How to Manage Family Stress During the Holidays with Online Anxiety Therapy in Maryland
Make holiday visits sweeter by navigating family gatherings more skillfully.
“If you think you are enlightened, go spend a week with your family”. The late spiritual teacher, Ram Dass, said many wise things but this is probably my favorite quote of his and it comes to my mind every year at about this time. As an anxiety counselor in Maryland, I don’t even need to see the calendar to know when we’ve hit November. Suddenly, many of my conversations with clients start turning towards the stress of navigating family relationships as Thanksgiving approaches. I start hearing more about long-standing grievances or difficult dynamics with extended family members. And people start sharing their mixed feelings about the holidays. Plus, since I’m a person too (!!!), I start feeling some of it as well. Thankfully, I know this is coming and there’s a lot that online anxiety therapy can do to help folks get through this holiday season with more ease and calm.
Why family gatherings can trigger anxiety
Your baggage contains more than clothes
It’s not only clothes and pie that gets packed up into our planes, trains and automobiles when we head home for the holidays. Whether we realize it or not, we’re also bringing along our expectations and family history as well. Expectations can be tricky. Unrealistic positive expectations set us up for inevitable disappointment and resentment. Projecting negative expectations already put us in a negative state of mind and make it very easy to look for every little detail that confirms our worst fears. The good folks in the recovery world have lots of insightful slogans, including this one : “Expectations are premeditated resentments”.
So, how can we make this better? It can be useful to go into holiday family visits with a neutral, open stance. Creating more realistic expectations can include focusing more on things that are within our control, instead of trying to control how others behave. This might sound like, “I’d like to make sure I get in a walk by myself everyday”, or “I’d love to hit up the new bakery in town and am going to plan a visit there on Friday”, or “Aunt Nancy got a new job this year so I’m going to ask her about it and find out what she thinks of it”. This older blog post has more on expectations and holiday stress.
Family. it’s complicated.
The same goes for our history of family dynamics. It’s so incredibly easy to slide into the roles we’ve always occupied in our extended family: the peace maker, the clown, the mother hen, the rebel. There’s something comfortable about the familiarity of those old roles and scripts, but they often create friction with the more updated views we have (or want) about ourselves. There is a possibility of letting some of those old roles go and allowing others to figure out the new scripts. If you don’t play the mother hen, it can be ok that something falls through the cracks and a dish doesn’t end up at the holiday meal. If you decline the role of peace maker, other people can figure out how to resolve their conflicts on their own (or not). Making these kinds of changes can be uncomfortable for everyone and having some time to plan this out with an anxiety counselor ahead of time can help you feel more confident and calm in the moment.
Sometime family dynamics change whether we want them to or not, and that can bring it’s own kind of stress. As a College Park, MD-based therapist, I’ve worked with college students for many years and have predictably seen the challenges come with that first visit home for Thanksgiving freshman year. Students, who may be grappling with anxiety, have been used to living on their own for a couple of months and have gotten used to the freedom and independence of that. Parents have usually been missing their child and are looking forward to having “their baby” back home again. Friction ensues.
I’m on the parent end of this myself for the first time this year so I can understand the very intense feelings on both sides of this situation. I’ll be taking a lot of the advice I’ve been giving for years: Communicate plans early to avoid assumptions and expectations about time and activities. Try to give some space for each other to feel out the shifting dynamics of the parent-child relationship after the child has moved out. Remember that this is just one of many visits and comings-and-goings of the college years, and the rest of your lives. It’s ok if it’s awkward, difficult or imperfect. Transitions are weird.
Overwhelm from sensory and social overload
Holiday visits can be A LOT for anyone, introverts and extraverts alike! So many people, having so many conversations (often at the very same time), all in one place. For folks who live in places where it’s often cold at the end of the year, all of this activity happens in close quarters, inside. All of this is a recipe for the overwhelm that can come from having too much sensory input and so much socialization all at once. That overwhelm can lead to exhaustion, irritability, reacting in unhelpful ways and more.
Intense inputs and activity require some balance through rest. Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith wrote about the seven different kinds of rest, including sensory rest and social rest. Improving sensory rest might include figuring out how to get a little bit of quiet for yourself for a few minutes in another room during a busy holiday visit. Adding social rest to your holiday plans might mean being deliberate about who you choose to sit next to at the holiday meal or making time to see friends as well during holiday visits.
