How to Escape Your Role in Your Family

Going home for a simple visit or for the holidays should be associated with happiness and good cheer. But for many people, it evokes stress and feelings of doom. This situation can be even more pronounced if you are single and do not have a significant other or children to buffer your sometimes awkward interactions with relatives. After all, you are off living life the way you want with your friends and maybe even your own family.

These relationships might not be perfect and can even be strained at times… but at least you chose them. You did not choose your parents or other members of your biological family. Nor did you choose the relationship patterns or emotional dynamics that existed in your childhood and often continue to the present day. You were a kid, after all, and did not consciously choose your family or your role in it. You might have been assigned the role of being the sick one, the black sheep, the hero, or the caretaker (among many others).

The black sheep can grow out of their “go my own way” tendencies, and heroes can modify expectations. But if you were the caretaker in childhood, you probably still feel like the caretaker when you go home for the holidays or even interact with close friends. In this context, I am talking about caretaking as the act of regulating or soothing another person’s emotions so that they (or the family) can be okay… even if it means that you are not okay and end up being miserable.

Many therapy clients report things like:

• Buying presents for their mothers because their fathers are too lame or unwilling to go shopping themselves.
• Going overboard in buying gifts and doing things for people that are never reciprocated.
• Suppressing their own thoughts and feelings because the aging parent cannot handle truths about the past, family, or relationships.
• Going places and doing things you don’t like in order to avoid letting your parents down.
• Staying at home longer than you want to.
• Appeasing a parent who demands to be treated like a child even though they never let you have a childhood and might even have been abusive.

People who do these things and engage in caretaking behaviors typically end up feeling resentful and maybe even depressed as they look forward to an experience like so many other negative memories of holidays past.

In order to change your family role and stop all of those caretaking behaviors, you will need to change your story and perhaps even the way you remember some of your past holiday interactions.

Tell yourself a new story or narrative about your role in the family.

What keeps you being an emotional caretaker? Usually, it is fear of abandonment. When you were little, if you did not take care of your parents emotionally, there may have been an implied threat that you would be rejected and not cared for. “You are such an ungrateful child!” In the worst of cases, you may have had an abusive parent who went off on you in a rage (or worse) and then apologized profusely for their being abusive. And you had to make sure that they knew it was alright and you forgave them.

But you are not a child anymore (although you might feel like one if you are away at college), and your parent cannot abandon you the way a young child can be abandoned. So, although rejection and abandonment might hurt like heck to an adult, it is not an emotional death sentence the way it is to a small child. At this point, in adulthood, it is more likely that your parents depend emotionally on you more than you on them. So, you don’t need to be afraid. Tell yourself that you are strong and self-assured and that there is plenty of love and friendship in the world to go around (if you don’t believe this, keep telling yourself a new narrative until you do).

Here are some behavioral things you can do that will help:

1. Honor your inner child. Imagine that you have a beautiful little kid with you (it’s you). Do not accept any behaviors from others that would make the child feel wounded or scared/shamed.
2. Learn to tolerate negative emotions. It is not that they won’t happen. It’s just that you won’t put so much meaning on them.
3. Pre-plan some activities (running an errand, making a phone call) that will enable you to take a break and exit the situation when you need to.
4. Develop the ability to stand by and witness other people’s folly. If you do someone else’s holiday gift shopping (other than for a child), you are preserving other people’s dysfunctional relationships and not helping them in the long run.
5. Practice not feeling impelled to justify or give other people explanations for your emotions or beliefs. Say how you feel; if they don’t like it, they can have their own feelings (that you also don’t have to fix).
6. Evoke positive memories of a holiday past (or imagine a new one) that did not involve you caretaking others. Bring that vision and emotion into your body in the present. Feel like the healed you are who you want to be.

In having many conversations about this topic with my clients across the fall months, I recently thought back on my own experience of the holidays. Across most of my adult life, these memories were ones of loneliness and loss.

As I spoke to one client about changing her narrative of her past and her family role, I all of a sudden remembered being a young child of perhaps three years. I was sitting in the dark at the dining room table, mesmerized by the “Angel Chimes” that my mom had set up for me. My mom was in the kitchen looking at me fondly, and I felt calm, happy, loved, and secure. I hadn’t truly recalled that memory for 50-plus years. So, I just went out and bought myself my own Angel Chimes and set them up in my own dining room. Now I can bring that sense of joy and magic into my body where in the past existed sadness and stress.

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Find your own memories of joy from your past (or make one up if you can’t find any) and try not to focus on the bad experiences. This will enable you to honor yourself in the present, shed those emotional chains that bind you, and take care of yourself for once across the holidays and all other times when you are interacting with family and feeling pulled back into that old role.