Navigating Holiday Anxiety from a Family Systems Perspective

by | Dec 13, 2024 | family-communication, holidays

Between juggling holiday schedules, coordinating events, gift-buying, house-decorating, holiday meal-planning, and hosting get-togethers, holiday anxiety can touch many areas of your life. We’ve broken down how to cope with holiday anxiety through these four family systems theory topics. If you are dealing with pressure to feel festive, Lotus Counseling Group hopes you can start to develop healthy family boundaries for a calm and centered holiday season.

Identifying Your Family Role

We all have a role we play in our family systems. Your family role typically develops during childhood. Even when you seek your own therapy to address individual changes, returning to a dysfunctional or chaotic family environment places us back into our family roles. Through identifying your family role, you can increase insight about your place in the family and follow the suggested growth points.

Here are some common roles you might play in your family: 

The Peacekeeper

If you are constantly playing mediator in your family, you may be playing the peacekeeper role. Adults who played the peacekeeper role as children learned their value came from their ability to calm family conflict.

A growth point for adult children who played the peacekeeper role is to attend to their own emotional needs and self-care, before serving others.

The Clown

If you tend to crack jokes to keep tensions from building, you may be playing the clown role. Adults who played the clown role as children often learned that they could distract parents or caretakers from negative emotional experiences through laughter.

A growth point for adult children who play this role is to take a step back from using humor as a one-size-fits-all coping mechanism.

The Hero

If you were the kid with good grades, lots of friends, and often called the “little helper”, you may have played the hero role in your family system. Those who play the hero are often the first-born children in their families. They cope with family stress through over-performing and seeking validation through achievements. They also send a message to onlookers that everything in the family is perfectly fine, even when there is dysfunction or chaos.

A growth point for the hero role is to challenge their own battles with perfectionism and build a healthy sense of internal self-worth, not based on external achievements. 

The Rebel

If you were the wild child of the family, often getting in trouble at school and home, you may have played the rebel role in your family of origin. Ever heard the term, “The squeaky wheel gets the grease?” The rebel of the family is the one member who shows symptoms of the dysfunction. For this reason, they often become the “black sheep” of their family, even though they may also be the only ones brave enough to say, “Hey, something’s not healthy here!”

A growth point for adult children who were the rebels of their family is to assess their own mental health struggles, possibly even attending to impulsivity issues, emotion regulation, and distress tolerance strategies. 

The Lost Child

If you often found solace in isolation and peace and quiet, you may be the lost child in the family system. Those who play the lost child role would rather be invisible, as being seen and heard by others may cause internal distress.

A growth point for an adult child who fell into the lost child role is to work on building healthy self-esteem and self-worth, likely focusing on assertiveness and communication skills.