When Family Feels Hard: How to Stay Grounded During the Holidays

Cecelia Baum Mandryk (02:19.19)

Hey, and welcome back to Millennial Midlife. Today we’re talking about something that comes up for almost everybody at this time of the year, my clients, myself, probably you. It’s when family feels hard. Because let’s be honest, family can be tough. Family around the holidays can be even tougher. know, we go back, a lot of us go back to holiday homes.

 

whether for Thanksgiving or Christmas or Hanukkah or whatever it is that you celebrate and you know suddenly we’re seeing through the eyes of everyone as our 16 year old self who did that really stupid thing and it can be a lot, right? You add in political differences and aging parents and illness, even different coffee preferences or warm drink preferences and suddenly the holidays can feel like an emotional obstacle course. I know I’ve been here, right? More than once.

 

more than once, more than times, more than a million times probably, I thought as I’m in holiday events, as an adult, why can’t you just be different? My life would be so much easier if you were a different version of you. If you were more like me, right? And the funny thing is they’re thinking the exact same thing about me. Isn’t it so interesting, our brains? For me, it happens even before I get to the holiday thing, right before I get to the family event.

 

Before I walk into the room, start judging myself because I can start seeing myself through their eyes and imagining what they’re going to think about my choices and about my parenting and about my life. And so I start judging myself in advance of them judging me because I know they’re going to judge me. I’m pretty certain they’re going to judge me. So by the time I actually arrive, I’m already tense. I’m already kind of angry. I’m totally amped and I’m totally on like I’m on guard already before I even get there. But now, now I have this work. So if you

 

If that feels like you or whatever version you have that feels like you, I was there. Now I have this work. Things are totally different. People who I work with in one-on-one clients and group clients use this work to have holidays go totally different for them. So holidays can be different. I want to open this up and say, if the holidays, if whoever you holiday with, they’re still them, right? Like we don’t get to magically get new people. They’re still them.

 

Cecelia Baum Mandryk (04:39.724)

But instead of it feeling stressful or tense, or you leaving feeling judged and unseen, you could actually have a holiday that feels and looks different for you. Because you change on the inside. Because you have this work. You have tools and awareness that let you do the holidays different. What I do now before I see my family, I actually spend time thinking about how I want it to go, who I want to be, how I want to feel, what I’m available for. I breathe, I use tapping, I ground myself before I even get there.

 

so that when I show up, I am connected to me. And that allows me to show up how I wanna show up. I take responsibility for how I feel. I’m allowed to set boundaries in a different way because I’m more in touch with me. I’m regulated, I am regulated. And when I am regulated, then I get to be a different person in this event. Whether or not it actually goes differently from the outside, like if somebody was watching, but it feels very different to me. And that’s what matters, right?

 

Because here’s the truth that I want you to hear. Other people will not behave the way you want them to this holiday season. They’re going to be them. Other people aren’t going to be, they’re not going to magically change. I mean, maybe they did, right? Maybe they did like a whole lot of work on themselves over the last year and they’re new people and that would be amazing. And it’s very likely that for the most part, you’re going to be with people who are still the same people they were last year. But the good news is you get to choose who you want to be this year. You don’t have to control them. You can let them be them.

 

you can focus on you and you can create a much calmer, grounded holiday than you’re used to just by working with yourself.

 

So here, this is the part where you get to start to work with you. Okay, so when I say stay connected to yourself, which sounds like coach speak, right? It sounds like kind of where you’re like, okay, that sounds good, but like, what does that even mean? Here’s what I mean. Pay attention to yourself. Pay attention to what is going on in your brain. Pay attention to what is going on in your body. What does it look like or sound like or feel like when you’re stressed, angry, or overwhelmed?

 

Cecelia Baum Mandryk (06:41.486)

Can you start to very aware of how you are and who you are when you are in this dysregulated space? And dysregulated is just like an umbrella term for any of those other things that I just mentioned, right? Feeling stressed, feeling angry, feeling judged, feeling unseen, feeling belittled, feeling whatever it is. So can you start to become aware of what is happening within you?

 

So instead of paying attention and thinking like that person shouldn’t have said something, they shouldn’t be that way, they triggered me. We’re coming back inside and we’re saying, I’m stressed right now. Can you meet yourself in the moment and say, I’m stressed right now. I wonder what I need to come back to myself. There’s this line in A Course in Miracles that says, I see nothing as it really is. It’s one of the lessons and it’s one of my favorites and it’s one that’s come up recently in my cycle of doing them. And it really says like, we…

 

When we step into something like a holiday family event or staying with family or whatever it is that’s hard for you with people over this season, we think we’re seeing reality as it is, right? But in fact, we’re actually seeing reality as we expect it to be. And that’s like really wild for us. We don’t want to admit that. But with our brains, we don’t see reality. We see what we expect to see.