The mental load
Honestly, this part could have its own blog series. If you are the one in a family that keeps track of all the things, you carry the mental load. And, by all the things, I mean the obvious and the unspoken stuff. Things like: Remembering that several family members see the other side of their extended family Thanksgiving night so we need to get our gathering underway early. Making an extra dish of stuffing because you know the person that is supposed to bring it often forgets or shows up late when dinner has already started. Packing all the toys and extra outfits that babies need to go anywhere plus the “Baby’s First Thanksgiving” bib that grandma sent months ago and will be wanting to see. Keeping an eye on the teenagers who have been known to try and sneak some wine when they think nobody is looking. And on and on and on.
This also can overlap with being the one to try and keep the peace in a family. Smoothing ruffled feathers, anticipating and trying to prevent conflicts, making sure both sets of grandparents see the kids. It’s a big, unpaid, thankless job that often exhausts the person doing all this unrecognized labor. These roles are not exclusive to women but most frequently fall to women (and especially mothers). New to the concept of the mental load? Check out this fantastic comic on the mental load.
If you know that this labor imbalance has been an issue in your relationship for a while, check out Eve Rodsky’s work on Fair Play. In extended families, to make changes, you may have to brush up on your assertive communication skills and negotiate with others what you are willing and not willing to do. Support with online anxiety therapy in Maryland can help you map out a game plan for this.
Recognizing the signs of holiday anxiety
Wishing you could just hit the Escape button on family holiday visits?
Starting to get antsy in early November and begin dreaming of spending Thanksgiving alone with a pie and the television? Other signs of holiday anxiety can include increased muscle tension, irritability, obsessive planning as a way to try and control outcomes, difficulty sleeping and trouble with your mind running away in a billion different directions at once.
Perhaps you already struggle with anxiety all year round and the holidays add an extra helping on to your stress plate. The sooner you know you have a challenge on your hands, the sooner you can start to make a plan to get through it all better this year. But even if you are reading this in the car, on the way to see your family on Thanksgiving Day, there’s still time to do it differently this year. Let’s do this.
Coping Tools fOr Managing Holiday Stress
Grounding Techniques Before and During Gatherings
Stress and anxiety impact our bodies, our nervous systems, and our thinking. We can use this to our advantage by remember if we can get a foothold of more relaxation in any of those areas, the benefits can ripple out to all these interconnected parts. Grounding techniques can help us gather our attention and focus in the here and now, which can help you stay present, reduce racing thoughts, and alleviate stress. A smooth, relaxed breathing pattern can send signals to your brain and body that it’s ok to relax. Keep your belly soft and allow a gentle breath to flow all the way to the bottom part of your lungs (like it’s going to go into your belly) and breathe out smoothly and slowly, for a little longer than you breathe in. If you want, you can imagine breathing in through the nose, like you are smelling a flower, and breathe out through some pursed lips, like you are blowing out birthday candles. Mind racing so much that it’s hard to even stick with this long enough to feel some benefits? Check out the recording on this post about the Cylinder Breath Technique. It’s a favorite technique of many of my clients as a way to get both the body and the brain to quiet and relax a bit. These, and other tools can be incorporated in any plan for anxiety treatment or mindfulness based therapy.
Setting boundaries with compassion
We started this post with a quote and I’ve got another one, this time from Prentis Hemphill that feels very appropriate to the topic. “Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously”. I love this. Boundaries often get a bad rap when people think they are all about enforcing separation and isolation. Boundaries are essential for relationship and connection. Boundaries help us feel safe, and only when we feel safe can we feel connected.
Holiday family visits are a fantastic time to flex your boundary muscles. How can you set things up in a way that allows you love both yourself and the people you are visiting? Think creatively! Here are some examples about what compassionate boundaries might look like with a family holiday visit:
I stay for only two nights and then also take some time for myself before heading back to work or school the next week.
Perhaps we stay at a hotel, instead of at someone’s house, to have our own space to decompress at the end of the day.
It might be too hectic and hard to visit both sides of a family over the holiday and a tough choice gets made about visiting only one this time and the other at a different time.
I don’t feel like doing all the cooking for everyone again so I’ll ask folks that are coming to bring a dish to share so the work is spread out.
If Uncle Joe starts ranting, I will turn to the person on the other side of me and ask how they have been.
I will not debate my own adult choices about my job, relationships, or family, and will leave the conversation/room if that happens.
