Love is all around us, especially at this time of year. But does the romantic notion of Christmas affect us negatively?
So, with this in mind, let’s break down the romanticised expectations in turn.“Hiding misery is hard, so I'm choosing to spend Christmas alone this year”setup. Families are messy and complicated at the best of times, and enforced togetherness combined with alcohol and high expectations can make tempers flare.
Despite Christmas being touted as a “family time”, it can bring out the worst in us, with pre-existing issues brought to the surface. According to psychotherapist, the key here is managing expectations. “Any time we are expecting a day to be picture-perfect, we’re setting ourselves up to fail and we can feel as though we’re losing control,” she explains. “What we want to happen versus how life turns out are often two very different things.
If you’re hosting Christmas, the pressure can feel even worse, particularly if you have a family member who’s prone to criticism. Psychiatrist and founder of Brain Based Connectionexplains: “A parent or sibling may have unrelentingly high standards of how things ‘should be’, and with that we can feel moral judgement. If things fall short of the expected standards, we can feel we’ve done something wrong or have been lazy or thoughtless.
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