 

And that means that if you walk into a holiday event and you’re expecting to be ignored, ridiculed, annoyed, whatever it is, you’ve already written that script in your head. And so you filter everything through that lens and your reticular activating system will pick those things out. And so this episode honestly is about when family feels hard, but it’s really like what’s going on within you when family feels hard, right? Here’s the thing. You can choose a different lens than last year. You can choose a different way of seeing yourself and operating with the people that you have. So I was talking

 

about this with a client recently who had a family event thing, a family thing that was going on. And she told me she had this story that her family didn’t really want her there, right? That she was kind of this pity invite and she at this other thing, she felt very, she wasn’t included. And then during the holiday, she feels like she’s, don’t really want her there.

 

Cecelia Baum Mandryk (08:54.636)

And I don’t know what anyone else is thinking, right? And they’re not in coaching with me, but I am in coaching with this person and I can hear, they just told me what’s going on in their brain, right? And this is the same for any of us at any family event. We don’t actually get, for the most part, we don’t get to know what other people think, but we do get to know what’s going on inside of ourselves. So staying connected to yourself means recognizing what’s going on within you. So she was telling me this story. They don’t want her, they just pity me and nobody wants me around. And it felt…

 

disconnected for her, right? She felt very unwelcome, very unloved. I do know that if she walks into any family event believing that, she’s walking in with an energetic BO. And I wish that I could say that I came up with that term and I didn’t and I can’t remember where I first heard it, but energetic BO, right? She has energetic BO. She’s coming in believing nobody wants to hang out with me. And you’ve seen this, either you felt it because you went into a party with this kind of

 

or event or some kind of gathering with this kind of idea or you watch somebody else walk in and you’re like, I don’t really know why I don’t want to spend time with that person, but I just don’t want to spend time with them. There’s something off about them. I just don’t want to be around them. They can feel the energy. And then your brain, if you have this story, this client that I was talking to, they walk in believing that no one wants to hang out with me and then they watch everyone respond to their energy. Your reticular activating system will pick up every weird look, every

 

like person who turns their back to you, everything, the person who doesn’t sit down on the couch, it will interpret it and highlight every moment to confirm your story because that’s what our brains do. They filter information to confirm our predominant belief system. And if you go into the holidays thinking, this is going to be awful, I’m going to be judged for everything that I like, my body and my parenting and my work and blah, blah, then you are actually setting the stage for that happening in some way.

 

And we blame it on other people, and I’ve done it too, so I’m not pointing a finger at you. We blame other people thinking they’re the ones ruining our holidays when in fact we can start to take responsibility for how we feel in that moment and how we show up. taking responsibility for yourself is so much more effective at creating a calmer holiday for you than trying to control everyone else around you. Because just pause and ask yourself, how well has it worked to control everyone around me in the past?

 

Cecelia Baum Mandryk (11:21.612)

It hasn’t. It doesn’t. It just doesn’t. We want them to and we give them ultimatums. If you do that one more time, we can’t uphold these boundaries and these ultimatums, but we do it because we think we need to control them to feel good within us. This is not about excusing behavior. It’s not about condoning behavior, but it is about owning your own story and owning who you are in these instances and these events, noticing the lens you’re walking in with.

 

So before you step into your next gathering, before you step into the holiday season, you might ask yourself, what stories do I have? What stories am I bringing with me? Where am I blaming others or feeling like a victim? Where am I giving away my own power and my own choice? Who do I want to be this holiday season or what do I want to happen this holiday season? And what am I actually available for? What am I energetically available for? What do I want to happen? How do I want this to go if I

 

I got to choose. And this is the work that works because it’s the work that happens within you. And again, we think we spend a lot of energy trying to control everyone outside of us thinking that will make everything better and it doesn’t work and it never actually makes us feel better even if it does work.

