It is early December, and I am sitting in a psychoanalyst’s office in central London, about to do 60 minutes of pre-Christmas family therapy. Outside, the Christmas lights are twinkling. I can hear a drunk person literally shouting for joy on the street beneath the window. But inside the consulting room, it is eerily silent. My mother, my sister and I sit in squishy armchairs and pretend to admire the art, but really we are eyeballing one another like prizefighters, looking for weak spots. My father is just a tiny, flickering face on an iPhone, propped up next to my mother on a cushion. My father doesn’t really believe in therapy, but he’s compromised by dialling in via Zoom. He keeps falling off his cushion and on to the floor.
Our therapist peers benevolently at us over her spectacles. She is in her 80s and has a world-weary look about her. Like she has seen all manner of dysfunction before. She lets the silence hang for a moment, and then she clears her throat: “Shall we begin with presents? Or the meal?”
My family started doing “Christmas therapy” eight years ago, after a holiday so bad my mother decided we needed professional help. The exact details are hazy but I do remember wrestling with my mother over a dish of roast potatoes. I also remember throwing a potato. Then my mother brandished a carving knife at me and said: “I would like to run you through with this knife.” We didn’t eat Christmas dinner at all that year. My mother wandered the streets alone, smoking fags, while the rest of us sat on the sofa and watched Elf.
When we started therapy, the dream was that we would be able to Christmas-proof our family dynamic. The idea was to air grievances in advance, in the presence of a mental health professional, in order to avoid future unhappiness. But the way this plays out in practice is that once a year in December my family spend an hour in a room together, assigning “Christmas roles”, while delivering awful truths about one another’s personalities. My mother looks at me and says things like: “You do 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 do all genuinely want to organise a happy Christmas, but we also want to win at therapy – which means gaining the tacit approval of our therapist. In the immediate aftermath of what happened with the potato, winning at therapy meant pretending to be saner than you were. In the early years, we sat quietly in our armchairs and made sensible suggestions about the chore rota. But more recently we’ve worked out that we can get more sympathy by hamming up our personal struggles, and talking about the fact that my mum and I are on antidepressants. So my sister talks about her anxiety and I talk about my rage, and it feels quite exciting to talk about ourselves in this way. Like we are really up against it. Sometimes we take it too far and our therapist interrupts us and says: “Remember, it is your mother who is not always mentally well”, and my mother smiles slyly. “Yes, I can’t cope because I’m not well.”
The strange thing is, when it’s not Christmas, we have a nice time together. I lived with my parents until I was 29, and not just because I couldn’t afford to leave. I liked living with them. For 11 months of the year, we don’t point score with each other. We speak on the phone a lot, and post funny things on the family WhatsApp group. I even appreciate the fact that we are sometimes bad-tempered and sad when we get together, because it feels honest. There’s no pressure to perform. But then December rolls around and we suddenly start trying to sand off each other’s hard edges all over again, and craft some impossibly smooth, picture-perfect family portrait.
In the last couple of years, though, something has shifted. My mother used to be the one who organised our annual session of Christmas therapy, and panicked about potential tensions – but lately she seems less invested in the whole thing. My sister and I are in our early 30s now, and in the absence of any children of our own, we have become more controlling of the family we do have – while our parents seem increasingly relaxed. They both recently discovered Instagram, and last year they spent a lot of time playing on their phones. They didn’t always come to the table when we called them. My mum was in her room a lot, not wrapping presents but napping. She didn’t even seem that bothered by the arguments. When I shouted at her she didn’t shout back.
We addressed some of this last week, in therapy. We are going to implement a new rule this Christmas: everyone has to 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 shout. But I could tell that my mother’s heart wasn’t really in it. She had tasted freedom, and now she just wanted to nap and play on her phone.
For me, Christmas still feels like a litmus test for the state of my whole life. The degree of happiness and calm I feel on the day seems like an awful premonition of the amount of 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 have let go. My mother has suggested that next year, my sister and I go to therapy on our own.
