PenPenWrites

I must have been prescient when I wrote my previous post about people who didn’t want to be with family on Thanksgiving. That wasn’t me, of course. I was looking forward to traveling to my son’s house and being with my son, daughter, their spouses and my grandchildren. Grandpups, too. I was in fine fettle when I spun out a “what if” scenario of not being able to join them. Turns out, the day after I posted , I got sick–not seriously ill, just queasy and congested enough to make dealing with airports and flights intolerable. So I was by myself for the Big Day (Slept through most of it; the upside of being sick.) and the Big Meal (A big loss since my DIL is a terrific cook; I had soup, which was about all I could tolerate).

I bring this up now because that previous post seems to have tapped into a larger trend. A good number of people want to free themselves from being with family on Thanksgiving. The message they’re sending out: Going back to the family home (often the parental manse) means exposing themselves to dysfunctional family dynamics, being treated like a younger version of themselves or feeling unaccepted. They’re not only raising the issue, they’re writing, podcasting or otherwise broadcasting their feelings about it.

A case in point is this Washington Post video by Jeff Guenther, aka “Therapy Jeff.” Guenther recalls the bad vibes from previous family Thanksgivings and the relief he’s found in no longer attending the holiday get-togethers. Here are some excerpts:

• “Every time I’d fly home for the holiday I’d get these awful headaches and feel insanely anxious as I tried to shapeshift myself into the version of myself that I thought my family needed in order to love me.”
• Ten years ago he stayed home and surrounded himself with friends and “it was honestly the most liberating decision I have ever made.”
• “A lot of people think you have two options. Either go home and suffer or you stay home and feel guilty. There’s actually a middle path. You can go home strategically and protectively.”
• “Use gray rocking. Be pleasant, be polite, be boring. Don’t hand them any tender information they can twist into a concern or judgment. Not everyone deserves access to the inner world. Some people only get the surface and that is more than enough.”

painting: Carl Larsson