– Unpacking the Holidays–Marriage Counseling Style

Last Updated on December 14, 2015 by Chris Roberts

TAKING AN ACCOUNTING OF THE HOLIDAYS ON YOUR MARRIAGE

Once the glow of the holiday season has passed and the presents are opened and the wine is emptied, as we reflect back on the season, sometimes it isn’t as exciting as we hoped.  And the effects on your marriage can be less then stellar.  Marriage counseling, or discussing your marriage with the intentionality of a marriage therapy session, is a great (or saddening) time to really understand what happened over the past month.  For those us of that have been married for a long time, and even for those newlyweds, we quickly come to realize that the prolonged holiday season of winter can bring up as much conflict as it does beauty.  If you’ve noticed this pattern in your marriage, the first thing to realize is that it doesn’t mean there is something wrong with you!   Sometimes we can become blinded to the “shoulds” in life; for example: The holidays SHOULD be nothing but joyous and fun.  There is nothing inherently wrong with this notion, except that it can make us quite frustrated and angry at each other when it doesn’t turn out this way.  The truth of the matter is that the holidays are a crazy, complicated, enigma of a season.

Any great marriage counselor in Nashville is well aware of these complications and stressors that effect every marital component during this time.  In a previous article about marriage therapy in Nashville, Tennessee, we discussed how family of origin issues directly affect the daily lives of married couples.  This is none more true than during the holidays when we spend significant amount of time with family and when our old family traditions of HOW we spend the holidays comes into play.  There are seemingly simple concepts of how many presents do we get each other and how many presents do we get the children?  There are questions that MUST be addressed such as: How do we present Santa to the children?  How do we wrap presents?  Do we open one present on Christmas Eve or leave them all for Christmas morning? Do we eat breakfast before gifts, or after?  These are the seemingly trivial ones!!

There are more complicated questions that get brought up in marriage counseling such as: How much time do we spend with each parents?  How much time do we spend with just our family versus how much time do we spend with relatives?  How do we tell our parents that we don’t want to travel to their houses anymore?  These are such fundamental questions that need to be addressed between spouses, because left unattended, they can cause serious discontent and frustration and resentment amongst marriage partners.  Further, how does a couple even go about answering these questions?  There isn’t a manual or handbook about the “right” way to answer these questions.  But there are hundreds of tiny questions like these that come to a sharp apex during the holiday season, because we are all so bent on making it special and wonderful and magical.  As adults, we soon learn that the magic can be so easily lost as we get subsumed beneath these mountains of questions and negotiations.

For many couples, these questions are spoken out loud for the first time in the context of marriage counseling.  This is even true for people that have been married 15 and 30 years.  These questions are so fragile, because one or the other spouse will usually have to break the traditions that they enjoyed during their childhood.  One spouse wants to wake up in their own home with the own comforts and their own Christmas tree.  Another spouse wants to be with family and have themselves and their children surrounded by a multitude of people that love them and love their children.  Again, the problem with these questions is that there is no “right” way or “right” answer.  And these are the areas that can cause the greatest conflict among marriage partners.

If you’ve noticed that the aftermath of the holidays leaves a disappointed and bitter taste in your mouth, then it may be helpful to schedule some marriage counseling sessions in Nashville to better understand why these times are so stressful and frustrating.  Usually, both partners have a grand vision for a making a beautiful holiday season, its just that the details of how that vision plays out can look quite different.