Holidays and Family Conflict: Annual Holiday Newsletter
How Much Room Is There to Disappoint Each Other?
It is that time of year when I share my annual holiday conflict newsletter, and this one has been hard to write, because this lesson is personal. Conflict in families is normal. We are very different people, and we didn’t necessarily choose one another. We are together because we are family, and that comes with expectations. That can be challenging, and it has certainly been challenging in my family, too.
For six years now, I have not been able to gather my whole family around one table on the day that used to be mine. Thanksgiving. I have five grown children and four grandchildren, and the thing I have always been most grateful for is my family, which makes the irony hard to miss. The people we love most are the ones who bring us the deepest joy, and they are also the ones who sometimes break our hearts. A truth we rarely say out loud is that whenever we are in relationship, we will sometimes disappoint and sometimes be disappointed, and that is simply part of being human.
Lately I keep coming back to questions I can’t answer. How much room is there in a relationship to disappoint each other? How many times do we have to get it right, agree, and show up the way the other person hoped before there is any margin for error? If I get it right ninety percent of the time, does the other ten percent mean you no longer want to be around me? And how much disappointment can we hold, in the people we love and in ourselves, before we decide the relationship isn’t worth the discomfort?
I think we need answers to these, because so often the bar we hold each other to is one that no one has ever named, and without knowing where it is, none of us can tell when we, or the people we love, are succeeding.
The research offers some answers, and they are far more forgiving than we are with each other. Relationship researcher John Gottman found that about two-thirds of the conflicts couples have are never solved; the couples who last carry the same disagreements as the ones who don’t and simply learn to live alongside them. Developmental researcher Ed Tronick found that even healthy parents and babies are perfectly in sync only about a quarter of the time, and that what builds trust is the coming back together.
If the strongest relationships we can measure run on that much disagreement and that much missing each other, then the bar we set for the people we love may be one no relationship could ever clear.
Maybe part of the problem is that we are striving for perfect, in the people we love and in ourselves, and the margin for error has become so thin that none of us can stay inside it for long.
I have come to think we might find wonderful people and fantastic relationships if we are willing to let go of our expectations of who people should be and how they should show up, and instead learn who they are. I know how hard it is for me when who I am falls short of who someone thinks I should be. Don’t we all want to be valued and accepted as we are and where we are, as flawed works in progress?
What happened in my family isn’t about danger. No one is unsafe. It began with a difference in values, a choice one person in my family made about their own life that another could not accept. I understand that pain, too. When someone we love chooses a life that doesn’t look like the one we imagined for them, we grieve the future we had pictured, and that grief can look a lot like rejection. There have been other paths back to each other, and more than one of us who could choose to take one. But as in so many stuck conflicts, no one has moved yet. For now, that difference seems to carry more weight than the decades of connection we so intentionally built.
It sits alongside other differences in my family, including children who now stand on opposite ends of the political spectrum. Those differences weren’t a problem for a long time, until they were, and they became a problem for us at about the same time I watched them become a problem in so many of the families I work with.
We used to have the Best Bowl. Every Thanksgiving the whole family played football together, and the winning team captain took home a three-foot trophy. One year my daughter caught a pass and scored a touchdown while carrying her chubby baby girl on her hip. Another year my very pregnant daughter-in-law took out a brother-in-law on her way to the winning touchdown. We spend lifetimes building our families, with more energy than it takes to power a nuclear submarine, and it can all come apart over differences that harm no one. My family has now lost six years of what used to be a very happy day. There is a hole where new memories should be.
Managing Holiday Family Conflict
I know I am far from alone. There seems to be an epidemic of family estrangement. Recent national surveys put the number of American adults currently estranged from a family member somewhere between one in four and nearly two in five. A 2025 YouGov survey found that 38 percent of Americans are estranged from a sibling, parent, child, grandparent, or grandchild, and that nine percent are estranged from a grandparent. Cutting someone off can feel like a way to end the discomfort, but what I see in my work is that we rarely cut off only one person. There are friends and family members on every side that inherit the distance and the loss, without ever having had a say in it, and the pattern of how we handle hurt gets handed down right along with it. It seems to me that when we fire people that we don’t agree with, we run the risk of eventually just running out of people in our lives.