 

And we spend very little time working on what’s going on inside of us, which is where all of it actually matters and has really big impacts, right? Creating the nervous system regulation, creating the belief system that supports you, understanding how do I actually want the holidays to go this year? Knowing that I can’t control other people, right? Because when family triggers come up, what’s really happening is your nervous system is saying, I don’t feel safe. Right, so when somebody says something and you feel triggered,

 

it’s your nervous system like raising their hand and saying or like a little engine light coming on and saying like not safe, not safe, not safe. And what most of us do is we ignore that light for a really long time to our own detriment, right? And then we kind of like with a car, oftentimes if you ignore it, something bigger and worse happens, That, that saying that it took me forever to understand a stitch in time saves nine, right? If you have one little

 

Cecelia Baum Mandryk (13:32.578)

hole in a sweater and you take time to mend it, it fixes it. If you don’t, you have an enormous thing to deal with, which I’m dealing with right now with my kids wool outer clothes. I did not save nine. I did not save nine stitches there. Okay, so your nervous system says like, I’m not safe, I’m not safe. And the name of the game here, to reconnect with yourself, over going back to that phrase, right, is to pay attention.

 

So the name of the game is noticing, right? You’re paying attention, the gentle observation, the compassionate awareness, and then curiosity. So noticing, my engine light’s going on, my nervous system light is blinking at me. I don’t feel safe right now. I could say I was triggered, but actually the trigger happened within you. So I am triggered, right? There’s a trigger happening within me. It is happening within me, not outside of me.

 

because different people are triggered by different things, right? So it’s not the thing that triggers us, it’s what’s of us that’s triggered. And then asking, so as we notice and we make space and we say, I’m triggered.

 

I’m safe right now. I just took a breath and then I can ask what’s really happening here. What’s coming up for me in this moment? What’s the story that’s happening within you? Because that trigger is happening within you. Not something from someone else, not something they did or said. It’s your system reacting to old information, right? I don’t see anything as it is now. I’m layering my

 

Brain is interpreting current information based on what I have tagged as important with my reticular activating system, based on old experiences of what’s been safe or not safe. That’s how this is working. And I can now interject myself into it because I know this is how it’s working and I can create regulation. I can start to bring myself back home. I can take responsibility for how I feel.

 

Cecelia Baum Mandryk (15:25.836)

I can bring myself back and I can change the course of how this event goes for me. Even if that means leaving, right? Like you can also leave if you want to. When you know that and you can work with it, you get your power back. So otherwise you get stuck in victim mode, waiting for everyone else to behave so that you can finally feel okay. So here some truths for when family feels hard. You can reset in the moment.

 

you always, always, always have the chance to reset in the moment. And this is, I’m not gonna lie, this is a practice, but if you start practicing it now, resetting, processing things, you can really learn how to do this in the moment. And processing an emotion takes like 30 to, I think it’s 60 to 90 seconds, but like 30 to 90 seconds probably, right? If it’s a pretty small one, just noticing it before you start reacting from it really,

 

helps you let it go, right? So you can always pause, breathe, and come back to yourself. And if you need to know how to do this, I have both a free thing and a small paid course that really leads you through processing things in the moment. So the five minute shift is the course and it’s great. It will help you. It will help you figure out how to do this. And if you practice it, you’ll get so good at it. You can choose again in the moment. So you get to decide who do I want to be right now? You can notice I’m showing up.

 

I’m reverting to 16 year old self. I don’t want to be 16 year old me. I don’t actually want to be reacting like that. I remember who I connected with before this event. That’s who I want to be. I can pause and I can switch back in any moment. In any moment I have a choice as to how I want to be and who I want to be. I can’t choose what other people do, but I can choose for me where I want to be, how I want to be, what I want to be doing. I get to choose that story. And then third, boundaries aren’t about control.

 

Boundaries that are based in control usually don’t work and they just lead to frustration. So real boundaries are more about love, about staying connected to yourself and others from a place of safety and then making decisions from that point. Again, not to let people get away with behavior that you don’t like, but so that you can actually act powerfully on your own behalf. So to clarify that a little bit, a control boundary usually says like, need to change so I can feel safe. Like you have to change your behavior. You have to not mention this thing so I don’t feel triggered.

 

Cecelia Baum Mandryk (17:43.766)

A real boundary says, I feel triggered here. I can notice and regulate myself, and then I can choose whether I want to be around somebody who says these things or does these things. I can decide what I want into my life. And that’s love and action. OK, so let’s do just a quick reset, right? So what you can actually do. So like I said, there’s the five minute shift course and then another freebie that’s when it hits the fan, right? When it hits the fan.

 

But you can, let’s bring it down to a minute, right? So wherever you are during the holiday season, when things feel like there’s a lot going on, when family feels tough, you feel like you’re in that dysregulated triggered spot, you can take a breath. I I like to put a hand on my body, but that’s not, everybody doesn’t like that. So I typically do when I’m explaining this, but you don’t have to. You can take a slow breath.

