Don’t Let Your Brain Ruin Your Holidays

Have you ever noticed that when you are good and mad at someone, everything they do is just bad and disgusting and horrible? I mean, they can even breathe wrong.

That is the story our brains are telling us, anyway. It’s very easy to overgeneralize and classify someone (or something) as all one way or never another way. We are also usually quick to assume we know that the other person is thinking something bad about us; they are breathing wrong on purpose because they are mad at us.

Overgeneralization, all-or-nothing thinking, and mind reading are three cognitive distortions that we address in cognitive behavior therapy. I will devote more time to these concepts in the future because are so sneaky at keeping us stuck in anxiety. I want to touch on it now because the holidays are coming up, and I thought you might want to get the jump on the thought patterns that can add anxiety to a time that you just want to enjoy.

So how does this play out at the holidays?

It usually starts with an expectation.

Ann Lamott is credited with saying, “Expectations are resentments waiting to happen.”

I don’t know about you, but I usually don’t realize that I had an expectation to begin with until something failed to meet it.

I remember our first Thanksgiving as a married couple. I was someone who didn’t really try to learn to cook until I got married. Then I scrambled to learn so I could live up to my mother-in-law’s reputation for cooking everything from scratch. As it turned out, this reputation was a figment of my husband’s memory bias, but it took us a while to figure that out. Let me be clear: my mother-in-law is a fantastic cook, but my husband was remembering just the special meals she put together when he came home from college. She did not pull out all the stops on a day to day basis. In the first year of our marriage, though, we were still figuring that out. I did not want to disappoint, so I learned to cook things from scratch. So, there’s my first cognitive distortion, based on my own perception of an expectation of my husband’s, “I have to match my mother-in-law’s kitchen skills or I will let my husband down.” “I’m not good enough unless I learn to cook things from scratch.” (Another point of clarity: he never had that expectation of me. I took that all on myself.)

I assumed, on our first Thanksgiving together, that everything must be from scratch, so I figured it out, all the way down to cranberry sauce that would give Martha Stewart cause to up her game. We sat down at the table, and my husband admired the wondrous spread but said, “Where’s the cranberry sauce?”

He did not even recognize my fancy-from-sractch-cranberry sauce as cranberry sauce! For him, it just isn’t Thanksgiving unless there are slices of jellied cranberry sauce, straight from a can, on the table (more proof that his mother didn’t cook everything from scratch). This speaks to his expectation “It’s not cranberry sauce if you can’t slice it.”

This could have easily cued my all-or-nothing thinking and overgeneralizing, and I could have crumpled over the fact that one thing wasn’t perfect in his eyes. I could have made it mean that he thought I was a terrible wife. Sounds dramatic, but I’ve emotionally gone to such extremes over little things like that. And, I am willing to admit this because I know I am not the only woman who does this. But thankfully, that day it didn’t play out that way. We were both so excited that everything else turned out so well, that the cranberry sauce has become a long-standing joke for us at Thanksgiving (as well as a kitchen time-saver).

This was a humorous story about expectations, but we often do allow expectations to trigger those overgeneralizations and the result is rarely funny. Our brains like to put things in all-or-nothing, always-or-never, right-or-wrong categories. This is a way our brains are just looking out for us. It’s quicker and easier to ignore any of the messy information that contradicts what we naturally want to think so we can jump straight to tidy assumptions about what other people are thinking based on our past experiences.

This plays out during the holidays when we attach meanings to circumstances that we have overgeneralized (based on our own perceived expectations).

• Aunt So-and-So thinks I am a bad mom because my child won’t eat her green bean casserole.

• I couldn’t time the food to be ready all at the same time. This dinner is ruined. I am a terrible cook.

• Nobody ever helps me do the dishes. They are so ungrateful.

• Your uncle wouldn’t even come to Thanksgiving. He must think he is too good for us.

• We didn’t have enough money to buy the meal we usually have. Thanksgiving is just ruined.

