I can’t tell my family I will miss Christmas without raising alarms, but how am I supposed to endure family gatherings feeling the way I do?

From the therapist: What I think is worth paying attention to is how you’ve decided to cope with the very natural feelings you’re experiencing in response to what your brother has shared. Your way of managing your anger, sadness and anxiety has been to avoid being in the presence of your sister-in-law, but I don’t know what that accomplishes. It leaves you deprived of the family experiences you value, and doesn’t improve anything for those involved.

So let’s step back and consider what you want, what you have control over, and where these overlap. Your brother has essentially left you carrying distressing, private information, which has made you feel both powerless and complicit. I imagine that by withdrawing from events where your brother’s family is present, part of you is trying to send a message to him that you don’t support his marriage and part of you is trying to signal to your sister-in-law that you’re aware of, and disapprove of, her behaviour. But I want you to consider that you can disapprove of your sister-in-law’s behaviour without boycotting family events. Being present doesn’t mean you’re endorsing her actions – or your brother’s decisions about how to respond to them – and avoiding family gatherings punishes you more than it does anyone else.

I suspect that you’re struggling with how to more broadly navigate the position your brother has put you in. He trusts you enough to confide in you, but what he’s doing, consciously or not, is transferring the burden of his pain and sense of helplessness onto you. If he feels trapped in an untenable situation – unable, for whatever reason, to take action, despite his concerns – now you do too. You’ve become a container for his anger, sadness and anxiety, which might feel like a kind of relief to him, and could also serve as a buffer that allows him to avoid doing anything about it.

You’ve already voiced part of what you want: for your brother to stop confiding in you unless he’s going to leave his marriage. But that feels more like an ultimatum than a boundary, and conflates what you might do in this situation with what he might choose to do for himself. When I see couples in therapy, although I might not choose to stay in their marriage if I were in their situation, that doesn’t mean they want to make the same choice. It sounds like you want your brother to leave his wife more than he does, and your anger stems partly from watching him remain in a situation you find unacceptable. You can tell someone what you see, but you can’t make them see it, or act on it. And the harder you push for a particular outcome, the more defensive and judged they might feel – and the less likely they may be to turn to you when they genuinely need support.

It’s often more helpful to ask questions that encourage reflection. You might say to him, “You seem distressed by what’s happening in your marriage, and yet you also seem to find yourself in the same situation over and over, where things improve for a while but ultimately not much changes. I’m glad you trust me with this, but I’m out of my depth, and I don’t want to be the only one you bring it to. I wonder if talking to a therapist might help. What do you think about that?”

That said, I want to distinguish between the marital issues here and what’s going on with the children. If they are exposed to constant conflict between their parents, and your sister-in-law speaks to them in the way you describe, there’s real emotional harm occurring. You can point out to your brother the behaviour that worries you, ask him if he understands the damage caused and encourage him to take responsibility to protect his children – but, again, you can’t control what he does. What you can do, however, is decide how to show up for these children, which may be another reason to go to family get-togethers, and offer them an aunt’s warm and calming presence.

This may be the shift that will help you the most: instead of organising your life around avoiding someone whose behaviour angers you, you can focus on moving toward the people you love. Christmas doesn’t have to be a referendum on your sister-in-law. Still, these gatherings might feel more manageable if you’re not walking into them without any support of your own. Your brother handed you something heavy. Having a place to bring your own feelings about it, perhaps with a therapist, can help you hold it without letting it dictate where you spend your holidays. You can’t unknow it, but you don’t have to carry it alone.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Lori Gottlieb

Illustration by: Marta Monteiro

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