Managing Holiday Expectations For the Obsessive-Compulsive Personality

Have The Best Holiday ever!

Yeah, right.

Don’t even think about trying to make that happen. Sure, it’s nice to try to choose the perfect gift, card, or steamy stocking stuffers, or try to host the perfect meal or party. But bring too much controlling, driven energy to it and you might bring about the very thing you’re trying to avoid: the dreaded disappointment that it’s Not The Best Holiday Ever.

If you’re compulsive, driven, obsessive or Type A, holiday expectations can easily trigger your default defense mechanisms: control and perfectionism. You may expect too much of yourself in trying to make the holiday jolly. Or, as we’ll see later, you may give up and shut down, trying to keep it from being gloomy.

Blocks to Holiday Bliss

There may be a lot of moving pieces in your situation, and pieces don’t always move the way we want them to.  It’s more like the wild and wooly crowds at Walmart on Black Friday morning than a staid and stable jigsaw puzzle with cozy fireplace scenes.

Take people (those endearing but uncontrollable beings that we can’t live with and can’t live without). They tend to get rushed, rattled, and rude in their quest for gift-giving precision. For some reason they seem to feel entitled to break the rules even more than usual during the holiday madness.  Wait in line? Forget about it. Civility? I’m too busy. Consideration? That’s so passé.  And it can make things worse for compulsives if we expect others to honor the rules we’ve set up in our own minds.

Our rigid ideas about The Way Things Should Be often get us into trouble.

Years ago when our kids were young and we had lots of family over to celebrate and exchange gifts, I had the holiday expectation that we would go around the room in order and pay attention while each person unwrapped their gifts one at a time.  My fantasy was doomed to failure: no-one followed the rules I had concocted in my own head, and I did not have The Best Holiday Ever. Thankfully, I’ve since learned to go with the Flow, chaotic though it may be. At least when the gifts are being unwrapped.

But it’s not just expectations about the externals, getting ourselves or other people to behave the right way.  Our expectations about what we’re supposed to feel can also cause trouble.

Holiday Expectations: The Pressure to Be Merry

For some of my clients the holidays are, at best, endured. It’s a dark time because they feel so much pressure to be happy. This is a different sort of perfectionism: the attempt to perfect our personal mood. The result is a seasonal commandment: I should be able to will myself to be happy during the holidays. To the extent that you can control happiness it’s cultivated gently over time, not flipped on like a light switch when the holiday industrial complex tells you you should. The real key elements of happiness are self-acceptance, self-compassion, and gratitude–not commandments and attacks.

We need a new bumper sticker campaign: “Keep Perfectionism Out Of Christmas.”

As I’ve written before, I’m not against attempts to be perfect–just the “shoulds” and “needs” that too often glom onto it. Perfectionism can be used consciously and healthily to get closer to our goals. But too often it’s like a disease that takes over and kills its host.

Abandoning All Hope

But it is possible to go too far in the other direction.

Some people who’ve had horrendous holiday experiences set their expectations at Zero, with the hope that that will make it The Best Holiday Ever because they won’t get disappointed as they always have in the past.

That’s the approach Ebenezer Scrooge took in Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol. “Bah, Humbug!” And in case you don’t remember, it ended up being a very harrowing experience. As I wrote in a previous post, his dreams showed him just how out of balance he had become by being so cynical.

Abandoning all hope is really just another way of controlling: trying to manage feelings on the inside by not expecting anything good to happen on the outside.

Disappointing Others

I can see that even if I can convince you to try not to hope too much or too little for yourself, many of you will still be terrified that you might disappoint someone else. The kids! “You Grinch!” I hear the accusation. How can I argue against efforts not to disappoint kids at the holidays?

Easy. I’ll argue by suggesting that stressing yourself for your kids is not good for your kids. And, I’ll argue that if your kids never experience disappointment, they’ll never develop resilience. I suspect that the more pertinent question might be whether you can tolerate disappointing them, rather than whether they can tolerate the disappointment.

Maybe you could give them the gift of your presence, contentment and gratitude instead.

Getting It Just Right

Perhaps this will appeal to your perfectionism in a healthy way: don’t expect too much, but don’t expect too little, either.

Let’s try to let go and enjoy the chaos. You can’t make The Best Holiday Ever Happen, but you can allow yourself to appreciate the good elements and focus on those.

Savor what you can. Stay small and simple. Fruitcake? Never mind. I’ll take that back. How about music, smiles, and the days getting longer?

Maybe in some small way we can remember and appreciate that these holidays are about coming out of the darkness and a new beginning, about hope, receiving, and giving. Not controlling and perfecting.

If there’s a chance for having The Best Holiday Ever, that’s the best shot we’ve got.

To help you get through the holiday bedlam, here’s a link to the Healthy Compulsive Project Podcast.