Tidings Of Good Boundaries

Dear friends,

Already, the holiday stress marathon that stretches from Thanksgiving to New Years is in full swing. Even if your family doesn’t celebrate any December holidays, you are likely to find yourself swept up in the tide of busyness and obligations. Somehow a season branded with homespun coziness and repose by the fire translates into a massive organizational project with hundreds of tasks, stakeholders, and rapidly approaching deadlines. If you’re a parent, this season may be more aptly titled, “the most stressful time of the year.”

There are endless calls for our presence and our presents that can overwhelm already full schedules and empty pockets. It’s a time for family traditions, social gatherings, rituals, and nostalgia. All that adds up to unreasonable expectations and stress.

Any parent paying attention to the news is being bombarded with messages of scarcity. Remember, there is a supply chain breakdown so you better buy, buy, buy. Parent influencers are peddling a similar message and reminding us that we better enjoy all the magic before our children grow. After nearly two years of isolation, parents are being told to double down on holiday bustle to make up for what they missed out on.

Moms have been sold a cultural ideal of the holiday magic maker who conjures up merriment at every turn and infuses holiday spirit into every waking moment. We can feel overwhelmed while trying to make every dinner picture-perfect, every gathering heart-warming, and every outing a perfect memory. We internalize all this messaging and turn it against ourselves. If our child isn’t scheduled until they pass out, are you even doing it right? Is your child having an over-stimulated and sugar-induced meltdown in the middle of winter-wonder?

Even our adult plans can weigh us down. A season emphasizing togetherness can highlight the painful losses and absences in our own lives: estranged family, toxic dynamics, grief, and loneliness. The financial needs of gifting, travel, and childcare closures can bring more stress than joy. The drive to do it all leaves us bending over backwards trying to accommodate the needs and feelings of others while stuffing down our own.

Psychologists have a word for when we choose to do more than is necessary, appropriate, or healthy: overfunctioning. When we over function, we are often aiming to make things easier on ourselves, but the result is the opposite. We deny our own needs and feelings which then re-emerge as depression, anxiety, anger, and resentment. We can only subvert our own needs for so long before they explode or we collapse in martyred exhaustion. Then, we feel guilty for our collapse, and we go right back to doing it again.

Does this sound familiar? You spend hours and hours planning, shopping, prepping, cleaning, organizing, or cooking only to spend the last few moments losing your ever-loving mind over a child’s missing shoes, a floor that was supposed to be vacuumed, or a last-minute change of menu. Many of us have a memory like that from our families of origin that we are re-enacting in our own families now.

We spend so long stuffing down our own needs while planning that when the time comes to actually enjoy them, we are so angry, frustrated, and depleted that it all boils over.

Overfunctioning can look a lot like over-scheduling and over-planning. We can feel overly responsible for children’s (or partner’s!) happiness and appoint ourselves holiday cruise directors. We squeeze holiday activities into every available minute, and we can feel pressure to make holiday outings over the top fun-fests. What could be the harm in that? When we subvert our own needs in pursuit of other’s happiness, the whole family unit suffers. Our needs don’t go away, they just resurface with no one equipped to meet them.

We can also over-function with emotional tasks. When tension and stress run high around the holidays, it is easy to want the quickest solution. Sometimes, we make ourselves over-responsible for others to calm everyone (and ourselves) as quickly as possible. This can look like doing more than our fair share of the labor around the holidays. Are you responsible for all the gift-ideas, purchasing, and wrapping? Are you folding a dozen holiday obligations into your over-full schedule to avoid disappointing anyone? Are you regularly defusing other people’s personal squabbles to avoid making people uncomfortable? You might be over functioning.

When we overfunction, someone else underfunctions. Often it is our own partner, children, or family. While it might seem like allowing them to overfunctioning is a gift, sometimes the best gift we can give those we love is permission to take ownership themselves. If you don’t believe me, just think back to any time someone has given overly “helpful” advice on how to feed your baby or even told you about the “proper” way to clean the bathroom.

The path to a less-stressful season lies with balance and intention. It may not be possible to completely avoid the bluster of the winter season, but we can reign it in. If you are feeling driven by what you should be doing (and also feeling drained, frazzled, and fried), reflect on what you want the holiday to feel like for you. Once you have focused on that, you can choose one or a few things you are interested in doing to make that happen. Anything that doesn’t make the list can either be cut entirely or shared with a collaborator.

If a specific event can regularly lead us to overwhelm, it is a good time to re-examine if it is a tradition that is important to us. If it is, then what is it about this tradition we value and how can we trim the excess so we can all participate. Fully give over tasks to other people (and if financially prudent, hire out!). Are there elements that can be scaled back or dropped all together? Are there things we are doing for the sake of tradition that aren’t serving us well? If they are important to someone else, give them ownership. If you’re interested in a guide to structuring these conversations, check out the Better Life Lab (scroll to the holiday section at the bottom) which helpfully takes on how to outline these conversations.

Letting go can be harder than it seems because we have internalized the idea that our success is tied up in how much we can accomplish. We have a consumerist culture trying to sell us on the idea that moms can have it all if only they just do it all (by ourselves). We just need to purchase the right planner, drink more coffee, and start earlier. We don’t need to be superhuman to be loveable. Your productivity is not a benchmark of your success as a friend, parent, sibling, child. You are deserving of love, care, and peace this season. Full stop.

This season, we invite you to spend some time celebrating mindfully. The pandemic celebrations can offer some much needed contrasts. When things slowed down, what pieces did we actually miss and what might we have enjoyed about the slower pace? Let’s make time spent present, peaceful, and joy-filled our measure of success this season.

If you need a safe-space to work out what that might look like for you, you know where to find us!

Warmly,
Kellie Wicklund, LPC, PMH-C
Owner + Clinical Director

Christina Moran
Executive Director