A psychotherapist's tips for navigating Christmas

This time of year involves a lot of politics - and not just the government-forming kind. Christmas brings its own set of political intrigue for most households and navigating the family dynamics can be tricky.

Fortunately, Brendan O'Connor brought in his regular guest, psychotherapist Richard Hogan, to give us a steer on avoiding the potholes on the festive road ahead.

The first thing that Richard does though, is put the whole notion of Christmas in the context to which it belongs:

"It is an absurd thing, isn’t it? Just the absurdity of it, that we chop down a tree, stick it in the house, decorate it and then, you know, Santa Claus comes and puts presents under it for all our children. And we’re celebrating this thing and then we throw it in the back of the car, and we dump it in the local car park, and we move into the next phase of our lives."

Of course, humans are creatures of habit – we like to do things repeatedly. Our rituals then get varying degrees of significance attached to them. And they all come with memories and reminders wrapped up in them:

"Once we do something repeatedly and we put meaning onto it, it becomes incredibly a part of our DNA. And so, when we go back every year into Christmas, we’re going back into all that times lost, all that childhood stuff, what you got for Christmas, what things were like in the family, all those old Christmases, all those Christmases of times past are there."

Richard has what Brendan calls a revolutionary idea for how people should navigate Christmas and everything that comes with it – do what you want to do:

"I suppose that’s what I’d always say. Life is short here. Of course, we have to do some of the obligatory visiting and all that kind of stuff, but if we just did a little bit more of what we wanted to do, our Christmas would be a little bit happier."

Doing what we actually want to do? Having a happier Christmas? Revolutionary indeed. But Richard has more. Because Brendan mentions parents wanting to give their children what they themselves didn’t have at Christmas and Richard sees this as a big part, not just of Christmas, but of parenting in general:

"Our own childhood is always right in the mix when we’re parenting. And it’s a profound thing to see when I work clinically and you see a parent who’s trying to change and fix something from their own childhood and they’re bringing the exact same thing back into reality that they’ve experienced."

Don’t give your kids everything that they want, is Richard’s message here. Because contrary to what Roald Dahl might say, kids who get everything don’t live happily ever after at all.

"Children shouldn’t be getting everything that they want all the time. It’s just not good for them."

Another part of the whole Christmas experience is the office party and Richard – who never goes to his own one – has advice here, mainly centred on try to remember you’re ostensibly at work when you’re attending the office party:

"People forget that they’re work dos, and they forget that they’re in a work environment [...] and they forget the parameters and they forget the boundaries and all of a sudden they’ve got a HR situation going on Monday morning."

For many people, the biggest challenge of Christmas is going to a relative’s house, or a parent’s house and trying to avoid conflict or annoyance or embarrassment. And even the best preparation can fail when you go through that front door:

"It’s like the event horizon of a black hole, you know? Everything gets sucked out of you."

As a tip Richard advises talking to ourselves and trying to understand the balance of family units and how people get labelled not out of malice necessarily, but out of trying to reduce complexity:

"Family is the most complicated system we will ever have to navigate as human beings, particularly the one of origin, the one you grew up in, with siblings who know every little button to push in you there to get you going."

So, when it comes to the homeostasis, the balance and equilibrium of the family, if you want to change that, Richard’s advice is to change how you talk to yourself about your role in the family and change how you interact with people:

"And that will push the homeostasis to react and change and people will interact with you differently."

And if that’s all you want for Christmas, then that’s what Richard reckons you have to do.

You can hear Brendan’s full conversation with Richard by clicking above.