Have you ever noticed just how bad the holidays are for people. As counselors it is our busiest time of the year. So many traumas, so much drama, such huge emotional conflict. Christmas comes along the same time every year and every year it is the same story, of pain, suffering, and emotional trauma.
Why is that?
Well, without going into a lot of detail, we think the primary reason for that is HYPOCRISY and CONTRADICTION. You see, the image of Christmas, the holiday myth, the Miracle on 34st idea, is that Christmas is a happy time when happy, functioning families get together and share happy, healthy feasts with much laughing and joy. But unfortunately, that is not the reality. While our local television stations feed us the “2 1/2 men” lie that everything is hunky dory in family land, the reality is that for a large number of people, sexual abuse, alcoholism, addiction, mental disorder, disease, and family strife are the harsh realities. You may have a hard time with this but the statistics bare it out. Just consider child sexual abuse. One in four boys, and one in three girls, will have experienced child sexual abuse by the time they are twenty. That means most families have a victim or two hiding away somewhere in the kids’ rooms. But that’s not the worst part. The worst part of it is that these people will be victimized multiple times. They will be victimized by the predators who abuse, victimized by their parents when the parents protect the predator, and victimized by The System which isn’t really set up to deal properly with the problem anyway.
And that’s just sexual abuse! That’s not even counting the physical beatings, emotional abuse, and psychological rape that passes for socialization in most North American families. You can deny it all you want, but it is rampant all around you.
No wonder Christmas is so hard! It is the time of year that we are called upon to be the biggest, most flamboyant, most outrageous liars and hypocrites of all, and who can feel good about themselves while doing that? In order to maintain the belief that our family is healthy, happy, and hopeful we force a glittering illusion and for the sake of appearances stuff the pain, cover it over, and suffer through it in repressive silence — pretending that uncle Jim didn’t touch little Suzy in the vagina area, that mom isn’t completely destroyed by the abuse she experienced as a child, and that dear old dad isn’t a selfish and emotionally abusive alcoholic.
Of all the lies that there are in the world as it has become today, for many people Christmas is perhaps the biggest lie of all.
So what are you going to do?
How are you going to end the cycle?
Well, you’re going to have to make some hard choices, and you’re gonna have to change. You are going to have realize that a family that can’t deal with sexual abuse, addiction, alcoholism, violence, and rape but instead covers it up and hides it away behind a “don’t judge me” barrier of selfish self-protection is no family at all, and no amount of holiday illusion will make it so. You’re going to have to quit hoping and praying that some magical bullet, or some graceful divine ray, is going to bring the family back to health. You’re going to have to stop wishing for a thing that you’ll never have and most important, you’re going to have to make a choice. If you ever want to have even the hope of a healthy, happy, holiday season, you’re going to have to dig yourself out of the pathology and put a strict boundary around the toxicity not only so you can heal and recover yourself, but also so that you might break the cycle and protect yourself and any children you have from having to live through another generation of silly nonsense. In this way, and only in this way, will you be able to brake the inter-generational cycle of violence and abuse and finally create the holiday season that you really want to have.
And I know this sounds radical, ferocious, and harsh, and I understand it seems counter intuitive, especially in a culture, and on a world, that says “keep the family together no matter how broken it is.” But you can’t clean yourself off while you are swimming in polluted water, and no institution is worth keeping if it causes, supports, and then finally obscures in one yearly orgasm of consumer delusion, the suffering, pain, and destruction it has caused. If you want to move forward and you want our advice, make the hard choices, cut away the disease and toxicity, and only then may you live happily ever after.