 

And right now you can even do that, right? So take a breath as you bring to mind an event that maybe felt tense or maybe even just recognizing what’s going on in your body right now. You might name what’s happening. Whatever emotion is there, irritation, guilt, frustration, sadness, happiness, joy.

 

And remind yourself that you’re safe right now. You’re physically safe. And how human it is of you to be feeling this feeling. This is a normal human emotion to be feeling. And then see if you can take three, watch your breath for three to five breaths. And see if you can make them slow and gentle through your nose if possible.

 

Cecelia Baum Mandryk (19:28.172)

And as you take those breaths.

 

Cecelia Baum Mandryk (19:33.73)

And with a final exhale, might then ask yourself, what’s really happening here? What’s the underlying story? Maybe what do I need right now? Or how do I want to move forward?

 

You might even softly remind yourself, have a choice. I can create safety for me right now. And for so many people who follow me and who engage with me, either on the internet in some way, social media, or they work with me, that line, that I have choice, I can create safety for me is such a powerful one. Right, so that just a few breaths, a few recog… like validating yourself, checking in with yourself, reconnecting with yourself, paying attention.

 

is what allows that shift to happen. Okay, so let’s wrap up or start to wrap up with the difference between reacting and responding. Because again, when we’re in family mode and holiday mode, oftentimes there’s a lot going on and we get into reacting. So reacting feels a lot like autopilot. It’s like when you find yourself yelling or walking away or saying yes without even realizing it. And then you start thinking like, why am I even doing this? Like, how did I get here? Why am I making cookies for the party again? Responding is different responding.

 

is that reconnection, right? It’s pausing for a beat, processing whatever happened, whatever information you got, whatever emotion is coming up and asking, who do I want to be right now? How do I want to move forward? Reaction feels urgent and tight, like your body’s bracing, like it’s looking for safety. Responding usually feels slower, it feels open, it feels more neutral, right? It feels like you actually have the choice in that moment, like things slow down when you’re responding. You’re on your feet and grounded again.

 

It’s the moment when you shift away from surviving or trying to find safety to being yourself around your family. Okay, as you head into this holiday season or whatever season, whenever you’re listening to this, I want you to feel some hope. Hope that this year can be different. I want you to feel a little bit of relief that you’re not broken. There’s nothing wrong with you if it’s been hard in the past and empowerment that you actually have some say in how this goes. So if you want to do some journaling around this, it can be kind of fun or even just like thinking out loud.

 

Cecelia Baum Mandryk (21:42.9)

If this was your dream holiday season, how would it go? And dream holiday season under like the context of it already happening, right? So not like, I’d go to Bali by myself. I mean that you can do that, right? That could be your dream holiday. But you might also say, if I was going to go see my family, how would it go? Could you write that script? Could you pretend that it’s a movie, that you’re the main character? Could you actually write how that plays off? Can you imagine how you want to feel, right? In this real world, in this real event that you’re going to go to, how do you want to feel?

 

What would it be like and who would you be if you felt that for the day?

 

When you change how you show up, the world around you shifts too, right? And this is bringing in elements of manifestation and elements of nervous system work and elements of mindset work. They’re there. So I know that this time of the year can feel so overful, but I also know that my clients tell me that the hours they spend in coaching each week are the most important and impactful hours for them. There are hours that allow them to be who they want to be, to do the holidays differently, to actually enjoy themselves. So if this episode resonates or the work that you’ve

 

done with me, whether it’s been here or on Instagram or wherever resonates, and you feel ready to have a different holiday season, then come join me inside the Life Lab. Come join me. If you join in December or at the end of November, I’ll have a Black Friday deal because why not? And it’s for some courses and the Life Lab for the next year. You can set yourself up to get through the holiday season in a different calmer place and also to

 

set yourself up for the new year, right? For who you want to be going into 2026. This is where we practice this work every single week. We learn how to work with our own brains and nervous system so that you can create more calm and joy in the moments that matter most. Thank you so much for being here. I hope that this holiday season is a calm one for you, a joyful one for you, one that allows you to recognize grief and anger and frustration in whatever elements they come up and whatever measures they come up because those

 

Cecelia Baum Mandryk (23:47.434)

You’re allowed to feel feelings, and I’ll have another episode about this over the holidays. You’re allowed to feel many things around the holidays, and honoring that is so powerful. Be gentle with yourself out there. Take care, and I will see you next time.