Choose Your Lousy Emotion
How to detach from the ones you love this holiday season.
In today’s reboot, our resident professional interventionist, Joe Schrank, encourages us to stay in our honesty. For some families, even around the holidays, that means excluding a loved one who is actively using and, for that reason, likely to cause chaos. For others, that means inviting the loved one in and accepting that their presence may be painful and disruptive.
What should you — you — do? Another way of asking the same question: What can you bear?
In Joe’s words, “Welcome to choose your lousy emotion.”
Detaching over the holidays is one of those problems where everything is right and it’s clashing with everything that is wrong. Families who decide to say “you’re not welcome” are 100% correct in doing so. Many have been through the mill financially, emotionally, and quite simply have reached the end of the road.
As Joe also notes, “Maybe next Christmas will be different.” For the loved one in your life —but also for you. What you can bear might change. The less terrible option this year might be the more terrible option next year. Staying in your honesty means trusting the version of yourself that made the decision this year, and last year, and the year before that—and next year.
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How Do I Detach From the Ones I Love?
by A.J. Daulerio
Originally published November 26, 2023
TSB: So my son/daughter/mom/dad is still out there, drinking, actively using and making everyone’s life HELL. I hate to treat them so callously during the holidays, but I want the rest of my family to not suffer. Is that selfish?
JS: Welcome to choose your lousy emotion. Do you want to feel guilty or do you want to feel resentful? What about the option of being right-sized and forgetting expectations? We’re all too consumed with holidays and the competitive nature of it.
But I’ll answer: Choose what’s going to make you feel less terrible. The Al-Anon crowd will advocate for tough love–lock them out, cut them off, detach. I’m not opposed to that, but I’m not a mother sitting at Christmas dinner wondering where my son is. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the message: “Look, I get it, you’re a drug user, you can do that, but just not here.” It’s appropriate (and needed) in many cases.
The tough love route rarely, if ever, produces the desired result. We’d all like to think: “sitting alone on Christmas will show them, that’ll be the bottom!” The problem with this premise is it presumes logic and logic seldom, if ever, applies.
Many have been through the mill financially, emotionally, and quite simply, have reached the end of the road.
Well, how do I let other people in the family know what’s up without being too melodramatic?
Honesty! Have your celebration and let your guests know, it’s very possible that the identified patient will be drunk, maybe/possibly/more than likely belligerent. Just rid yourself of the eternal hope that this time will be different. The percentages show that it won’t and that’s a set up for further disappointment and anger. Deal with what’s in front of you, but don’t make it worse.
OKAY, AND THEN WHAT?
Sooner or later, it becomes a team decision. What’s best for the team? (The team = the non-addicted, not disruptive part of the family.) It’s not really fair to ask everyone to have the same feelings, meaning while some are good with keeping that shit out, others can’t tolerate the guilt.
Especially during the holidays. Detaching over the holidays is one of those problems where everything is right and it’s clashing with everything that is wrong. Families who decide to say “you’re not welcome” are 100% correct in doing so. Many have been through the mill financially, emotionally, and quite simply have reached the end of the road. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that message: “Look, I get it, you’re a drug user, you can do that, but just not here.” It’s appropriate (and needed) in many cases. But it’s not a magic wand to make an individual comply. It’s just a fence around you and the other members of the team. For families who can’t tolerate that and tell themselves “we wouldn’t cut him off if he had cancer” they’re 100% correct as well. It’s a brutal situation!
Do you find yourself getting more calls between October and January? Is there a holiday uptick?
I dread this time of the year. The holidays are chaotic. I have long-time clients calling me with what I’ll generalize as “The Tommy Problem.” One mother called me in tears to say she’s gotten pressure from her Al-Anon group to shut her son out, but she just had lunch with a friend whose son recently died: “What if Tommy dies? What if he dies because I locked him out over the holidays? Will I regret it?”
My best advice to her and anyone else is to stay in your honesty. If that means locking out your Tommy, do it. If that means including them, that’s ok, too. The deeper trouble is expecting magical Hallmark cards and harmonious family time. There will either be the chaos right in your face, or the guilt of building a fence around it.
But look, it’s just Christmas. It’s not the end of the world and there will be others. Taking off my social worker empathy hat here for a second, I side much more with the “fuck them” response. Why should the whole family system suffer? My own personal experience looked like this: My sister made the tough decision to exclude our alcoholic father from her wedding. The lead-in was tough. He was, on many levels, sick through no fault of his own. He had served multiple combat tours in Vietnam and never really recovered. The wedding went off without incident. Were he to attend, there was chaos without a doubt. Would my sister have preferred a functional man who could participate? Of course, but that was a fantasy. The reality was much different so choosing honesty paid off for us.
Again, figure out your family's own honesty and stay in it. Maybe next Christmas will be different.
****
Joe Schrank is a founding editor of The Small Bow, plus a clinical social worker, journalist, public speaker, and policy advocate. If you think you need his service, email me at ajd@thesmallbow.com and I’ll put you in touch.
MORE FROM JOE SCHRANK ABOUT THE HOLIDAY AL-ANON OLYMPICS
Ah Daddy, I Wanna Stay Drunk Many Days
And….it’s officially Holiday Check-In time!
WE NEED YOUR HOLIDAY CHECK-INS. SO HOW ARE YOU?
The most wonderful time of the year can be horrible for many godforsaken reasons, but let’s see if we can find our footing. Here are a couple of examples of great holiday check-ins:
“I’ve been throwing tantrums lately. Instead of telling others that I’m hurt or sad, I’ve been a brat. And to say that I’ve turned to anger or some other more adult characterization of my actions doesn’t do my behavior, or really, my feelings, justice. Instead, I have been a much, much, much younger version of myself.
To be more specific, I’ve sent two separate text messages that made me feel like a powerful toddler for doing so.
One text was to my immediate family on our group chat in response to our parents’ decision to just up and move Christmas Day to December 23rd this year. I ranted to my boyfriend about this total disregard for my and everyone else’s feelings.
The second text was to some girlfriends who had invited my ex-boyfriend to our annual Friendsgiving instead of me. When I accidentally found out about the event via a phone call with one of the girls, I texted the chat, “Have a great Friendsgiving” followed by the peace sign emoji, and then left the group.
Much like when I was three years old and lost my shit at the circumstances around me, I felt like I had really shown them, had made them regret being so awful to me. And then, just like when I was three years old, I was in a ball on the floor when the adrenaline wore off. I don’t even care about the holidays but apparently I really do.”
*****
“My family checked my little brother into a residential facility in another state last week. He’s battling addiction at 15. He’s already missed Thanksgiving, and he might have to miss Christmas, too. I look back at who I was at 15 — also in the throes of addiction, desperate for help, not getting it. My parents have learned and grown a lot since then. My brother has had more support than I ever did. But he still fell into the same trap, and I feel like a failure as a sibling — I couldn’t stop him, and I cannot save him. All those self-centering feelings of guilt rise because I’m the eldest. I was supposed to protect him, help him be better than me, and make the mistakes so he doesn’t have to. But I’m over a decade older and live states away. All we have in common is our family, sometimes skateboarding. And this, now, I guess.”
EMAIL ME HERE: ajd@thesmallbow.com subject HOLIDAY CHECK-IN
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A POEM ON THE WAY OUT:
Breakage
by Mary Oliver
*********
I go down to the edge of the sea.
How everything shines in the morning light!
The cusp of the whelk,
the broken cupboard of the clam,
the opened, blue mussels,
moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred—
and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split,
dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture gone.
It's like a schoolhouse
of little words,
thousands of words.
First you figure out what each one means by itself,
the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop
full of moonlight.
Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.
