How Can I Handle Holiday Family Time During Mental Health Treatment?

Summary: You can handle holiday family time during mental health treatment by taking proactive steps to prepare for the challenges you may face. It’s important to identify potential problems ahead of time – people, places, or events – and be ready with coping strategies you know work for you.

Key Points:

• If you’re in mental health treatment, you may have mixed feelings about the upcoming holiday season.
• It’s possible that past family experiences, including childhood trauma, play a role in the mental health challenges you engage in treatment to resolve.
• Family members can exert an extraordinary power over our emotions, especially during the holidays – and spending time with family over the holidays is not the best choice for everyone.
• To handle holiday family time during mental health treatment, you can create a plan to use all your available resources to stay balanced and manage any symptom recurrence or escalation that may occur.

Home for the Holidays: Is It the Best Choice for You?

Many people in mental health treatment trace the origin of their mental health challenges back to events that occurred early in life. That’s why learning to handle family time during mental health treatment is essential to their progress: family dynamics are at the core of the issues they work through when they seek support. Anyone who’s been in recovery of any type or participated in a group processing session during mental health treatment knows working through childhood issues is a common component of the work of treatment and recovery.

The stories shared in these meetings and group sessions unite people, help them feel less alone, and give them hope for the future.

Although the details are rarely identical, the emotions and patterns of behavior people from a wide variety of backgrounds develop in response to early challenges and adversity are often remarkably similar. Childhood trauma can lead to disruptive, confusing, painful, and overwhelming emotions. People who experience childhood trauma are at increased risk of developing mental and behavioral health disorders during adolescence, young adulthood, and throughout adulthood and older age.

That’s why the holiday season can be incredibly challenging for people in mental health treatment. Holiday time may mean lots of family time. Many of us travel across the country to see relatives or host holiday get-togethers at home. But for people whose mental health challenges stem from family issues, a joke, a look, or an innocuous gesture from a family member can release a flood of thought and emotion that’s hard to control and may activate maladaptive patterns of thought and lead to an escalation of symptom frequency and severity.

Family Triggers: Possible Downside of Holiday Family Time During Mental Health Treatment

If you’re in mental health treatment, you know exactly what we just described: a trigger. You also know triggers can lead to recurrence of symptoms. And you know at least one more thing: during family holiday time, it seems like triggers are everywhere.

Why?

Because the holidays are connected to family and family members know how to push our buttons better than anyone else on earth.

Correction: we let family members push our buttons, whether we like it or not. It makes sense, because if anyone knows where our buttons are, our family members do. After all, they were around when those buttons formed – and they may have helped put them in place.

However, now that you’re in treatment, you know it’s your responsibility to manage your reaction to what your family members say and do. That’s part of your growth in recovery. You replace non-productive reactions to triggers – i.e. cognitive distortions, all-or-nothing thinking, anger, sadness – with productive reactions to triggers – i.e. the set of emotion regulation, stress management, and practical coping skills you develop in collaboration with counselors, therapists, and treatment peers

But hold on a moment. At this point, you may be thinking something like this

Maybe, if I don’t go home for the holidays, I won’t get triggered at all.

Right?

Maybe, but no – not really.

You Take Them With You

First, it’s important to remember your family memories – holiday and otherwise – live inside of you. That means that during the holidays, your memories can act as triggers, whether you’re around your family or not. Second, the fact that memories can act as triggers means that during the holidays, anything holiday related can evoke a family memory, which can act as a trigger, which can lead to a recurrence of symptoms.

We hope those two points make sense. They need to. They explain why the sights, sounds, and smells of the holidays – like roast turkey, for instance – can evoke a broad spectrum of emotion. One simple thing can take you on a ride from joy to sadness to anger and back again, all in an instant. This can happen whether you’re alone, with friends, or with the family members that are part of the memory.

Third, a big part of a successful recovery and return to balance is learning how to process those old memories and associated emotions in a healthy and productive manner.

This brings us to our third point. A big part of a successful recovery and return to balance is learning how to process those old memories and associated emotions in a healthy and productive manner.

In other words, learning how to handle holiday family time during mental health treatment is part of your recovery journey

So how can you do it?

Here are our top five tips.

How You Can Handle Family Holiday Time During Mental Health Treatment

1. Be Realistic.

Now that you’ve read this entire post up to this point, you understand that even though you may not eat Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner with your family this year, the holidays are still rife with triggers. Being realistic means knowing ahead of time that the holidays will be tough, and if you’re completely honest with yourself, there’s a real chance of recurring and/or escalating mental health symptoms. If you have your coping skills ready to deploy at a moment’s notice, you’ll decrease your chance of relapse.

