Spending Less Time with Your Family over the Holidays

By Dr. Joti Samra, CEO & Founder of the Psychological Health & Safety (PH&S) Clinic and MyWorkplaceHealth

Spending Less Time with Family Over the Holidays

When big changes happen in your life, like a new relationship, getting engaged, getting married, having children, other things in your life are also going to change – one of those things is holiday traditions. You will, over time, create new traditions with your family – that is, both your extended families and, down the road, your nuclear family if you choose to have kids. So, spending less time with your family over the holiday may make sense but talking about it isn’t necessarily easy.

Family Relationships and Shame

There’s no shame in wanting to change holiday traditions or wanting to spend more time with your partner’s family over your own. Though do note that shame is one of the most toxic and harmful emotions we can experience. It makes us feel inferior, worthless and wrong and is often associated with a critical voice that tells us we should feel or act in a way that’s different than how we actually have.

How to Manage the Changing Traditions this Holiday Season

So, the first step in managing new traditions is to work on rephrasing how you feel.

If you still want to maintain a relationship with your own family it may feel challenging to tell them you’d like to spend less time with them during the holidays. So, the way you break the news to them can make all the difference.

Ask yourself two questions:

1. How do you want your family to feel about you when you tell them you will see them less often over holidays?
2. What can you do to minimize any hurt feelings?

You want them to first understand the decision isn’t an easy one for you and that you have mixed emotions about your decision (small white lies don’t hurt in these situations); and second, not begrudge you for your decision.

When we struggle with how to approach a conversation, a number of factors get in the way. We don’t know what to say or how to say it; we get caught up in over-thinking the talk, worrying about all the possible – and often unlikely – outcomes; we let our own emotions, like anxiety or fear, get the way; we can’t decide what we really want; or we find that external factors, like how your family may react, are an impediment. We have an element of control over all but the last of these factors.

Tips on how to have this conversation with your family:

1. Approach the conversation in a gentle way.
2. Acknowledge and validate any feelings your family may communicate to you, even if it’s sadness that you won’t be around.
3. Let them know that in fairness to your partner, you want to spend time with their family as well.
4. Then come up with a solution that works for both of you, such as alternating which family you spend the holidays with by year.

Ultimately, you and your partner have to come up with your own family traditions that satisfy both of you.

Final Thoughts

It’s also important to note that no one should feel obligated to spend time with family over the holidays. Just because we are related to someone does not mean that having a relationship with them is necessary or even healthy. So, if any members of your family are abusive, toxic or otherwise problematic you are not obligated to spend time with them – even during the holidays.

Also, it’s always important to take care of ourselves, and this is particularly true during the holiday season, with the holidays being emotionally charged in a number of ways and the days being shorter which can have an impact on our psychological health and wellness. So, make sure to take care of yourself this Christmas and engage in parties and traditions that are going to be healthy for you.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published as part of a Globe and Mail “Ask the Psychologist” column authored by Dr. Samra, and has been edited and updated.