‘I’m going to scream!’: how to survive (and maybe even enjoy) your family Christmas

Key Highlights

• Go for lunch with friends who live locally, or book a ticket to a museum or a National Trust place so that you have ways of getting yourself out of the house.” Tamara Hoyton, a senior practitioner for Relate at Family Action, agrees that scheduling breaks is a good strategy.
• “Arrange a trip out, or offer to cook so that you’re away from the living room where everyone else is,” she says. Practise staying grounded “If we are coping with difficult situations and conversations, it’s important to stay grounded and present, so that our thoughts and feelings don’t spiral,” says BACP-registered counsellor Georgina Sturmer.
• Practise grounding exercises in advance, so you can use them in tricky moments.
• Sturmer recommends the 5-4-3-2-1 technique.
• “Notice five things you can see, four things you can feel, three things you can hear, two things you can smell, and one thing you can taste,” she says.