Home Is Where The Hell Is
Posted by fxckfeelings on November 9, 2009
The holidays are a boom time for business, not just for malls and Salvation Army Santas, but for those of us in the mental health game; from family fights at Thanksgiving through being lonely on New Year’s Eve, holiday malaise keeps most shrinks pretty busy until the thaw begins after a chilly Valentine’s Day.
The reason for all this misery is due simple; all occasions involve great expectations for happiness and their close cousin, guilt, which is especially pronounced during this period, because, as much as nobody wants to avoid their own family or a stranger in need, it’s especially hard to do so “during the holiday season.” Of course, it’s bullshit, and a pain for most people, but for me, cases like these mark the beginning of the shrink’s harvest festival. Let me reap what you sow!
–Dr. Lastname
I don’t know why my sister turned out so trashy—we were raised under the same roof, and it wasn’t in a trailer—but she’s a real mess, with a drunk mess of a husband and three messy step-kids, and because of her traveling “Springer Show” of a family, I dread any and all family gatherings. She and her circus show up at Thanksgiving at my parents’ house every year, and by the end of the night at least one adult and two children are crying, and every year I swear I’m never going to put myself and my husband through another holiday disaster, but every year Mom talks me back into it and so it goes, over and over again. As the big day approaches, I want to know if there’s anything I can do to make this year any less excruciating. My goal is to find a way to be around my sister/my entire family without wanting to impale myself.
In addition to your Springer Show knowledge, you are certainly (and smartly) demonstrating the wisdom of not expecting family get-togethers to be fun, warm, and happy.
Sure, it would be nice to find yourself at a very special Thanksgiving (and in the TV-holiday-episode way, not the short bus way), and maybe that’s the kind of holiday gathering you used to take for granted chez vous.
Unfortunately those days are over, and the goal for you and your mother is to get used to the big, sad change and make the best of it. In one sense, it’s your sister’s fault, but since she married an asshole because she’s stupid, and not because she wanted to fuck your and her Thanksgiving over, it’s really no one’s fault.
It’s just life, and you often don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.
So this Thanksgiving, don’t let anger or guilt make up your mind about what to do and, above all, don’t express your negative feelings. You have every right to have those feelings, but expressing them is what starts the Springer Show moving and puts you stage center.
If you show your anger, then your family will consider their pain reactive to yours, and, given that your mother makes you feel guilty already, saying something angry will give you something real to feel guilty about, just when you need to assure yourself that you have a right to stay away from the clan if you feel it’s for the best.
Add up the reasons for going or opting out, knowing that most of the important reasons are not feelings. Don’t worry, I’m not trying to tell you that families are sacred in some way, just reminding you that they have a value aside from happiness.
That value includes whatever you think families, even bad families, can be good for: giving you and your kids a sense of where you come from, passing on good traits and skills (even if current family members handle them badly), and finding ways to look out for people you may love without liking or respecting them.
There’s always the chance that your parents would accept your need for sister-free visits and give you a pass for the holidays, or you may, after adding things up, decide it’s best to attend anyway, because there’s no other way to see your parents or you’d like to remind your kids how much worse things could be if they didn’t have two relatively sane and sober parents.
If you do go, ready the pie, brace yourself, and stay at a nearby hotel so you can exit when things turn ugly. And that’s Dr. Lastname’s “final thought.”
STATEMENT:
If, however, you decide to skip this year’s feast, prepare a statement to deflect the maternal avalanche de guilte. “I loved our family Thanksgiving when we were growing up, but peacefulness and sobriety have always been an essential part of that tradition, and, as much as that’s what we still want, we can’t have it with this grouping. In any case, it’s time for me, as an adult, to make the tradition my own. It’s a painful decision, I’ve given it a lot of thought, but it’s time to move on.”
I work as a super in an apartment building my elderly uncle owns. I don’t pay rent, but I do unclog toilets, collect rent checks, and generally deal hands-on with all of his tenants and run the place now that my uncle’s retired. In recent years, the neighborhood has gone downhill, and now the building barely breaks even. So when, in recent months, a family in the building stopped paying rent, it created a deficit. I do feel for them, because the parents are struggling, and the kids are young, but my uncle has maintenance bills and a mortgage, and their apartment is the most attractive in the building and the easiest to rent. I hoped, when I served them the first eviction notice, that it would get them to pay up, but they pretty much ignored it, made me feel bad for kicking them out before the holidays, and have now forced my hand so that I have to evict them for real. My goal is to figure out a way to ignore my instincts and not feel like such a jerk for putting a poor family out onto the street in the winter.
Despite what you say, I hope it never becomes easy for you to evict a family in distress, because that’s when you stop caring for the suffering of others. Better to feel sympathy than be a sociopath.
On the other hand, feeling guilty and responsible isn’t right, because you didn’t cause their economic misery, and it’s not your job to bail them out. Good people often feel guilty when they see someone in pain. It’s a reflex that has nothing to do with rationality and, as in this situation, it can easily do more harm than good.
Sure, in this instance, fuck guilt, but never disregard your responsibility to help others, if you can—just think rationally about it. Help others if you can actually do some good and if the good outweighs your cost, which is one measurable bad side-effect.
Here, generosity is unlikely to help this family over a financial hump, because they don’t seem committed to paying rent, and forgiving the rent would ruin your uncle and cost you your shelter and job. Your goal is to limit the damage, not make it worse.
It would be easy if we lived in a Dickensian world where generosity always pays beautiful, heartwarming dividends, but we don’t. Life punishes many good deeds.
So your goal is to ignore your guilty feelings without numbing yourself to compassion, figure out what will do the most good, do it, and give yourself credit for making a tough decision.
Life sucks on Thanksgiving as much as on every other day, except worse because our expectations are higher. Happy holidays, indeed.
STATEMENT:
Write a statement to protect you from false guilt without dulling your compassion. “I care for what happens to the people in this apartment and I’d help them if I thought I could do some actual good and could afford it. But I’ve thought hard and I can’t. So I need to evict them with respect, and respect myself for having to do a tough job.
