Are There “Ghosts” at your Holiday Table?
If you’ve never seen your ancestors on ancestry.com, you’re missing out. Seeking out how he got here, my husband called me over to the computer screen - and there was a haunting handwritten page from a census book. It was his grandfather as an infant, listed next to his parents. Residence - the 9th ward in Chicago. I bet it was as bleak as it sounds. And from there, they embarked on a journey out of Chicago to San Antonio, and everything changed.
Thinking about his ancestors and their journey made me think about the holidays. But not how you might expect.
I don’t know about you, but sometimes I dread the holidays.
How is it that, surrounded by family that gathers only a few times a year, I can drop into an anxious fog of times past? One minute my twin brother and I are adults, and the next, we’ve regressed back to our high-school petulant selves, determined to take each other down! Not again… BOO!! The “ghosts” are back!
Ah, the ghosts. Old friends, we unpack during the holidays when we’re back in the mix of our family dynamics. They seem to come out of the woodwork.
What do I mean by ghosts? They are the unconscious remnants from early painful relationships and experiences. For example, suppose your father made you feel incompetent as a child. You may carry this feeling of incompetence into your adult life but haven’t taken the time to examine this assumption about yourself. Flash forward to this year’s Thanksgiving, and this “you’re incompetent” ghost is ready to come out of the woodwork at the slightest hint of judgment from your father. One off-hand comment by him, and you’re off to the races! Pissed, triggered, and stuck in the hauntings of the past.
In our early lives, our family relationships shape our experience of ourselves, what we can expect from others, and our worldview. Our ghosts can be those relationships and experiences that, beneath the surface of our consciousness, remain powerful in shaping our experience in ways that hold us back. To move past our ghosts we must come to know, understand, and accept them.
What makes holidays so ripe for falling back into these unhealthy patterns? These family relationships are so hard-wired, it’s easy to go on autopilot and drop into our old role of a time gone by, emotions and all. In a sense, these roles protect our here-and-now selves from facing the pain of the past.
But these ghosts don’t have to be a given. You can change. You can honor how your younger self survived, even though those earlier patterns no longer serve you. These old ways of experiencing ourselves and others are ghosts and need to be integrated into who we are now.
Here are a few tips for recognizing, empathizing, and understanding your ghosts so they don’t keep haunting you.
Ghost Busters - A Few Tips
First, I’m talking about integrating rather than getting rid of our ghosts. Why is this? We all have less mature parts of ourselves that need to be seen, understood, and soothed. We are better off accepting these parts as they are a part of us. But they don’t need to run the show!
Step back, and give your adult self space to process what you’re feeling. Then, walk outside, and go to another room, but give yourself a moment to reflect.
Remind yourself that you’re no longer a kid that didn’t have the autonomy you have now. You’re an adult, and you get to decide how to define yourself and what you value that drives who you are and how you behave.
You can also ask yourself, what did I have to do to fit into my family as a child, and what part of this identity do I need to let go of to be my best self? For example, suppose you had to be the “helpless” one in your family to fit in. In that case, you might take a moment to honor that ghost (your current sense of helplessness around your family or in general) and let it rest as a cherished “ancestor.”
Ask yourself what “ghost” may be haunting the offending family member(s) and what their younger self needed to think, feel, and behave to get by. This might make empathy easier and help you reign in your own ghosts.
Final Thoughts
Let’s circle back to our ancestors. A well-known saying in the field of psychoanalysis goes like this. “Turn your ghosts into cherished ancestors.” Psychoanalyst, Hans Loewald wrote about this idea in 1960 and it’s the idea that by understanding our ghosts (unconscious patterns of experiencing ourselves and others), we can bring them into the fold of who we are here and now as cherished ancestors. Like my husband’s ancestors, our earlier selves had to make their way through uncharted territory. They developed strategies to survive and, in doing so, made it possible for us to be who we are now. These strategies may no longer be useful, but by honoring their part in our journey we can tame our ghosts into cherished ancestors.
Finally, I want to circle back to a theme I wrote about a few weeks back, complexity. It’s so easy to lose sight of the complexity of other people’s lives, their shaping experiences, and their ghosts. Don’t get stuck in black-or-white or good-or-bad thinking. Instead, try to complexify. Ask yourself, what about this person is more complicated than I realize and how might I tune in to this complexity to relate to them? Maybe this can be the year your ghosts don’t haunt the holiday dinner!