Column
Change
Christmas survival
7 min read

The shadow under the Christmas tree

Psychologist, Roger Bretherton, offers advice for those who find it challenging to spend time with the family at Christmas.
Part 1 of Unwrapping God This Christmas.
A light green pine tree stands amidst dark green forest and its black shadows
Evgeni Evgeniev on Unsplash.

The Ghost of Christmas cranberries past 

I am haunted by a Christmas ghost. But mine isn’t Jacob Marley weighed down with chains. It’s Nigella Lawson, and she comes carrying cranberries. One merry Yuletide many moons ago, I made the mistake of cooking, thanks to Nigella, what my family largely agree to be the best cranberry sauce ever.  It was easy. I just followed the recipe, and a delicious sauce was born. Unfortunately, I have never been able to repeat the feat. Every year I return to the same recipe, in the same kitchen, with staggeringly different results. Results which my family, who have always been a bit too kind for their own good, insist on eating out of some perverted sense of duty. Over the last half decade, we have basically invented a new Christmas tradition: pop the crackers, don the hats, supress the gag-reflex while consuming the annual plate of silage masquerading as cranberry sauce. 

Christmas is a time for ghosts, and not just the cranberry flavoured ones. It might be the empty chair at the table. It may be the memory of happier times. It could be a year of losses and regrets. But there is a darkness to Christmas that the fairy lights and tinsel can’t quite conceal. There’s a shadow under the Christmas tree that we’d rather not acknowledge.  

For some people the most difficult thing about Christmas is the requirement to spend time with family. It is one of the few times in the year we run the gauntlet of being thrown together for an extended period of time in a confined space with a bunch of people who may not be our first choice of company. We may have a common biology, or a common history, but we may not have much in common beyond that.  

Most Christmases are not haunted by the spooky ghosts that send a shiver down our spine. They’re more often harried by the mundane phantoms of broken promises, unsaid words, and the seething resentments that lie dormant in any group of people with a shared past. Sometimes there is one person we don’t want to be left alone with: the critical mother, the lying ex, the uncle who thinks the governments of the world are a front for a secret cabal of paedophile lizards. Whether they scare us, infuriate us, or bore us- we’d rather steer clear. It’s no wonder that for some of us, Christmas with family is not an appealing prospect.  

To hear some people talk in January, you’d think they’d gone to purgatory for Christmas. All the festive trappings leave them feeling, um… trapped. 

Trapped by the Christmas trappings

To hear some people describe the suffocating sense of confinement they feel when forced to spend time with their family is to be treated to a picture-perfect case study of learned helplessness. This psychological concept became famous following a series of distressing lab studies carried out in the mid-1960s. The experiments involved placing lab dogs in a cage with a wire mesh floor that could deliver painful electric shocks through their feet. For one set of animals the lid of the cage was open – as soon as the voltage was turned on, they leapt over the walls of the cage away from the pain. Other dogs received the same excruciating electrocution treatment, but for them the lid of the cage was closed – no matter how much they tried there was no escape.  

After this initial training, the dogs were then placed in the cage again, but this time the lid was open for all of them. The dogs who’d been trained in the open-lid cage, leaped out and away from the electric shock as they had done previously.  But – and this is the really distressing bit – the dogs who had previously experienced the inescapable pain of the closed-lid cage, failed to move a muscle. Even when they could escape, they didn’t. Freedom from electric shocks was only a short leap away, and yet they lay down and took the pain as if they could do nothing about it. It was a brutal experiment. Even those who conducted it have written about it since with a palpable air of embarrassment. But it birthed the concept of learned helplessness, the idea that we can be conditioned to act as if we can do nothing to change painful situations – even when we can. 

It probably seems a bit much to equate Christmas at home with being electrocuted like an imprisoned dog.  But to hear some people talk in January, you’d think they’d gone to purgatory for Christmas. All the festive trappings leave them feeling, um… trapped.  

 

Even the most dysfunctional families fail to keep it up and lapse into moments of hilarity, peace, or occasionally even love. 

Three thoughts to turn a drama into a crisis

The difference with human beings though, is that unlike dogs, our helplessness is not just conditioned, it is learned and maintained by the way we interpret the world around us. We are not trapped just by what happened in the past, but by how we view the present. There is an unholy trinity of thoughts that are guaranteed to turn the usual family drama into a crisis.   

First, take it personally. Instead of thinking your family (like most families) can be a bit weird and anyone would struggle to get on with them at times, convince yourself that their eccentricities say something really hideous about you. Spending time with these people makes you a worthless, useless, failure – or whatever other creative insights your inner critic has gift-wrapped for you this season.  

