Protecting Relationships from Holiday Stress

Christmas is a time for family. It’s supposed to be fun, a time when we can relax, spoil ourselves and each other a little, eat things we wouldn’t normally eat, and sleep in late!
There can also be a lot of pressure around the holidays to have fun, to be on our best behaviour with family we don’t see very often, to get the “right” gifts, cook the perfect food, and to make sure everyone has a really good time.

But with pressure comes stress.

And stress hurts our bodies, our minds, and our relationships. 

Sadly, divorce rates soar after Christmas. We’re often incredibly busy, travelling around the country visiting relatives or preparing our homes for family staying with us. Add a little booze, the accumulated exhaustion of finally having some time off (probably months later than you really needed it), some kids, some in-laws, and a sprinkle of financial concern triggered by the cost of living increase, and many people’s relationships find themselves under extra strain at Christmas. Even more so if there was already some tension there, or if one or both of you have been stressed or overwhelmed for your own reasons recently.

If you know you’re entering a period where you might both be under additional stress, then the good news is, you can plan for it.

There are a few simple things you can do to help prevent tensions rising too high and rekindle a sense of connection with your loved one in the holidays.

Take a Time Out

Our bodies can’t differentiate between an argument with your spouse and being chased by a lion in the wilderness. Both trigger the “fight or flight” response and cause your body to be flooded with hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. These hormones impede our ability to have rational, calm, and heartfelt conversations about what’s bothering us and make it more likely that the conversation will get heated and one or both people will get seriously upset.

It takes a minimum of 20 minutes for these hormones to dissipate and your nervous system to regulate after they’ve been triggered, and they will only dissipate if you take a step back, do something else, and don’t stew about the conversation you had.

Time outs aren’t about hiding from the problem or putting off difficult conversations, they are about protecting your relationship from harm when you aren’t able to have constructive conversations due to stress levels.

As soon as you start to feel stress levels rising in a conversation and anticipate an argument could be brewing, calmly ask for a time out and to come back to the topic at a better time to talk things through when you are both in the right mindset.

Make and Accept Repair Attempts

In his book, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, relationship expert John Gottman talks a lot about the predictors of divorce and what behaviours he’s observed in couples with a high divorce rate vs. couples who stayed together. He and his team have found that they are able to predict with 94.6% accuracy whether a couple will get a divorce, using findings from the decades long research program they ran.

The book, co-authored by Gottman with Nan Silver, is well worth reading, and so packed with useful advice and information that you don’t even need to finish it to get some benefit.

One big takeaway from their book was that despite all the risks to a healthy relationship, couples who frequently made and accepted repair attempts were more likely to remain together.

A repair attempt is anything you or your partner does that signals that you want to cease fire and be friends again. It takes a while to recognise these as they can be quite subtle, but good examples of a repair attempt would be a cup of tea being made and brought to you, a smile or awkward laugh in the middle of an argument, or a joking comment being made to try and break the tension. When you’re really wound up, it might feel like someone isn’t taking the issue seriously if they make a joke or start to smile, but these are repair attempts, signals they are open to ending the conflict. A repair attempt can be an obvious phrase too, an apology, or simply the statement ‘I don’t want to fight’.

Keeping a look out for repair attempts, accepting them when you notice them, and making repair attempts of your own, combined with using time-out’s, will help reduce the length and severity of conflict, and speed up the time it takes to make up afterwards.

Cultivate Fondness and Admiration

Another John Gottman principle. Knowing you’re entering a period where everyone is under a bit more pressure, try to focus on the good in your relationship and your partner. Gottman suggests making a list of things you admire about your partner, or things you are grateful for that makes you appreciate them. You could tell your partner some of the things you’ve written down in an organic way, or approach them with list in hand, depending on your relationship! You could simply hold the list in your mind and use it to remind yourself of why you chose this person as your partner, even when they are frustrating you with daily irks and irritations.

Take extra care to feed and nourish your relationship, make quality time to focus on each other. When there’s an opportunity to be kind, take it, when there’s an opportunity to appreciate, grab it.

Relationships are kind of like plants, you can’t leave them in the dark with no food, water, or light and expect them to flourish and bring you happiness. You can’t put them under long-term stress without giving them extra care and attention to keep them going.

Military relationships are put under even more stress than regular couples, and it’s easy to forget that with that extra stress comes the extra need to put time and effort into keeping our connections alive. 

No one teaches us how to be good at relationships. No one teaches us how to communicate effectively, process our own ‘stuff’ in a healthy way without projecting it onto others, or how to hold space for our partners’ feelings.

We learn about relationships growing up in drips and drabs, we see our parents and how their relationship worked, we see our friends’ parents, we learn about love, and marriage, and family dynamics on TV and in the books we read. We take all of that, and we role with it, starting as teenagers experiencing our first crush and following on into adulthood. We can probably agree that the mish-mash of information we absorbed wasn’t ALL ideal, and may not have set us all up to be relationship experts.

And then you have the military, with all the extra pressure and baggage and ‘stuff’ that is added when you have a relationship involving a serving person. We wouldn’t change it, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t extra work.

It’s not a personal failing to not be perfect at relationships, or to need a bit of extra help now and then.

Free Relationship Therapy for UK Armed Forces

Thankfully, there are resources out there for military families who could do with some support with their relationships, whether romantic or familial.

Relate, the relationship charity, offers free relationship counselling, family counselling, parental relationship support, children’s counselling, and sex therapy, to Royal Navy and Royal Marines, Royal Air Force and British army. According to their website “All Relate counselling support services are available to serving Royal Navy and Royal Marines personnel, veterans, reservists, and their dependents. Whether you’re married, living together, in a same-sex relationship, separated, divorced, widowed or single, we can help.”

To find out more about the services they offer and how to access support you can call them on 01302 380279 or email them at contracts@relate.org.uk quoting your/your partners service number.