Holiday Casualty Count
November 30, 2025
Dr. Roger Ray
I hope that you all had a good Thanksgiving whether it was a big family gathering or a Friends-giving like I had at my house. I say, “I hope”, knowing that for a lot of people, traditional family gatherings are something to be dreaded.
I have always said of my family of origin that I believe that I had one of the less miserable childhoods. For 45 years I have done quite a bit of pastoral counseling, and I have heard the horror stories of families with a history of child abuse, both beatings and sexual assault. I have done a lot of work with drug and alcohol addicted people and their family members. And I have known people who lived in such chronic poverty that trying to prepare a holiday meal was more a humiliation of charity or profound hunger.
My family had none of that. There was no violence, so sexual abuse, no one drank any alcohol, and we were pretty comfortably ensconced in the middle class of rural Kentucky. Our house was clean and safe, our clothes were clean, we went to the doctor when we were sick, we went to church every Sunday, and there was a family understanding that the children, unlike our parents, would all earn college degrees.
None of the people who scheduled appointments with me in my church office would have described their family in the way that I described mine just now. However, when I did go away to college, and my first college was just 30 miles from my hometown, I was always amazed by my university peers who got home sick. And as the Thanksgiving break loomed large, most of them talked about how eager they were to get to go home.
For me, living at college was an escape from the constant criticism, bickering, judgement, and guilt. What made my peers homesick, what made them long to go home was an anticipation of warmth, affection, acceptance, of having a place, a sense of belonging. While we had a nice house, car, clothes, plenty of good food, medical care, education, and a church life, there were almost no warm fuzzies. No comfortable sense that you could let your hair down and just be yourself. My mother was a puritan lady who was suspicious of happiness. My father was WWII veteran whose mind was wounded by the war’s carnage, and he lived every day in the anger he used to mask his constant fear.
My 3 siblings and I all married young, while we were still in college. That often happens to children who grew up in homes that were devoid of love. You want love, intimacy, affection, but for us, that’s kind of like ghosts …. Something that everyone talks about, but no one has ever really seen.
I shouldn’t speak for my siblings but at least for me, our attempts at finding the love and warm fuzzies we longed for were cursed by the baggage we took from home with us. It took me a long time to understand what was wrong with my family of origin and even longer to learn a better way of creating a happy home life. The harsh perfectionism that ruled our childhoods and made us successful in our careers, never worked well at home. It should have been obvious but, as is true of most things that should be obvious, it wasn’t.
My siblings found reasons to rarely be around my parents once they were on their own but my sense of obligation was strong, and I made sure that they were not alone on the holidays until they had passed away. My oldest brother, having at the time the most stable work and family situation, rolled up his sleeves and took on the task of caring for them in their last years. My sister passed away, and I have only seen my brothers at each parent’s funeral. Other than occasional FaceBook comments, we have fallen into the icy silence that is our family inheritance.
Ironically, shortly after writing that previous paragraph, I received a text message from my oldest brother telling me that he had cancer that was not responding to chemo therapy and that he likely only had weeks left to live. Forgive me for sharing such a personal issue but it would seem to me to be dishonest to not tell you. For all of us who hope to heal family divisions, we should all be aware that we are not guaranteed another holiday season or, in my case, maybe not even Christmas. Even without a terminal diagnosis, folks, we should view these things with a certain sense of urgency.
I wanted to raise the issue of family conflict today, in the shadow of Thanksgiving, because the great thing about this season is that the second big family holiday is just a month away. If Thanksgiving was a failure in your family; good news, you get a second chance to make it better in just a month!
The opening line of Leo Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina, succinctly says: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” There are libraries full of books about the various hells we create for unhappy families – alcohol, violence, sexual abuse, infidelity, gambling and drug addiction, various mental health issues, and, in our day, political and moral differences. We had a kind of diagnosis in pastoral counseling called “conflict habituated families,” families that simply didn’t know what to do if they were not in conflict. No one could express themselves unless they were shouting or talking through gritted teeth, as if anger is the only motivation for communication.
I spent years sending letters to my siblings reminding them that we could recreate our family. We could be happy and loving if only we could decide that we all wanted that. The most articulate answer I ever received to those entreaties was, “no thanks.” It takes at least two people to play tennis. After a few years of lobbing a ball over the net and never getting a ball hit back, you give up. But still, it didn’t have to be that way in my family, and it certainly doesn’t have to be that way in your family.
In the most severe cases, reconciliation may be nearly impossible. Sometimes there are root causes than should not be dismissed or swept under the rug.
And sometimes, the burden of resentments is so large that you can’t even imagine letting go of it.
I did my master’s thesis on the treatment of alcoholism and after a couple of years of going to four or five AA meetings every week, I can tell you that I have heard a lot of nightmare scenarios. Most of the time, whenever there is an AA meeting, there is an Al Anon meeting at the same time in another room in the same building. The recovering alcoholics called the Al Anon room where the family members of Alcoholics meet, the “sick room.” That seems dismissive but, I can tell you that it is not entirely inaccurate. Alcohol addiction is not a problem that typically arrives at a family’s door unaccompanied.
But here is the irony: every group has its success stories and often times, it was the sickest people who eventually find their way into being the most healthy. And sadly, a lot of time, the people who seemed to have the most to live for and the fewest serious problems, were the ones who just couldn’t find a way to minimize their conflict and maximize their joy.
I will tell you with some shame that some of my lowest functioning counseling clients, the ones who exhausted and exasperated me, the ones that I wished would just stop wasting my time, turned into some the most remarkable success stories.
You may think that your family is just impossible and maybe you are right but what if they are not entirely impossible? What if there was a chance that your family of origin could become, if not an astounding success, at least a lot more healthy than it has been in the past?
I am not one of those “pie in the sky” preachers who will tell you that everything can be fixed with forgiveness and unconditional love. There are offenses that are so evil that any kind of unconditional love or forgiveness would be, in and of itself, very sick. However, the things that cause distance in most families are typically so venial that they would embarrass Charles Darwin.
The famous Austrian psychiatrist, Victor Frankl, after he had survived a horrifying Nazi death camp during the holocaust, said, “Suffering is like a gas. It expands to fill the space allowed to it.” Even in the torture and deprivation of the holocaust, each individual has a certain roll in choosing how much of your skull you are going to rent to your suffering.
I’m not saying that your drunk uncle didn’t insult you at Thanksgiving. I didn’t say that your parents didn’t who more love and approval to one of your siblings than they ever did you. It may be that your brother even owes you money that he clearly has no plans to repay.
Seven years ago two women coauthored a book that became a NewYork Times best seller that was cryptically titled, “Let that Shit Go.” That’s not to say that you ignore the co-worker who is sexually harassing you . . . report them to HR or maybe even get a restraining order, but don’t let them live rent free in your head. You play a part in choosing how much of your life will be given over to suffering.
At least one over zealous marketing person has even tried to sell coffee mugs with the saying and an image of the Buddha, to suggest that it was Buddha who first told us to just “let that shit go.” And that, I can assure you, is a false attribution . . . however, even though I am certain that Buddha didn’t say it just that way, he did teach that life is suffering and the only way out of suffering is detachment, to let go expectations and resentments, so, in rather coarse vernacular, the Buddha would tell you, before your family Christmas gathering, to try to just let that shit go and save room in your heart and your head to have a more loving and joyous holiday.
Turn on some music. Open a bottle of wine. Tell a non-offensive joke. And try not to make it so obvious that you think that your Trump supporting family members are idiots. That’s my opinion.