Second, make sure you ignore anything good. The thing about being human is that we can’t do anything perfectly. We’re not even very good at being bad. Even the most dysfunctional families fail to keep it up and lapse into moments of hilarity, peace, or occasionally even love. We can be quite good at ignoring these bits though.  

Third, imagine it’s going to last forever. It’s true all good things come to an end. But to be honest, all bad things come to an end too. Our least favourite Christmas gatherings may feel interminable, but they only get worse if we keep telling ourselves, we’re stuck in the land that time forgot.  

These are the three patterns of thought that, more than anything, induce a sense of brain-fogging ineffectiveness at the thought of joining the family at Christmas. If we find ourselves wishing we were somewhere else, or wishing everyone else was somewhere else, we’ve probably succumbed to the three attributions that make up learned helplessness. In more technical language, we see the challenges that confront us as personal, global, and stable. 

And speaking of stables… (yes, I really did just do that). 

When God got a family

Most contemporary scholars now agree that Jesus wasn’t born in a stable, at least not in the way we think of stables. It’s more likely that he and his family were accommodated in a single storey dwelling where the humans slept on a raised section and the animals on the ground. Apparently, it wasn’t even that unusual for a manger to make do as an improvised crib- a bit like those baby carriers that double up as a car seat.  

But putting aside the stables and the mangers for a moment, what we do celebrate at Christmas is the mysterious moment in history when God became human. Not the moment Jesus appeared as a human-being-in-general floating ethereally above the global population, but the moment God became a specific human being. Developmental psychologist Donald Winnicott once said: there is no such thing as baby. He meant that to be born is to be thrown into a context we did not choose for ourselves. We emerge into the world as the product of a complex biological and social network, in which we are embedded, and without which we would not survive. The family that is currently doing our head in, is the family without whom we would not have a head in the first place. So, when we sing sweet carols to the baby Jesus, we’re actually celebrating the moment God got a family. 

Even more than that, to have any family is to have, specifically, your family. To be human is to be specified. You are this person, in this body, in this place, at this time, in this culture, in this family… this Christmas. There is no other You available other than this. When learned helplessness gets the better of us, we can succumb to the illusion that we would have been better if we’d emerged from some other family, any other family. We can be so lost in the dream of the family we don’t have that we fail to see the family we do.  And in doing so, we deprive ourselves of the freedom and triumph that come when skilful adults respond to challenging situations.  

So, this Christmas how about trying on a few new beliefs for size? You belong to your family, but they don’t define you. They may be your history, but they don’t have to be your destiny. Your time with them won’t last forever, but you may regret it if you don’t make the most of it while it lasts. They may be painful, but there are still moments of goodness to be found in their company.   

In part two, we’ll think about just what those good things might be.  

Related articles

Column
Change
Death & life
6 min read

The really annoying thing about dying

In his first Notes from Solitude, the death of his dad causes Roger Bretherton to reflect on the relationship and the strange emergence of 'father’.
A pocket watch rests next to a black and white photograph of a father lying beside a new born baby.
Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash.

The death of my dad was sudden and unexpected. I don’t know why it is that, from the moment he died, I have had to fight the almost irresistible urge to refer to him as father- a term of address I never used about him or to him during his life.  

Perhaps in some psychotherapy session at some point my therapist referred to my ‘father’, and I may have followed suit. And maybe occasionally when socialising with those who seemed a cut above my largely lower-middle class background, I called him father so as to avoid the flat northern vowel sounds that would expose me as an interloper. But that was just to fit in- on all other occasions he was decidedly not father and definitely just good old plain, dad.  

At death he became a classic, a museum piece, a part of history, not the dad who taught me how to ride a bike.

But for some reason the moment he died, it felt like dad wasn’t enough. I now had to call him father - those were the rules. At death he became a classic, a museum piece, a part of history, not the dad who taught me how to ride a bike by panting and sweating my five-year old self round the block, but the father who taught me to be… a man, or something like that.  

The F-word has gravitas, presence, authority. Dads are human, often bewildered, occasionally pissed off, eminently huggable, easily taken for granted - just there. Admittedly, Freud would have lost significant gravitas if oedipal theory had considered common-all-garden dads and not cigar-smoking brandy-swilling fathers. And no doubt the climactic scene of The Empire Strikes Back would have lacked considerable pathos had Darth Vader casually quipped, ‘No Luke, I’m your’re Dad’.  