Before arriving for the visit, I’ll let my family know of plans that I’ve made for myself or with friends so everyone knows when I am and am not available to hang out.
It can help to strategize ahead of time and come up with a phrase you can practice and return to again and again when setting and maintaining these compassionate boundaries. Something neutral and simple such as:
That won’t work for me.
I have other plans.
I’m going to step away now and visit with Aunt Matilda.
That’s not what we discussed ahead of time.
Practice repeating this over and over again, ahead of time, so in that moment when you are feeling internally wobbly, it’s easier to reach for this phrase.
How online anxiety counseling in maryland can help
You know how it’s easy to see the unhelpful patterns that your friends get into time and again, but it’s harder to see your own patterns and blind spots? A skilled therapist can gently provide that outside perspective that is hard to find within, and point out the blind spots that you might be missing, without the bias about being a stakeholder in your personal life. Working with an online anxiety counselor can provide convenient and consistent support to help you identifying triggers to anxiety reactions and craft new responses.
Therapy can be a great place to get support around both setting and maintaining boundaries (it’s often the maintaining that’s the hardest for most people, when they’ve stated their boundary but get pushback), and coming up with strategies to take good care of yourself in your relationships with others. Whether in-person or online, therapy is a confidential, separate place in your life that is time set aside just for supporting you.
When schedules and routines get upended around the holidays, it can be helpful to have a consistent, steady place to come back to for regular support. And the ease of online therapy in Maryland allows for greater flexibility of making schedule changes as needed as well. If you are wondering if you could benefit from online anxiety therapy, chances are it could be helpful to you.
create a holiday plan that honors your needs
Balance your holiday activities with meaningful rest.
Holidays are a wonderful time to connect with others, but remember that you count too! Plan ahead to create a holiday that also takes into account your own wants and needs as well.
Balancing connection and self-care
Think about your holiday time as a recipe that needs to be balanced. Not too much of one thing, not too much of the other. How can you experiment with the idea of finding the right mix of time and energy spent on connection and on self-care? Brainstorm ideas about how these pieces can fit together to create a better balance that leaves you, at the end of the holiday, feeling more satisfied and less exhausted.
Let go of perfection
This goes back to the bit about expectations. Holidays in particular are susceptible to perfectionistic thinking. Things have to be just right for it to have been a good holiday. It’s ok if someone messes up the mashed potatoes, or if a kid has a crying meltdown, or someone decided not to make it to the annual gathering. Our lives are imperfect. The world is imperfect. All the people I know are imperfect. It’s ok to have imperfect holidays. We will laugh someday about how little Susie knocked over the entire punch bowl and drenched the dog.
Build in post-holiday recovery time
I don’t know about you, but I find that even very enjoyable holiday visits take a good deal of energy out of me. It can be really hard to go right back into the next work week if I haven’t had a minute to collect myself after the holiday hoopla has passed. If this is true for you as well, build in some post-holiday recovery time. That might look like returning home after a visit (or having your guests leave your home) with some time to do your laundry, rest a bit and chill out before the next week begins. Or it might look like setting up the first few days after the holiday visit to be as light as possible for yourself, choosing quick and easy meals and pushing optional activities off a couple of days.
If those things aren’t possible, perhaps being more intentional about really and truly resting, in a way that’s meaningful for you, when you do have even a tiny pocket of time. Check out the blog series on the 7 types of rest for more ideas about how to do this well, instead of defaulting to scrolling on your phone and not feeling any more refreshed afterwards.
Reduce holiday stress With A Maryland anxiety counselor
Would you like some personalized support in making a stress reduction plan for the holidays, or anytime of year? I offer specialized anxiety therapy appointments in-person, located in College Park, MD. Online anxiety therapy appointments are available anywhere in Maryland. Contact me to schedule a free 15-minute phone consultation and take the first step toward taming your anxiety.
Other services I offer include hypnotherapy, mindfulness-based therapy, life coaching, and support for LGBTQIA+ clients. Additional information is available on my counseling practice home page.
About the author, an anxiety counselor:
Beth Charbonneau, LCSW-C, is a Maryland therapist, specializing in anxiety therapy and treatment. With over 20 years of experience, she brings a holistic approach to calming both the mind and the body, and helping her clients feel empowered to find more joy in their lives. Learn more about her College Park-based counseling practice here.
