Managing Your Relationship Over The Holidays
When it comes to making it through the holidays alive, those in the midst of relationship problems often consider just surviving a success. The holiday’s are supposed to be so much more than that, but when you’ve got troubles in your marriage, family festivities can often be a pressure-cooker that brings the worst out of your relationship. Learn how to manage your relationship by managing your environment with Marriage Therapists Ottawa.
Fighting Never Works.
Maybe you have a narcissistic husband or wife. They engage in all manner of attention seeking behavior, and love to do so at your expense. They throw inappropriate comments your way throughout the holidays, and you’re compelled to start throwing some back.
Don’t do that.
If you do, you protect your dignity, but at the cost of tension and stress being brought into your environment and mind. Problematically, you get no value from paying this cost, as there’s simply no changing the mind of narcissists. Big fight breaks out, nothing gets better for anyone, tension rises, and everything is worse.
It doesn’t even have to be narcissism. Throughout the holidays, especially for those in troubled relationships, you’ll be inundated with opportunities to help escalate family tension. Feelings of resentment encourage you to fight back when your dignity is attacked is legitimate, but acting on them will never produce the results you expect them to.
This is because getting what you want from the holidays has very little to do with managing yourself or others, but rather the relationships between yourself and others.
Manage Relationships, Not Each Other.
Maybe you have an alcoholic significant other. You’re terrified that he or she is going to make a fool out of themselves and you over the holidays, and are looking to do all you can to minimize that.
Most might take the direct route, and spend the holidays by keeping tabs on a husbands drinks to limit intake, or constantly hovering over a wife to limit the consequences of her drunkenness. Not only do you pay a massive cost by never being able to relax over the holidays, and you barely get anything for it. Your partner is still going to get drunk despite your efforts.
Try instead to manage relationships.
Alcoholics thrive in environments where everyone is drinking. They promote the drinking of others so their drinking appears legitimate, forming a co-dependency with everyone around them. Disrupt their efforts to influence the decisions of others, and you can have a significant impact on promoting peace of mind of everyone around you. Promote responsible drinking, and drink responsibly yourself, and while your partner is still likely to over-drink, they’ll be significantly less capable of bringing others down.
Marriage Therapists Ottawa
It doesn’t matter if your partner is a narcissist, an alcoholic, both, or neither. Trying to make another human being act the way you want them to not only never works, but always leads to worse consequences than intended.
This holiday season, focus only on your actions and how they are capable of contributing to either tension or peace-of-mind for yourself and those around you. Don’t spend your time and energy trying to manage those around you, but rather the relationships that exist between them and you.
These times are tough to get through, but if you emerge from the other end of the holiday season with your peace-of-mind intact, you’ll have won a massive victory. Once everything is over, get in touch with Marriage Therapists Ottawa and let us know how things went!