Hitting Home with Family

Family Matters

Last week, I talked about hitting your home button so you can home in on your values and ideals. This isn’t ever easy but it does get easier with practice. Ironically, for many of us, the hardest place to hit the home button is with family, especially those closest to us. In the family setting, but especially in the family gathering, we stumble and lose our balance.

I say that this is ironic, because in many ways family is where we get many of our base values in life. How can we be so different? 

Often it is not that we are so different in those deeper root values but in how we express ourselves and how we engage each other emotionally. I have family members that are gregarious and like to talk through dinner about everything they have just read or viewed. At the same holiday table, I have family members who are serious introverts and can’t wait for the meal to end so they can steal a quiet snuggle with one of the littles. Some of us look forward to the cacophony and chaos. Others are positively drained from it. 

In the past, I have also had many family gatherings colored by the mental and physical illness of certain central figures in our clan. Or the absence of people who were too ill to show up. I’m sure I am not alone in having had a few Thanksgivings where family members have had to choose which households to go to, given the tensions that are besieging us. Or where people have had to caravan from one table to another. Hitting your home button is hard when family dynamics make it a moving target.

Leaving to Show Up

There is a wisdom in the phrase “hitting home” that applies to the family gathering. When something “hits home” it hits us emotionally so that we finally believe it. I find it useful to let the discord and even displeasure with certain family dynamics (and sometimes certain members’ habits or ways of communicating) hit home. In other words, I face my feelings, and then I accept that this is a pattern that is likely going to occur again. From there, I fully accept it. I make peace with it. It is not me. It is not in my control to change. And even if it were, the Thanksgiving dinner table is not the place to change it. 

The next step for me is to find my workaround. And this is where the tactic I shared for hitting the home button comes into play. Take time for yourself. Make time for yourself. Figure out how you can steal away from the table or the conversation or whatever is happening just for a few minutes so that you can reset. You can excuse yourself to use the restroom. You can offer up a quick hand to someone else who needs it (kids can always use help and it’s totally normalized in most cultures to abruptly lend one to them). You can purposely “forget” your phone in your coat so that you can go check an important message. The idea is to find a simple viable excuse to go elsewhere and center, to remind yourself that these are the people you love. You may not be able to change them or the situation, but you are showing up for them and that’s the best you can do. Give yourself a hug.