Compassion and understanding shows up when we try to expand our polarized mindsets to include some alternate possibilities.

Ok, so maybe Aunt So-and-So does think I am a bad mom because my daughter won’t eat her green bean casserole. That doesn’t negate the fact that I’ve been doing some research on parenting and I am solid in my reasons for not dying on this hill with this toddler. It’s a different choice than Aunt So-and-So made when she had a toddler. Can that be okay? Or maybe that look on Aunt So-and-So’s face is not disapproval but a triggered memory of how hard toddlers can be at this age. Maybe she is wishing she could go back in time and react with more compassion like she sees you doing. Or maybe she wishes to go back to that time when she was a mom of a toddler because it is also a joyful time to be a mom. Who knows? Only Aunt So-and-So knows, so it’s not very helpful to make guesses about it, especially if those guesses make you feel bad about yourself.

I didn’t time the food to be ready all at the same time. So what? I have a microwave, we can heat up whatever has gotten cold right before we put it on the table. Maybe we sit down to eat a little bit later than intended, but nobody is rushing off to important plans after dinner. Black Friday shopping doesn’t start ‘til midnight, right? Can we laugh about this? And learn from it? My young adult niece is watching this unfold. She can learn that I didn’t let a little pressure make me lose sight of the big picture of enjoying our time together. Mistakes are normal. Maybe my example will teach her that you don’t have to be perfect to be a good hostess.

Nobody ever helps me do the dishes. First of all, did you ask for help? Or did they offer and you said “No, I got it.” Because that happens. Or is it that they will not do the dishes on your timeline? Or you are afraid they might break the good china so you do it yourself? Or they won’t do a good job? You may need to decide whether it’s important that the dishes

a. get done by someone else,

b. get done to your satisfaction, or

c. get done now.

You may have a good reason that you made it hard for them to help you, but you are just not aware of that reason. It feels better to blame it on them. When you own your reason, you will feel less like a martyr and more like someone who has chosen to do the dishes with intentionality. Then again, maybe you have a houseful of people who genuinely won’t help you, and you have asked. That is so frustrating. There could be some deeper issues going on that a simple blog post can’t possibly address (call me!). You may need to decide how important it is to serve the meal on real dishes vs. paper plates. If it is important to someone else that you use real dishes, then maybe that person would be willing to clean them afterwards? The goal is to find your options. If you are intentional going in, you can decide what you are willing to do. And not do.

Your uncle wouldn’t even come to your Thanksgiving. But does he really think he is too good for you? Maybe he has realized that he tends to enjoy his alcohol a bit too much and is trying to stop. He doesn’t want to ask you to have a dry Thanksgiving but also doesn’t trust himself to follow through on his goals if everyone else is indulging. Maybe there are things going on in his life that make Thanksgiving a painful day full of memories. Maybe it’s hard to be in the presence of happy people this year. Maybe he likes his solitude and has his own ritual of giving thanks on that day. I’m sure he feels appreciated to be included with an invitation, but don’t take it personally if he says no.

Whenever someone makes a choice, there is a very good chance that it’s about them, not about you.

We didn’t have the money to buy the Thanksgiving meal we usually have. But is Thanksgiving ruined? Or is this the year your kids truly learn that Thanksgiving is about being thankful for what you do have. You can still make memories, and in fact, this might be a Thanksgiving memory that stands out more than other years.

This week is too late for us to get together to work on your cognitive distortions around Thanksgiving in a therapy relationship, but there is time to start getting ahead of Christmas! Please reach out if I can help you sort out the automatic thoughts that might be getting in the way of enjoying your life and interacting with intentionality.

Jennie Sheffe is a National Certified Counselor ™ who helps women find freedom from anxiety and peace in their chaos. She sees clients virtually in the state of Pennsylvania, or in her downtown Carlisle, PA office. She offers Christian counseling and EMDR Therapy.