Habitual negative thinking and the emotions it invokes is, like many chronic and destructive behaviors, a form of addiction.

An old acquaintance of mine recently wrote an article about positive thinking—a subject that is often misunderstood. For many years I, like many people on the personal-development path, believed that by writing down and repeating affirmations (positive statements written in the present tense as if they were already true), I would think more positively and the changes I sought would happen automatically. I hung these inspiring statements all over my house, memorized them, and repeated them out loud, sometimes as much as 100 times a day. But it seemed that no matter how many times I said them, the changes I hoped to achieve eluded me.

Out of all the relationships we have in our lives, the ones we share with family members can be the most challenging. And there’s nothing like holiday stress to trigger the old wounds and unresolved issues that plague so many families.

Sharing close, loving, and supportive relationships is a basic human need, yet many of our family relationships fall short of this ideal. Most families have some level of dysfunction, with each member playing his or her part. Becoming aware of your own family dynamics—and consciously changing behavior patterns that create conflict—will help you avoid the interpersonal “land mines” that are often triggered in the midst of holiday stress. Below are some practical tips to help you make the holidays a time of joyful celebration, instead of fodder for unpleasant family feuds.

Many people don’t treat themselves very well as their default. And in times of stress—in a global pandemic, for example—even those who are normally self-disciplined may find their self-care practices waning. They break promises to themselves, eat poorly, don’t get enough sleep, are self-critical, or fail to take good physical care of their bodies.

A great technique for treating yourself better is by developing what I call your Inner Nurturing Parent. Imagine you had a little child in your care. You’d make every effort to keep her healthy and safe; to support her; to be forgiving of her mistakes, to make sure she gets healthy food and exercise; and to let her know how loved and cared for she is. That’s what a loving parent does. Only, in this case, you’re the parent and the child. Below are some practical ways to strengthen your own Inner Nurturing Parent, and turn the goal of treating yourself better into daily, living action in 2020 and beyond.

Anger is a normal and very human emotion. But few people have been taught how to effectively express and manage anger. Instead we learn how to deal with anger by our parents’ role modeling, and by how our parents reacted to our own anger growing up. We may have been taught to rationalize our anger away, blame or verbally attack the person who’s made us angry, or withdraw and avoid the other person—and our anger—altogether.

In a Zoom coaching session a few weeks ago, a forty-something years old client referred several times to feelings of guilt. Not only had it been a familiar feeling since about the age of five, it had been a driving force throughout his personal life and career.

While guilt often gets a bad rap, in certain situations it can be helpful. For example, if you pay for coffee with a ten-dollar bill and the cashier gives you change for a twenty and you don’t say anything, you might feel pangs of guilt. Why? Because a part of you holds a belief that stealing is wrong, so you return the extra cash. In this case, the guilt motivated you to change your behavior in accordance with your belief that stealing is wrong.

Or you might choose to remain silent and keep the money. To relieve yourself of the “pain” of the guilt, you might tell yourself, “This is a big corporation; a little less profit won’t matter”, thereby changing the belief that stealing is wrong, allowing you to keep the money, lessen the guilt, and still feel like you’re a good person.

Guilt is a barometer that alerts us to behaviors that violate the “truths” of our conscious and unconscious belief systems. And while some of those beliefs are reflective of our authentic values, others are self-limiting ones that we learned and adopted from others.

Tomorrow will be my sixteenth motherless Mother’s Day. And while it had gotten easier over time, the absence of my mother feels now like a wound opened anew. Exacerbating these feelings are the demise of my fourteen-year-old dog seven weeks ago, day seventy of coronavirus social distancing, and the loss of intimate family relationships—all in the midst of an unprecedented transfiguration of life as we knew it.

With both parents gone, I currently reside full-time on the other side of the parent-child equation. Among other things, this includes my being on the receiving end of behaviors I once directed toward my own parents. As a family-systems-trained psychotherapist and coach, I have seen these types of multi-generational pattern replications frequently in my practice, as well as being an active participant of their playing out in my personal life.

Living solely on the parenting side of the parent-child dynamic has taught me a lot about myself as a child to my own parents. This is especially true regarding my mother, with whom I shared a life-long relationship riddled with mutual disappointment, judgment, and resentment. Despite my unsuccessful attempt to achieve closure with her when she was dying, it wasn’t until the roles had flipped with my own children that I was able to release the hurt and anger I carried toward my mother, replacing them with compassion, forgiveness, and love.