Holiday expectations and drinking – sometimes the worry can kill the joy. Read these tips for enjoying your holidays.

Holiday expectations and drinking – sometimes the worry about what may happen can kill the joy that’s possible during family celebrations. Read these tips to help you enjoy yourself this holiday season – even if you’re anxious about a loved one’s drinking.

Drinking and Holidays Expectations

If you live in a family with alcohol abuse and/or active alcoholism, the holidays can be fraught with angst and worry about how to make “this” holiday great (or at least better than the last one), which in turn sets up expectations for how it will turn out. You worry about how to keep him (or her) from drinking too much, keep his sister from making nasty comments about his drinking, keep his wife from nagging him about ‘having another beer,’ and hope dinner is served before he passes out. Likely all of this will have you on pins and needles, snapping at your children, ‘listening’ for signs that things are about to go badly; almost giddy with angst trying to keep it all ‘happy.’  And, if it goes like it usually does, all of your expectations — your dashed hopes and dreams — will turn into resentments before the New Year.

So what can you do to keep drinking from sabotaging your holiday expectations?

• Remember that when a person drinks too much, it causes them to engage in any number of drinking behaviors— the key concept here is “drinking behaviors.”  Drinking behaviors are related to a person drinking more than their body and brain can process, not to the person’s ‘core’ nature. These behaviors include passing out, starting a fight, continuing inane trains of conversations that only they can follow but the other is afraid to break for fear of them getting mad, being all lovey or being all nasty mean. You cannot control drinking behaviors because your loved one’s brain is no longer functioning properly. The only thing you can control is how you react. For this holiday season, try not to react (remember, that didn’t do any good last year, either.)
• Try put yourself in a mental bubble. Not that you don’t enjoy your holiday, but try not to keep track of what everyone else is doing. When one or the other complains to you about what the other is or is not doing, smile and gently say, “I think that sounds like something you should talk to him or her about.” And then, WALK AWAY…easier said than done, I know, but you can always excuse yourself to go stir the gravy.
  
• Keep your expectations low — not ‘off’ but not Norma Rockwell, either. Try not to put stock in the hope that this will be the holiday you’ve always dreamed of because it can’t be when there is active alcohol abuse and/or alcoholism present. The drinking behaviors that ensue set up a whole host of behaviors in everyone else as they try to grapple with what to do in their own way and with their own set of expectations, emotions and views of the situation. Controlling all of that is utterly impossible.
• Count to 10 or 100 or take a walk or head to the bathroom and lock the door when it feels as if you’ll explode — do anything to break the moment so you can collect your wits about you.
• Understand Secondhand Drinking and learn to count drinks to protect yourself from drinking behaviors.
  
• Enjoy the parts you can. When you aren’t so focused on trying to stop what is beyond your control, you can focus on a child or another guest or your own admiration of the meal or… basically, try to be ‘mindfully’ engaged in whatever it is that gives you pleasure and focus on that.

AND PERHAPS MOST IMPORTANTLY know that you do not have to serve alcoholic beverages just because some of the guests like to drink. You can let people know there will be no alcohol served this year – with no further explanation, mind you. Whether the person who likes to drink comes or not, that’s their choice. Remember – it’s your holiday, too!

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Lisa Frederiksen

Author | Speaker | Consultant | Founder at BreakingTheCycles.com

Lisa Frederiksen is the author of hundreds of articles and 12 books, including her latest, "10th Anniversary Edition If You Loved Me, You'd Stop! What you really need to know when your loved one drinks too much,” and "Loved One In Treatment? Now What!” She is a national keynote speaker with over 30 years speaking experience, consultant and founder of BreakingTheCycles.com. Lisa has spent the last 19+ years studying and simplifying breakthrough research on the brain, substance use and other mental health disorders, secondhand drinking, toxic stress, trauma/ACEs and related topics.

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