IIt’s early December, and I’m sitting in a psychoanalyst’s office in central London, about to do 60 Minutes of Family Therapy before Christmas. Outside, Christmas lights twinkle. I can hear a drunk person literally screaming with joy in the street below the window. But inside the consulting room, there is an eerie silence. My mother, sister, and I sit on squishy chairs and pretend to admire the art, but in reality we look at each other like wrestlers, looking for weaknesses. My dad is just a little face blinking on my iPhone, propped up next to my mom on a pillow. My dad doesn’t really believe in therapy, but he’s putting himself at risk by calling in via Zoom. He keeps falling off his pillow and onto the floor.
Our therapist looks at us gently through her glasses. She’s in her eighties and has a world-weary view. As if she had seen all kinds of dysfunction before. She let the silence fall for a moment, then cleared her throat: “Should we start with the gifts? Or with the meal?”
My family started doing “Christmas Therapy” eight years ago when, after a particularly bad holiday, my mother decided we needed professional help. The exact details are unclear, but I remember wrestling with my mother over a plate of baked potatoes. I also remember throwing potatoes. Then my mother waved a carving knife at me and said, “I would like to hit you with this knife.” We didn’t have Christmas dinner at all that year. My mother wandered the streets alone, smoking fags, while the rest of us sat on the couch and watched the goblins.
When we started therapy, the dream was that we would be able to demonstrate our family dynamic at Christmas. The idea was to air grievances in advance, in the presence of a mental health professional, to avoid future unhappiness. But the way it works in practice is that once a year in December my family spends an hour in a room together, sharing “Christmas roles,” while offering up terrible truths about each other’s personalities. My mom looks at me and says things like, “You’re doing the turkey, Kitty, because you want to control everything.” Then I look at my mother and say, “I don’t think you should do anything at all this year, Mum, because you can’t cope.”
I think we all really want to organize a happy birthday, but we also want to win in therapy—which means getting tacit approval from our therapist. In the immediate aftermath of what happened with the potatoes, winning therapy meant pretending to be more rational than you were. In the early years, we sat quietly in our chairs and made sensible suggestions about routine tasks. But recently we’ve come to realize that we can get more empathy by intensifying our personal struggles, and talking about the fact that my mother and I take antidepressants. So, my sister talks about her anxiety and I talk about my anger, and it’s very interesting that we talk about ourselves that way. As if we were really against that. Sometimes we take it too far, and our therapist interrupts and says, “Remember, your mother is not always in good mental health,” and my mother smiles slyly. “Yes, I can’t cope because I’m not feeling well.”
The weird thing is that when it’s not Christmas, we have a good time together. I lived with my parents until I was 29, and not just because I couldn’t afford to leave. I loved living with them. For 11 months of the year, we don’t score points with each other. We talk on the phone a lot, and post funny things on the family WhatsApp group. I even appreciate the fact that sometimes we are in a bad mood and feel sad when we are together, because it is an honest feeling. There is no pressure to perform. But then December comes and we suddenly start trying to remove each other’s hard edges again, and craft a seamless, impossibly perfect family photo.
But in the past two years, something has changed. My mother used to be the one who organized our annual Christmas therapy session, and she used to panic about the potential tensions – but lately she seems less concerned about the whole thing. My sister and I are in our early 30s now, and in the absence of any children, we have become more in control of the family we have – while our parents seem increasingly relaxed. They’ve both recently discovered Instagram, and in the past year have spent a lot of time playing on their phones. They didn’t always come to the table when we called them. My mother was in her room a lot, not wrapping presents but sleeping. She didn’t even seem bothered by the arguments. When I shouted at her, she did not shout back.
We touched on some of this last week in therapy. We’ll be implementing a new rule this Christmas: everyone must turn off their phone and put it in a bowl in the kitchen. Our therapist also suggested closing our eyes and counting to 10 before we screamed. But I could tell my mother’s heart wasn’t really in it. She has tasted freedom, and now she just wants to fall asleep and play on her phone.
For me, Christmas still feels like a litmus test of the state of my entire life. The degree of happiness and calm I feel that day seems like a terrible premonition of how much happiness and calm I can expect from the future. The more I try to bend my family to my will, the more disappointed I feel, and so the cycle continues – I can’t seem to let go. But my parents let it go. My mother suggested that my sister and I go to therapy alone next year.