come from different people. The number one comment I got on my TikToks about my parents was “you’re lucky and my parents would never be like yours.” It’s true that not everyone might react the way my parents did. Only you can decide what’s right for you.

I also know that if nothing changes, then nothing changes. Sometimes we do our family a disservice by not giving them the chance to show us they’re actually better people than we think they are, because of our own fear of conflict or rejection or disappointment. We don’t even give them the chance because we’re so sure of how they’ll react based on our history with them, instead of giving them the choice based on who they are today.

With family in general, it can be challenging to evolve your relationship with them because these are usually the people who have known you the longest, so it can be a little like trying to move a river because of all the history and baggage you have together. And with your parents, you face additional complexities because the parent child relationship is a top down hierarchy. They’ve had authority over you in the past, which can make it a lot harder for you to see the path for yourself outside of their expectations. And this is even more the case if you’ve been raised in an extremely authoritarian culture like mine, because the patterns have been embedded since we were babies. If you think about it, as a child, you don't really question anything an adult tells you. You just take in what they say. If they tell you to do something, you generally just do it. If they tell you this is how something works you just believe them.

So when it comes to our family those patterns persist, which means it can be incredibly difficult to not just believe what they say whether it’s about how you look, or about how you're living life, or in the wrong profession. If they're always finding fault, if they're being very critical, that is the number one source of pain for a lot of us because the message that we’re continually receiving is that we’re not good enough. We believe and we’re afraid that this is the truth, which is why it hurts so much.

And here's the second piece that makes this even worse: we also believe they're trying to hurt us. We think they're being cruel on purpose, that they want to make us feel bad. So now we're dealing with a double whammy - we believe what they're saying is true AND we believe they're doing it to hurt us. But what I’ve learned is that most of the time, especially with family, they're not trying to wound you. They're often lacking in awareness while actually trying to help in their own messed up way, or they're just projecting their own fears and anxieties on you without even realizing it.

This is where it’s really crucial to take a step back and look at the situation like they’re strangers. What I sometimes do is I ask myself, if I were watching some other family like this, what is really going on? And would I react with the same level of emotional intensity if some stranger came up to me on the street and said the same thing that my mother just said? I already know the answer - I wouldn’t. I wouldn't take a stranger's criticism as gospel truth - I'd probably dismiss it entirely. 

This mental exercise helps me see the situation clearly: just because someone is your family doesn't mean their opinions and criticisms are the truth. They're just one person's perspective, filtered through their own experiences, fears, and limitations. The childhood pattern of believing everything they say is just that - a childhood pattern that you can choose to break.

I want you to try this same exercise the next time a family member says something critical that stings. Picture a stranger saying those exact words to you. Picture yourself watching another family where this same interaction is happening. Notice how much emotional charge gets removed when you strip away the history. You'll probably find that without all that baggage, the comment loses most of its sting - it’s just words from someone who has their own issues and perspectives that have nothing to do with you.

The way I see it is, some people are like those weird shopping carts you get sometimes where one wheel always veers to the right, so you spend the whole time fighting with that cart trying to make it go where you want it to go. But the cart isn’t out to get you, that’s just the way it is. 

So as we head into the holidays and family gatherings, think about one thing you can do differently, because you have options now. The key is to decide ahead of time how you’re going to handle things in a way that feels right for you, before you get into the situation.

The next time your mom comments on your weight, or your dad criticizes your career - pause. Ask yourself what's really going on. And then do whatever makes sense for you in that moment. Maybe you laugh it off. Maybe you change the subject. Maybe you say 'I'm not discussing this.' Maybe you leave the room. You get to choose.

People are always gonna be who they are, so let them. If they throw stuff at you, it doesn't mean you have to receive it. You don’t have to fight the shopping cart. You can just leave it there. 

When you understand that, everything gets easier.

That's it for today. If you liked this episode, share it with someone else who might be dreading their family gathering this year. And remember, I believe in you. See you next time.