The curse of the martyr, write Albert Camus, was to have other people tell their story. The principle doesn’t just apply to martyrs, it’s true of all those who die. To be dead is to become a character in other people’s anecdotes. That’s the really annoying thing about dying, we become a topic of gossip, people get to talk about us without the courtesy of ever having to talk to us. We become object, no longer subject. I think that’s why I resist calling my late Dad, Father. It objectifies him, makes of him something that he wasn’t. It, most definitely fails to do justice to all that he meant to me. 

She simply said, ‘It’s your Dad’, and held me tight in a hug that lasted longer than usually permitted in polite company. 

I say he died suddenly. It was a Sunday morning. I was in church at the time. Actually, worse than that, I was on stage speaking to a church. As a psychologist working in academia, I teach and train all kinds of people in every kind of organisation imaginable, but every now and then I get to speak in churches.  

On this occasion I was talking about character, the positive qualities of being – like love, gratitude, hope, wisdom and so on – that make life worth living. When I stepped off the stage my wife was waving to me from the back of the room, which was weird given that we don’t go to that church and she hadn’t come with me. When I wandered to the back of the auditorium wearing my ‘what are you doing here?’ face, she simply said, ‘It’s your Dad’, and held me tight in a hug that lasted longer than usually permitted in polite company. For someone who prides himself on social insight, it shames me to say that it took a while for the penny to drop. We were in the car with the engine running before it finally dawned on me what she meant. 

I try not to make too much of divine timings or fate, but there was something odd in the timing of getting that news. In that month I had addressed church congregations three Sundays in a row- which, as someone who is generally lazy and prefers not to work weekends, is an unusually intense frequency. But over three successive Sundays I had reflected aloud with those congregations that there were prayers that had accompanied the various stages of my life. Prayers that I found myself praying, almost as if they were prayed through me, as if they had chosen me rather than I they.  

In my twenties I had found myself praying as regularly as a heartbeat, ‘God do whatever you need to do with me, to make me into the person you would like me to be.’ It was a radical invitation for God to put me through whatever was needed to become who I was meant to be. But then the prayer faded. Its visit was over, it had done its work and it moved on. But as I addressed the congregations on those three Sundays I mused aloud that while the prayer of my twenties had departed decades before, I found a new prayer stirring in my forties. Now as the father of teenage boys, my new prayer was, ‘God do whatever you need to do with me to make me the father you would like me to be.’  

In the weeks that followed, people asked me whether I had had a good relationship with my dad. The most accurately answer was: we had the best relationship of which we were both capable. We both tried in our own ways to deepen our connection, but we were like the lovers in a romantic comedy; we always managed to miss each other. When he tried with me, I didn’t want to know. For several years, he left a book lying around at home that he wanted me to read. I never saw anyone touch it, but it moved around the house under its own steam. It was by my bedside, in the toilet, on the dining room table…  Macavity the Mystery Cat would have been proud. It was called, Things We Wish We Had Said. We may have wished, but we didn’t say. I never read it. Years later, when I tried with him, he was too flustered to respond. Both of us in our own ways lacked the courage to connect any deeper. But I was never in any doubt that he loved me, and I him. 

When he was alive I was most aware of how different we were. I defined myself in opposition to whatever he was. If he was gentle, I was assertive. If he was indecisive, I was ambitious.

He died of a heart attack on a Sunday morning asleep in bed, while my Mum was at church. Almost immediately his absence prompted a profound change of consciousness in me. When he was alive I was most aware of how different we were. I defined myself in opposition to whatever he was. If he was gentle, I was assertive. If he was indecisive, I was ambitious. If he was inexpressive, I was articulate. If he was like that, I was like this. And yet, almost at the very moment of his death, a reversal of awareness occurred. I started to see just how very much like him I was. His gentleness, his uncertainty, his scepticism, his care, his humour, were all mine. 

There is a rule in family therapy, that adult children relating to their parents should set their expectations to zero. We never truly see our parents until we stop viewing them through the lens of our own desires; what we wanted from them but never got. Until we do that our lives don’t really work, we sit around waiting for an impossible transformation, a payday that never comes, the moment our parents become exactly how we would like them to be, not as they are. For me, that moment of acceptance for dad only came when he was gone, I accepted him as he was when there was nothing left to accept. I don’t write this with any great sense of guilt or regret at opportunities lost, more with a sense of gratitude for what was given but often taken for granted.  

Oddly though, in the shadow of that seismic shift in my interior furniture, I detected the stirrings of an answer to my own prayer to be a better father. No longer compelled to define myself in contrast to what he was, I was freed to be what I was- both like and unlike him, and to be fair, more like him than I cared to admit. At some visceral level I came to appreciate how much of myself originated with him. I came to accept myself as a dad and my dad as a father.

Related articles