TUYT 69

Amy Hoyt22min

Leina Hoyt, MFT, MA

00:01

Because the forceful exhalation instead of the slow exhalation allows me to take another double breath sigh again faster. And that gets me back into regulation better.

Amy Hoyt

00:16

Hi, everyone, welcome back, we are excited to be here again together. And today's episode is what about the social obligations we feel during the holiday season,

Leina Hoyt, MFT, MA

00:30

the holidays can be particularly difficult to navigate with, with all the social obligations. And we were talking right before recorded and how when you have joined with somebody in partnership, both of your families of origin want to spend time with you. And if you have a family of origin that you come from, that doesn't have healthy boundaries, then they may express a sense of entitlement that you should spend all of your holiday time with, with them. And when we were when we've been raised like that, the brain responds as if we're going to be annihilated if we don't follow the imperatives of our family. And so then what I've seen couples do is they get into really big arguments, and it it devolves into, you don't support me with my family, or you don't love me enough to spend time with my family. And I want to suggest that that does not get involved in these discussions. This discussion is about how much time to spend at each place. It can be a cousin's house, it can be Christmas parties, it can be work parties. And when we are talking about this topic, it's really easy to go down the rabbit hole and make it become about something totally different. So one way to be able to do that is to say, I know that you're really upset because I want to spend time with my family too. But I want to make sure that we stay focused on navigating this. And maybe we can spend an equal amount of time with your family as we do with my family. Now, I do have some clients and have had over the years, who actually don't want to spend any time with their family of origin. But they might have somebody that they are partnered with who feels extreme amounts of pressure from their partner's family of origin, to accommodate the family in every possible social obligation. And in this day and age, I just don't think that that's practical. There are so many different events and entertaining opportunities during the holidays. And so being able to have an idea of time limits and when you're what you'll be spending your time doing and how long at each place can be very helpful. That's that is

Amy Hoyt

03:15

great suggestion. And I would say that's probably one of the top things that come up with social obligations and social pressures of the holidays. Right? You know, we, for our listeners, we did do an episode on boundaries just a few weeks ago. So it'd be episode 65. That was really helpful in terms of this exact situation. We I think we actually talked about something very similar. So we probably Yeah, if they want to go back and get more in depth into those boundaries, Episode 65 is great. One of the other things we talked about just in last week's episode, is financial obligations of the holiday season. And so we talked about, you know, expectations and gifting and so forth. But I I do think we should at least briefly mention it this week that that is a nother part of social obligations when you're invited to a party, bringing a gift for the host or hostess. When you know, at work. Usually there's some sort of gift exchange at the very least some sort of acknowledgement, holiday cards. I mean, it goes on and on and on. And so even if it's not a formal gift, or it's not really about the dynamics of your family and your partnership and your children, it's there's still a lot of social obligations around gifting. So we do go in depth about that last week, but is there anything else you want to mention about that in terms of the social pressure of gifting,

Leina Hoyt, MFT, MA

04:51

some of it's very difficult to navigate if you if you are in a work environment that expects certain Quality gifts to be exchanged, that can be really hard. And it might benefit you to come up with some creative ideas. One way that we avoided that when I started my nonprofit Counseling Center at Oak Grove, is we had a white elephant Christmas gift exchange. And it was hilarious. And some of it would be like brand new stuff that the person didn't return to Amazon and time or brand new things that didn't fit or that they didn't want anymore. But it was so much fun. And there wasn't any financial pressure on anybody.

Amy Hoyt

05:38

That's awesome. And so you put rules around, you know, spending for the gift. Okay, that's fantastic.

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