For a dozen years I have said that conflict management and communicating well are skills that can be learned, and that if we were given the chance to learn them, we would. I have said that learning them could mean fewer family estrangements, healthier workplaces, friendships that survive hard conversations, and communities able to disagree and still stay in relationship, even about politics, something my own family once did without a second thought and often with humor. I have believed that peace in the wider world begins with peace inside ourselves, then in our families, our workplaces, our communities, and beyond, and that the conflicts between nations look a lot like the feuds between us, only larger and with deadlier weapons.
This year, for the first time, I have had to ask myself what happens if I’m wrong. What if, given the choice, we would rather hold onto our certainty than hold onto each other?
Here is where I have landed, at least for now. I don’t think my family proves the skills don’t matter. I think it shows me the edge of what skills can do. I have watched mediation and conflict coaching help families and workplaces find their way back to each other many times, and every one of those times, the people in the room were willing to try something new. They were willing to listen to the other person’s perspective and to co-create a new possibility forward, and in my experience, the acrimony almost always softened once each person felt seen, heard, validated, and valued. It softened when people understood the story behind each other’s choices, when they recognized that people can make different choices and still share what matters most, when they separated the person from the problem, and when they were willing to examine their own role in the conflict and decide to show up differently. The skills can be taught.
The willingness, however, can’t be handed to anyone; each of us has to choose it, and no one can choose it for us, not even a mother who does this for a living.
What these skills have given me, even when they haven’t brought everyone back to the table, is a way to show up in my own hard conversations without adding to the problem. They have helped me say the hard things, because hard things left unsaid don’t go away; they wait, and they grow. And they have helped me say them from what I am experiencing rather than from blame, speaking to how much I miss us together and why it matters so much to me, rather than what I think someone else should do. Those conversations are still hard, and some of them haven’t changed the outcome, for now.
They are necessary anyway, because silence leaves each of us filling in the other person’s story with our worst guesses, and because an honest conversation, even an uncomfortable one, keeps the door open. It’s how we let ourselves be seen.
And when I’m honest, I notice I also do the very thing I wish others wouldn’t. It is far easier to expect someone else to be different than to examine myself. It’s not enough that I have expectations of who I should be; somehow, I have made it my job to have expectations of who you should be, too. And it is far easier to let the one thing that hurts me become the lens through which I see my family right now. Even while writing this, I caught myself telling a story about members of my family, their motives and their values. I don’t actually know those things. What I have observed in my conflict work, across so many people and situations, is that we share more values than we realize, that we simply hold them in a different order, and that they show up in our lives at different times and in different ways.
Maybe this holiday a few of you will choose one day to show up differently. Maybe, for just this one day, you could set aside the piece of that person that disappoints you, frustrates you, or makes you angry, and see them without it. You might start by remembering the last time you laughed together, shared a secret, or agreed about something. You might greet them the way you would if your favorite star walked into the room, curious about who they are now rather than certain you already know, and for that one day, treat everyone in the room as if they are truly special.
I can’t promise how they will respond, and I won’t pretend that one day mends years. What I can tell you is that you would be different, and that is the part of any conflict that is always within your reach.
Mending bridges isn’t easy. Yet, a wise colleague, attorney and mediator once said, “The avoidance (of conflict) feeds the fantasy that there is a pain-free option. There isn’t. Embracing some discomfort is the better choice because discomfort is already there, chosen or not.” (Sam Autry).
In my experience, mending is lighter than carrying everything it takes to hold a grudge. I think of it as short-term hard work for long-term peace, rather than a long-term disconnect that can shape the experience of generations. Either way, there is a price to pay and there are unintended consequences, and I wonder how often we discover that only after too many chances have passed.
As for me, I don’t know how this year will go. I am sitting with doubt in the place where I have always kept hope, and I’m trying hard to hold both. I still believe there has to be a better way. I just understand better now how hard it can be to choose it, and how much we lose when we don’t. And I am working on having more compassion for everyone, including myself.
If you are managing family holiday conflict or carrying something like this into the holidays, I would be glad to hear from you. You aren’t alone at your table either.
P.S. One time, I outsmarted the potential for sideways conversations at a family gathering by creating a game, and I’m sharing it with you here. We ended up having so much fun that there was no room for any of that.
“Pass the Questions, Please” is a holiday table game for getting to know each other all over again. Drop the question cards in a bowl, take turns drawing one, and let the stories begin. The questions ask about childhood mischief, favorite foods, and the gifts we loved and the ones we didn’t, including “What’s the worst gift you’ve ever received? (No names!)” Anyone can pass, there are no wrong answers, and laughing is strongly encouraged.
Kimberly Best RN. MA.
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