Dealing With Difficult Family Members During the Holidays

The holiday season often brings up a complex mix of emotions. For some, it represents joy, connection, and celebration with family and friends. For others, especially survivors of childhood trauma, it may bring feelings of sadness, resentment, anxiety, guilt or loneliness. It might bring up a longing for the picture perfect family holiday that you’ve never had. Maybe your family holidays were okay, but there was always some kind of conflict or tension to dampen the mood and shatter your expectations.

This blog post is for you if you’ve decided that despite the tension and walking on egg shells, you are going to tolerate going home for the holidays (How to make this decision could be a whole blog post on its own!)

This blog post will cover tips for navigating family gatherings that go beyond “set boundaries and practice self care”. While important, at times these tips feel not enough to really help you navigate through these tricky family gatherings. Let’s review some of my favourite practical strategies for how to manage these tricky situations.

Imagine yourself at your family’s dinner table, sat beside your great aunt who is notorious for her fat phobia and diet culture commentary. You’ve been working in therapy to accept your body and disentangle yourself from society’s idea of the ideal body. You think you might make it through dinner without any mishaps, when suddenly, your great aunt says to you, “Do you really think you should be eating that?”

Here is where you have a choice. You can allow those few words to take you out and undo all of the hard work that you have been doing. Or, you can hit your aunt with this question.

“What do you mean by that?”

Said in a genuinely curious way, this is one of my favourite strategies for dealing with these sorts of inappropriate, passive aggressive comments. This questions typically takes the asker by surprise and forces them to think about and explain what they really mean. If your aunt’s comment was asked as a way to shame your body, she is now being forced to spell out her intentions to you and everyone at the table in why she asked this. Typically, not wanting to make themselves look badly in this process, you will receive a grumbling “Oh, nothing” in response. Putting her on the spot may stop her from making future passive aggressive comments to you. These types of people like to stay under the radar. Remember, keep yourself calm and composed while openly and politely confronting your relative.

Remember that your great aunt is trying to upset you with these comments. By having a big reaction to them, you are giving her what she wants. Keeping calm, cool and collected is the best way to keep yourself out of the game she is trying to play.

Now, let’s be clear. This strategy is best used for those passive aggressive comments, those backhanded compliments, and those statements that are sly manipulations that might even slide under the radar of your other, less observant family members. If a family member is verbally or emotionally abusing you, I would not suggest this strategy. Speak with your therapist to make a plan to help keep you safe.

If you’re interested in more tips for dealing with difficult family members over the holidays, click the link below where I cover an additional bonus tip in my video on Instagram Reels.

About the Author

Dana Etherington is an Occupational Therapist, Psychotherapist and the Owner of Cedar Tree Therapy, a psychotherapy practice located in Brooklin, Ontario. Dana uses evidence based treatment modalities to treat anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder and disorder eating and complex family relationships.

Fostering healthy body image

Perhaps you’ve noticed that you teen is overly critical of their body, and is making attempts to hide how they look. Bringing up your concerns with your teen’s body image can be a tense topic. This post is aimed at helping parents discuss the challenging topic of body image with their teens. This conversation can be important for all young people who are learning how to love their bodies as they change and grow. It is especially important if you suspect that your teen is struggling with body image and self esteem. 

Start the conversation with validation. Create an atmosphere of safety and openness by telling them they are not alone in what they are feeling. 

You could say something like:

“ It’s normal to have some bad body image days, some days where you don't feel so comfortable in your body.” 

Go on to say: 

“It's important that you know that your worth isn’t determined by your appearance. Regardless of how you look, you are still worthy of people’s time, attention and respect. I hear that you would like to have the “perfect” body. What I think you might mean is that you would like to feel comfortable in your body. We can feel comfortable in our bodies regardless of their shape or size. Your body is not something to feel shame or guilt about, your body does so much for you and serves you in so many ways.” 

The conversation can be concluded by reinforcing the teen’s own unique qualities and strengths that are not related to appearance. 

You can encourage your teen to try out the following practical strategies if they are struggling with body image. 

• Stop comparing. As hard as it may be, resist the urge to compare yourself to others.

• Unfollow social media accounts that lead you to not feel good about your body. Any accounts promoting potentially harmful behaviours or products don't need your attention.

There are some do’s and don’ts for promoting positive body image with our teenage children. As a parent, don’t comment on a stranger's body, your own body or your teen’s body. Even if you are making a compliment, remain neutral about bodies.
Lastly, the most important tip of all — model positive body image. Teens absorb so much about how they feel about their body from how parents feel about theirs. Remove all “diet” language from the family conversations. Modelling acceptance of your own body will help your teen with acceptance of theirs.

 Author Bio

Dana Etherington is an Occupational Therapist, Psychotherapist and is the owner of Cedar Tree Therapy.  Cedar Tree Therapy is a psychotherapy practice that serves clients 13 and up all across Ontario with anxiety and body image challenges. Dana’s eating disorder experience comes from working in adolescent residential eating disorders treatment centres.