2. Plan Ahead.

This is related to being realistic. You approach the holidays with appropriate caution, because you’re aware of the challenges. You look ahead at the holiday week – whether it’s Thanksgiving week or Christmas week – and anticipate the days and times you might experience a trigger.

For instance, if you do spend time with family, and know there’s a diner your brother-in-law will attend – the one who thinks getting mental health support is a sign of weakness and the whole mental health treatment system is a scam – then be ready for that.

Get in your exercise in beforehand, make sure you get enough sleep the night before, have your phone ready to text a treatment peer or close friend – whatever you need to handle a challenging relative, get it ready ahead of time. That way, you won’t get ambushed by waves of emotion between courses – and you’ll be able to make it through the whole dinner with your emotional and psychological wellbeing whole and intact.

3. Use Your Support System.

Your treatment peers will likely all be brainstorming ideas on how to handle holiday triggers, too. You can learn from them, and they can learn from you. As a recovery community, you can support one another through the challenges of the holidays. Exchange phone numbers or DM/IM handles and use them. Remember: you’re not the first one to be in mental health treatment who needs to learn how to deal with family triggers, which means you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Listen to others, use what works, and leave the rest.

4. Create New Traditions.

There’s an elephant in the room we haven’t pointed out. Yet. For some people in recovery, family contact is not helpful. At all. In some cases, it can be detrimental and undermine the recovery process. If that’s you, then you’ve probably confirmed this with your counselor, therapist, or treatment peers, and you know you need to avoid your family during Thanksgiving or Christmas – and that’s okay. It may be better than okay. Learning to set and follow through on healthy and appropriate boundaries with family members is empowering and may be exactly what you need this year. However, you still may want to celebrate the holidays with people who make you feel seen and heard.

That’s where new traditions help.

You can get in touch with friends – which many people call their chosen family – and plan events that can become your new holiday traditions. When you do this, you can feel empowered, reconnected to the holidays, and look forward to this year and the next – on your own terms, in your own manner, and in your own time.

5. Giving Thanks.

Once you go through your practical checklist – previewing the holiday schedule, making sure you use your support network, and preparing yourself for your relatives – you can shift your focus to one of the things the holidays are all about: gratitude. If you’re active and participating in mental health treatment, you can be grateful for your healing, first and foremost, and grateful for the progress you’ve made. You can also be grateful for your family – including the ones that push your buttons – and recognize that although they may be imperfect, they’re your family. This is true for your chosen family, too, if you don’t communicate with your biological family. You can be grateful for the warm, supportive, compassionate group of friends and treatment peers in your life – and be sure to let them know how you feel about them.

These five tips can help you maintain balance and keep your treatment progress on track during the holidays. One thing we should also mention is that if you have a good routine that you know works for you, you should maintain that routine through the holidays. The winter holidays are a time to double-down on your regular exercise, healthy eating, and stress management habits. Resist the temptation to change your routine too much. If you stick with what keeps feeling healthy and balanced, you increase your chances of maintaining your treatment momentum – if that makes sense – during the winter holidays. We know that sentence may seem obvious, but nevertheless, there it its:  we encourage you to dance with who brought you – meaning keep up your mental health wellness routines – especially when you know you’re about to enter a month filled with potential triggers.

Time for Reflection, Time for Looking Forward

We don’t want you to fear the holidays.

In fact, we want the opposite.

We want you to approach them with clear eyes, so that you’re not surprised by the things that come up inside over the next six weeks. Once you do your prep work – meaning you use the tips we list above, or some version of them – we want you to embrace the holidays with open arms.

The holidays ca be tricky, but they can also be a blessing.

You can view all these family memories, interactions, and experiences as opportunities to apply your coping skills and see if they’re as effective as you think they are. If they need some work, that’s good for you to know. When you look at the holidays that way, you can use them as a benchmark to gauge your progress. Maybe last year a relative got under your skin, and maybe this year that same didn’t bother you at all.

That’s progress.

What this approach also means is that, rather than seeing the holidays as presenting a risk to your treatment progress, you can use them as an opportunity to prove to yourself how far you’ve come and see for yourself how much you’ve grown.  The holidays can confirm your resilience, reaffirm the wisdom of your choice to seek treatment and support, and remind you that you’re one hundred percent capable of living a full and vibrant life through all phases of your menta health recovery journey.