IIt's early December and I'm sitting in a therapist's office in central London, about to do 60 minutes of pre-Christmas family therapy. Outside, Christmas the lights flicker. I hear a drunk man literally screaming with joy on the street below my window. But the office is frighteningly quiet. My mother, my sister and I sit in soft chairs and pretend to admire the art, but in fact we stare at each other like boxers, looking for weak points. My father is just a tiny, flickering face on an iPhone, lying on the pillow next to my mother. My dad doesn't really believe in therapy, but he's compromised by connecting via Zoom. He continues to fall from the pillow to the floor.
Our therapist looks at us kindly over his glasses. She is over 80 and looks world-weary. It's as if she's already dealt with all kinds of dysfunction. She lets the silence hang for a moment and then clears her throat, “Shall we start with the gifts? Or the food?”
My family started doing “Christmas therapy” eight years ago, after the holidays were so bad that my mom decided we needed professional help. The exact details are hazy, but I remember arguing with my mother over a dish of chips. I also remember throwing potatoes. Then my mother swung a carving knife at me and said, “I would like to stab you with this knife.” We didn't eat Christmas dinner at all that year. My mother wandered the streets alone, smoking cigarettes, while the others sat on the sofa and watched Elf.
When we started therapy, our dream was that we could keep the family dynamic in the spirit of Christmas. The idea was to express grievances early, in the presence of a mental health professional, to avoid future misfortunes. But in practice, it goes like this: Once a year, in December, my family spends an hour together in the same room, assigning “Christmas roles” while simultaneously telling the terrible truth about each other’s personalities. My mom looks at me and says something like, “You're doing turkey, Kitty, because you want to be in control.” Then I look at my mom and say, “I don’t think you should do anything at all this year, Mom, because you won’t make it.”
I think we all genuinely want to have a Merry Christmas, but we also want to win in therapy, and that means getting the tacit approval of our therapist. Right after the potato thing, winning therapy meant pretending to be more intelligent than you were. In the early years, we sat quietly in our chairs and gave sound advice about scheduling housework. But more recently, we realized that we could get more sympathy by hiding our personal problems and talking about the fact that my mother and I take antidepressants. So my sister talks about her anxiety and I talk about my rage, and it's very interesting for me to talk about myself that way. Like we're really against it. Sometimes we go too far and our therapist interrupts us and says, “Remember, it’s your mom who’s not always mentally healthy,” and my mom smiles slyly. “Yes, I can’t cope because I don’t feel good.”
The strange thing is that when it's not Christmas, we have a good time together. I lived with my parents until I was 29, and not just because I couldn’t afford to leave. I liked living with them. For 11 months of the year we do not settle scores with each other. We talk on the phone a lot and post funny things on the family WhatsApp group. I even appreciate the fact that we sometimes get irritated and sad when we get together because it feels honest. There is no pressure to perform. But then December comes and suddenly we find ourselves trying again and again to sand down each other's rough edges and create an incredibly smooth, perfect family portrait.
However, something has changed over the past couple of years. My mom used to organize our annual Christmas therapy and panic about the potential tension, but lately she seems less interested in it all. My sister and I are now in our 30s, and without children of our own, we have become more in control of the family we have, while our parents seem increasingly relaxed. They both recently discovered Instagram and spent a lot of time playing on their phones last year. They didn't always come to the table when we called them. My mother spent a lot of time in her room, not wrapping gifts, but dozing. She didn't even seem particularly bothered by these arguments. When I yelled at her, she didn't yell back.
We covered some of this last week in therapy. This Christmas we are going to introduce a new rule: everyone must turn off their phone and put it in a bowl in the kitchen. Our therapist also suggested closing your eyes and counting to 10 before screaming. But I could tell that my mother's heart wasn't really in it. She tasted freedom, and now she just wanted to take a nap and play on the phone.
For me, Christmas still seems like a litmus test for the state of my entire life. The amount of happiness and peace I feel on this day feels like a terrible premonition of how much happiness and peace I can expect in the future. The more I try to bend my family to my will, the more frustrated I become, and the cycle continues – I can't seem to let go. But my parents let me go. My mom suggested that my sister and I go to therapy on our own next year.
