Trouble with family during this season is a common challenge. How can you keep an even keel when some people just want to fight or be mean? Or, perhaps you dread this time of year because it reminds you of loss. REBT has some ideas on how to cope.
The festive season has a way of magnifying everything. Both joys and stresses, and, more often than we’d like to admit, our frustrations with family.
Whether you’re surrounded by them, missing them, or trying to politely avoid them, family dynamics often come into sharper focus during this time of year.
REBT (Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy) offers powerful tools to help you stay grounded, emotionally balanced, and purposeful in how you relate to both family and your own emotional experience.
In this article I’ll share some survival tips for dealing with family troubles. Whether it’s feast or famine: the overload of difficult family interactions, or the ache of family absence.
Why Family Pushes Our Buttons
REBT teaches that your emotions, such as anger, sadness, and anxiety, come not from other people’s actions, but from your own interpretations and attitudes about those actions.
So while family can be troublesome, your emotional reactions to family members are not caused directly by them, no matter how tempting it is to think otherwise.
Here’s an example to illustrate what I mean.
Let’s say that your brother-in-law makes a snide comment about your career or your parenting choices. You feel angry. But REBT challenges us to think about this interaction a bit more. It encourages us to ask: What am I telling myself in that moment, perhaps before I became angry?
Here are a few likely candidates:
- “He should respect me!”
- “He has no right to talk to me that way! Damn him for doing that!”
- “This is unacceptable!”
- “Rich coming from him! His kids hate him. How dare he speak to me about my parenting!”
These thoughts aren’t just descriptions. They’re demands. Why?
Because they imply, inflexibly, that others must behave the way we want them to. Even if they clearly aren’t. Demands often lie behind our most destructive emotional reactions.
It’s very important to distinguish between preferences and demands.
For instance, it’s perfectly reasonable to want to be respected and to have a family gathering that’s free of drama and judgment. But when your preferences become absolutist, in other words, if they morph into “They must,”, “They should,” or “I can’t stand it if they don’t,” you hand your peace of mind over to people who may not even be trying to be reasonable.
REBT shows us how to step back from these demands, acknowledge the preferences behind them, and adopt a more flexible, resilient mindset, such as:
“I really wish he wouldn’t judge me like that. It’s a pain and disappointing when it happens. But it’s his opinion, not mine and I can deal with it. Too damn bad!”
More flexible interpretations like the one above are not only going to ensure more emotional equilibrium, but they also happen to be true: They accept reality as it is, rather than demand that it must conform to our wishes.
Dealing with Difficult Family Members and In-Laws
The holidays often throw you into close quarters with people you wouldn’t choose as friends, maybe not even as acquaintances.
This may include in-laws, estranged siblings, or critical parents.
What’s a sane way of dealing with this reality? For one, you don’t have to like it (or or your difficult in-laws / family). It clearly is thoroughly unlikeable to spend time with obstructive, rude, or nutty family members at the festive table.
But if you start going beyond this acknowledgement of a bad situation and add inflexible, unreasonable demands (e.g. “They must not do this to me!”) and pronouncements (e.g. “How terrible that I have to deal with these weirdos!”) on top of that, you’re adding trouble on top of trouble. Double trouble.
Here are some rational alternatives that would be helpful to practice now, for use when you need them later:
- “I wish they were more supportive. But they aren’t. That’s painful, but I can still approve of myself and live a good life without that support.”
- “It’s annoying that he keeps bringing up politics, and I’d rather that he wouldn’t. But he’s allowed to have an opinion, however wrongheaded it is. I don’t have to let it ruin my time here. I get to choose how to respon.d”
- “They’re acting like they always do. And I can’t control them, but I can control my interpretations of what’s happening.”
This doesn’t mean becoming passive or permissive. Far from it. By taking more emotional control, you can select from an array of responses and actions because your mind will not be clouded by rage or despair.
You can leave a room. You can change the subject. You can even confront someone. But you’ll do that without rage or resentment and the drama that follows in the wake of such emotions.
In this way, REBT helps you avoid two common traps:
- Exploding, saying things you regret later, and damaging relationships you value, and
- Suppressing, avoiding and feeling regret because you were worried about what you may say or do when enraged or despondent.
Instead, it points out a middle path: Recognizing the challenge, acknowledging your preferences but not turning them into demands, and choosing your responses accordingly..
Family Absence: When the Famine Hurts More Than the Feast
On the other side of the spectrum are those for whom the festive season brings longing rather than frustration.
Maybe you’re far from home. Maybe your family has grown distant or fractured. Maybe some are gone, and the ache of their absence has become part of your holiday landscape.
Sadness in such moments is deeply human. In REBT we never advise against feeling sad. It shows that people, sometimes especially those who are absent, mean something to us. Nothing can be more human.
But it is useful to examine what kind of sadness you are feeling.
A healthy sadness might be based on thoughts like:
- “I miss them, and it hurts. But I can bear this pain, and still find value in the season.”
Unhealthy misery, however, might come from thoughts like:
- “This shouldn’t be happening. Life is no good for making this happen.”
- “It’s awful to be alone right now, and I can’t stand it.”
- “I’ll never be okay without them ever again.”
These rigid, global, and catastrophizing thoughts intensify pain into suffering.
REBT offers a way forward: acceptance. Not approval, not enjoyment, not passivity. Just the honest recognition of what is, rather than what “mustn’t be.”
From that stance, you can choose to honour your feelings without being consumed by them. You might start new traditions. Connect with others who are also alone.
Reflect on the values you want to express in this season, even without the people you miss.
You’re Not a Puppet
One last REBT principle worth remembering is: Nobody can control your emotions. They may have power over you because of social structures, money, or tradition, but only you have control over your reactions and interpretations.
Your mother-in-law’s comment may be deeply disrespectful and rude, even aggressive. But how you interpret that state of affairs will largely determine how you react to it: whether it ruins your evening or simply proves to be an annoying pain.
You are not a puppet on the strings of someone else’s mood, words, or behaviour. Unless, of course, you believe that you are.
In my mind, that’s one of the most liberating lessons taught by this approach. It doesn’t promise that people will be easy or kind. It doesn’t claim that life will always cooperate. But it does give you a way to remain sane, steady, and sovereign: even in the emotional funhouse of a holiday family gathering.
If this article helped you, why not recommend it to a friend (or family member)?
For more help, you can book a session here.