The 3 Words You Need for Any Holiday Family Conflict, from a Holocaust Survivor and Psychologist

The holiday season can be full of wonder and joy, or it can be laden with anxiety and animosity. In most cases, it’s a bit of both. In many cases, the tone of a holiday celebration can be ruined—sometimes in an instant by one person’s offhand remark—but it doesn’t have to be this way. Instead, we can take the high road, creating safe spaces to empowering each other with our differences.

The Healthy @Reader’s Digest spoke with Dr. Edith Eger, clinical psychologist, Holocaust survivor and bestselling author of The Gift: 14 Lessons to Save Your Life, about managing challenging family dynamics. Over the holidays, people who don’t regularly see each other gather around the dinner table and are often confronted by tough conversations.

Many of us were trained to suppress our feelings—hiding from our emotions and pushing them down—which can lead to outbursts of anger that have percolated, sometimes for months, years or even decades. Dr. Eger encourages us to explore our feelings and do our grief work to learn how to respond thoughtfully instead of reacting out of unprocessed feelings and raw emotions. “You can’t heal what you don’t feel,” she says.

“A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it,” says Mary Karr, author of The Liar’s Club, her memoir about growing up in a family plagued by substance abuse, depression and other mental health issues. Dealing with passive-aggressiveness and gaslighting from family members can lead to anxiety, PTSD and worse, but setting healthy limits and boundaries can help set us free. “Freedom is a choice we get to make again and again each day,” Dr. Eger says.

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