Welcome to the holidays, a time for families coming together. It’s exciting to visit your partner’s family and experience new relationships and rituals – it’s also potentially mortifying. Holidays are a crucible for surfacing relational histories – and conflicts – as well as highlighting the eccentricities of others’ private lives. It can be challenging enough in our own families. But it’s a whole new set of challenges when we’re thrown into the midst of someone else’s family.
Families can be seen as a microcosm of society and culture, with their own interaction order: a collection of particular behaviours, rituals and ways of acting in specific situations. Differences can pose challenges, especially when you’re forced together for hours, making small talk over mulled wine, passing salt down the dinner table and navigating who gets the last mince pie.
As an American who had to encounter new Christmas rituals when I moved to the UK, I was genuinely, albeit not unpleasantly, disoriented. The food was different. The music was different. I was especially baffled about watching the monarch’s speech.
But some differences can be awkward.
When you walk into someone’s home, into their personal private long-standing relationships, you’re walking into a host of expectations you don’t necessarily understand. And you’re going to have to deal with them then and there.
Here are some tips on navigating being a guest at someone else’s Christmas.
Communication, not psychology
It’s common to think of families psychologically. They have unique attitudes to conflict, attachment styles and political beliefs. But when we encounter one another in the moment, face to face, we don’t necessarily know (nor have time to reflect on) histories of thought patterns, emotional tendencies or values.
In the bump and bustle of social interaction, we have to contend with whatever is dealt to us on the spot – no pauses, no rewinds, no consulting an AI chatbot for insights. Psychological understanding, if you can get it, may be helpful as background information, but it doesn’t necessarily help you react. It may even lead you astray, encouraging you to think of people based on what you assume about them rather than taking their actions seriously.
So the first word of advice is to resist the urge to psychologise or assume you know what others are thinking. You might even want to take any warnings from your partner about certain people with a grain of salt. Focus instead on what the people you meet do and what they say.
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Read the full article by Dr Jessica Robles here.
Notes for editors
Press release reference number: PR 23/194
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