Why Going Home for the Holidays Can Make You Feel Twelve Again

Something peculiar can happen when adults return home for the holidays. People who are otherwise capable, confident, and reasonably comfortable with themselves can find that within an hour of arriving at their parents’ house, they’re behaving in ways they haven’t behaved in years.

A successful professional who handles difficult conversations at work suddenly can’t tell his mother that he’d rather not discuss his weight. Someone who has spent years becoming more assertive finds herself apologizing for things she hasn’t done. Two middle-aged siblings get into an argument that sounds remarkably similar to one they had when they were teenagers.

And afterward, there’s often a mixture of embarrassment and bewilderment. How is it possible to have done so much growing up and still feel twelve years old after ten minutes with your family?

The answer has less to do with immaturity than with the persistence of our earliest relationships.

Families Have Long Memories

We don’t enter our families as blank slates each time we visit. We return to relationships in which we’ve spent years learning who we were supposed to be, what was expected of us, and which parts of ourselves were welcome.

Perhaps you were the responsible child who kept things running smoothly. Or the one who learned to stay quiet because expressing disagreement led to conflict. Maybe you became the family comedian, the difficult one, or the person everyone relied upon to make sure nobody got upset.

These roles weren’t necessarily imposed consciously, and they weren’t always experienced as painful. Often they emerged gradually through thousands of ordinary interactions. A child discovers that being agreeable keeps a parent calm, that being accomplished brings admiration, or that anger is the only way to get anyone’s attention.

Over time, these ways of relating become familiar enough that we stop experiencing them as choices.

When we return home, we may find ourselves inhabiting them again before we’ve even realized what’s happening.

Why Insight Doesn’t Always Change How We Feel

One of the frustrating things about these experiences is that we may understand them perfectly well. We know that our mother’s criticism reflects her own anxieties. We recognize that our brother has always competed with us. We can explain, sometimes at considerable length, why our father becomes uncomfortable whenever anyone expresses disappointment.

And yet we still react.

That’s because our earliest relationships are not simply collections of memories or ideas about other people. They also shape our emotional expectations: what we anticipate will happen when we disagree, disappoint someone, express a need, or refuse to take responsibility for another person’s feelings.

These expectations can remain remarkably powerful even when our adult lives have given us plenty of evidence that other ways of relating are possible.

There is also the complication that our families may continue to treat us as the people we once were. A parent may still assume that the responsible child will take care of everything. A sibling may continue to provoke the same old competition. And sometimes, despite years of personal growth, the family itself hasn’t changed very much.

It’s difficult to behave differently in a relationship when everyone involved is accustomed to the old arrangement.

Additional Reading

• Why Is It So Hard to Ask for Help?

• Why Do I Feel Guilty When I Relax?

• Why Every Conflict Feels Like the Relationship Might End

The Conflict Between Belonging and Being Yourself

What makes family visits especially complicated is that these old roles often served an important purpose. They helped us preserve relationships with people we depended upon and loved.

The child who learned to avoid conflict may have been protecting a fragile connection with a parent. The one who became exceptionally competent may have discovered that achievement was a reliable way to receive attention. Even the rebellious child may have found a recognizable place in the family through opposition.

Giving up these roles can therefore feel more threatening than we might expect.

You may know perfectly well that you’re entitled to disagree with your mother, yet feel unexpectedly guilty when you do. You may resent being expected to organize the entire holiday gathering while simultaneously feeling anxious about what will happen if you don’t.

Part of you wants to be treated as an independent adult. Another part still wants the familiar reassurance of belonging.

Neither wish is particularly childish. The difficulty comes when they seem impossible to reconcile.

What Does It Mean to Go Home Differently?

People sometimes approach holiday visits determined that this year will be different. They’ll finally confront a critical parent, refuse to get drawn into an argument, or establish boundaries that have been difficult to maintain.

Sometimes these decisions are useful. But they can also become another source of pressure, as though a successful holiday requires demonstrating how thoroughly we’ve overcome our childhood.

A more interesting possibility is to become curious about what happens to us in the presence of our families.

When do you begin feeling responsible for someone else’s mood? What makes an ordinary comment suddenly feel humiliating? Why does disappointing a parent still carry so much emotional weight? And what happens inside you when you consider responding differently?

These questions don’t necessarily lead to dramatic confrontations. Sometimes change involves something quite modest: allowing a parent to be disappointed without immediately trying to repair it, declining a familiar argument, or recognizing that the guilt you feel doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve done something wrong.

For some people, maintaining a relationship with family requires considerable distance or firmer boundaries. Others discover that their relatives are more capable of accommodating change than they expected. There isn’t one correct way to navigate these relationships.

Psychotherapy can be helpful because these patterns often appear in other areas of life as well. The person who feels responsible for keeping a parent happy may find themselves doing something similar with a partner, a supervisor, or even a therapist. Exploring these experiences as they arise can make it possible not only to understand the old expectations, but gradually to feel less governed by them.

Perhaps the goal of going home for the holidays isn’t to prove that we’ve finally grown up. It’s to recognize how much of our earlier experience still lives within us, while discovering that we may have more room to move than we once did.