As we head into the holiday season, the songs and movies paint the picture of enjoyable time spent with family. This isn't the reality for everyone. Some of us are going to be spending time with family members with whom we have challenging relationships rooted in the past. If you grew up with a parent who created a toxic environment, you may be experiencing the consequences of it now, even as an adult.
Avoiding the person or pretending that the toxic environment didn't have an impact on you is not going to help. Here are some tips for recognizing and navigating those situations in order to have the healthiest and safest holiday season possible.
How can growing up in a toxic environment affect you as an adult?
Growing up in a toxic environment can cause people to create negative coping strategies that can actually do more harm than good.
For example, if your parent was emotionally volatile, you may have often felt like you were walking on eggshells around them. You learned to make yourself small and unobtrusive. If they were needy and required a lot of your attention, you learned to anticipate others’ emotional needs and prioritize them over your own. If they made you feel that you were never good enough, you learned to overachieve and seek external validation to reassure yourself that you are worthy of love and praise.
Some of these behaviors may seem harmless or even beneficial, like anticipating others’ needs, but it becomes toxic for you when it causes you to prioritize those over your own needs.
Why is one's relationship with their parents growing up so important?
The development of anxiety as a response to a toxic parental relationship can be related to both nurture and nature.
Some people are naturally more predisposed to anxiety. If those people are exposed to toxic childhood situations, they will react more strongly than those who aren’t naturally prone to it. Then it becomes a snowball as the person predisposed to anxiety internalizes what happened in the toxic environment, which reinforces more anxious feelings in future situations.
If you’re someone whose genetic makeup predisposes you to anxiety and you have a parent who exhibited any of the behaviors above, you began to learn early on that anxiety was a normal and appropriate reaction to any situation, which then told your brain to create a shortcut to those feelings for next time.
What are some signs your parent made a toxic environment for you growing up?
Anxiety can take many forms, but some of the most common are ones we often find in the “Type A” personalities that led us to be so successful in other areas. Here are some signs to look for in your life.
You struggle with perfectionism
Perfectionism can look like always striving for the next accolade without stopping to celebrate the current milestone. Maybe your parent accepted nothing less than an A+ and you internalized that expectation for yourself over the years.
This can also result in perfectionism looking like procrastination. You may hesitate and delay on starting a project you're not confident you can perfectly complete.
You worry about all the "what-ifs"
Anticipatory anxiety is being so focused on a future event that you experience more anxiety anticipating what could go wrong than the actual event warrants.
Maybe your parent spent weeks worrying aloud about a family party or holiday coming up with “what-ifs” that they would have little to no control over even if they did happen, like “Where is aunt so-and-so going to sleep if she brings her new partner?” or “I don’t know what I’m going to do if cousin so-and-so brings up that situation from the past, I won’t be able to bite my tongue this time!” These situations usually never happened anyway. Maybe as an adult, you do this in an effort to try to control the outcome of future events.
You get stuck on a topic or situation
Rumination is when you can’t let go of an idea, the mental equivalent of a rocking chair going back and forth endlessly. Maybe when something went wrong on a family vacation, your parent couldn’t let it go long after the situation had been resolved, even if everything worked out fine in the end. Maybe a flight was delayed or luggage was lost and even though it was resolved, they spent the rest of the trip dwelling on it and complaining about it. Now you find yourself doing the same, thinking that you’re just processing when you’re really perseverating.
You believe your parent is always keeping score
Fixation is similar to perseveration in that it centers on an inability to let go of an idea but in this case, maybe your parent brought up past slights to win an argument, which made you feel like they had been holding on to this resentment all along. You may find yourself doing the same thing now, thinking you are just being logical or rational when others may perceive you as just waiting to pounce on them.
This can feel like validation of past hurts, but all it does is create a scorecard with the people you care about.
What can you do to overcome a toxic relationship with a parent?
There are many strategies people find that help them reduce the anxiety they feel that stems from past experiences. The goal is not to avoid feeling anxious ever again; that would be setting yourself up for failure. Rather, the goal is to feel the emotion, notice it, then bust out your toolbox of strategies to find the right one for the situation.
Do some journaling
Many people find that journaling, especially before bed, helps quiet the mind and trick the brain into thinking those worries have been taken care of, even if all you did was write it on a piece of paper to deal with later. Doing this helps you separate what is within your control from what is outside of your control. This helps you focus on the items you actually can impact. Even when all you’ve done is write a to-do list for tomorrow, your brain thinks, “Ah, that’s been taken care of, now I can sleep.”
Think through the worst-case scenario
Many people also find it helpful to think a situation through until they reach the worst possible outcome in their minds. This sounds counterintuitive, but what it does is allow you to realize that the dangling “what-if” is a lot worse than reality.
Let's look at the example of worrying about the "what-if" that you will lose your job. If you continue to move forward from there, it could become “And then I lose my job, which means I have to find a new one. In preparing for that possible outcome, what steps can I take now that will protect my financial standing, like tightening my budget, making sure I overperform on this project or reach out to my network before I actually need a new job? And while I’m thinking about this, what feelings are coming up? Is there something exciting and enticing about thinking about a new job? Am I being fulfilled by my current role or is this a wake-up call to do some reassessing?”
Doing this exercise helps you circle back to separating what is within your control from what is not and provides you action steps you can take instead of worrying about the "what-ifs" happening to you.
Practice deep breathing exercises
Deep breathing helps slow the central nervous system, which minimizes the “fight or flight” response that shallow, panicked breathing can trigger. In a fight or flight response, our brain diverts oxygen to our muscles and heart instead of our brains, anticipating that we are about to fight an enemy or run away and therefore don’t need to use our higher-order thinking and executive functioning skills.
The easiest strategy is something called four-square breathing or box breathing. This includes a deep belly breath in while counting to 4, hold for 4 counts, deep exhale for a 4 count, and hold for 4 counts. Many people find it extra helpful to find a square shape in their line of sight, like a ceiling panel or a window frame, and follow the lines as they breathe. This repetition allows the mind to refocus on the world around it, instead of the imaginary disaster scenario it came up with when adrenaline was pumping. By slowing down, we tell our brains that there is no imminent danger, which allows the blood flow to return to our brains instead of just our muscles so that we can begin thinking of more complex solutions.
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