Surviving the holidays (and beyond) without compromising our values.

The holiday season is stressful by nature, fraught with travel mishaps, preparations, hosting duties, and surviving family get-togethers. This year, the usual stress will be compounded by the recent and highly contentious presidential election, which should make for some interesting times as 2016 comes to a close.

Don’t give up on the holiday season! Surviving (and maybe even enjoying) gatherings filled with family and friends who don’t agree with us does not mean we have to compromise our values or become silent bystanders. We always have the opportunity to make a choice, however small, and our choices can not only shape our experience and bring new understandings to others around us, they can also mean the difference between a pleasant or unpleasant existence.

I’ve found that a good approach when stepping into a potentially confrontational situation is to start as a spectator, free from expectations, and open to formulating an opinion that may differ from your usual ones. Having expectations of how someone should act or react to us or how situations should unfold or turn out, only sets us up for disappointment, anger and frustration, in this very emotionally charged and challenging climate. Keeping a cool and rational head helps us understand the wealth of information being offered to us from other people, and makes it easier to be an active and productive participant in the discussion, even when things get heated.

We also may learn something we didn’t know before about ourselves or about our family and friends. Sometimes this new information is a pleasant surprise, and sometimes it’s disappointing — or even horrifying. In either case, we have a choice about how to react, and what we choose to do with this new information will directly affect how our interactions turn out. 

I know this sounds great in theory, and most of us probably try to go into a holiday gathering in an open and pleasant frame of mind. How can we really keep a cool head when the topic hits close to home or seems like an affront to the very fabric of our core values?

I was recently speaking with a good friend and native Floridian about immigration. I personally believe that all productive, contributing people living, working or studying in the United States have a right to be here regardless of their race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or disability. A productive contributing person is what has weaved together the fabric of this great nation: through sacrifice, hard work, humiliation, indignation, bigotry and hate, beyond the contribution of an individual race.

These are values I consider core to my identity, and since my friend is a first generation Cuban whose parents immigrated to the United States, I thought he might agree. In the course of our conversation, he shared that he wanted major immigration reform based on what he is seeing in Miami, which he feels is becoming “little South America.” There has been a recent influx of South American migrants: "They" are everywhere, he said.

His nonchalance, as he said that, was jarring to me. Through my shock, I tried to really listen to not only what he was saying but why he was saying it. I asked about his parents’ experience, and shared that more and more, I myself was feeling like a “they” in America — despite being a natural born citizen of the United States. It quickly became clear to me that from his perspective, his parents’ were not the same kind of “they” as the new generation of immigrants. I could hear the genuine fear behind his words, although I was deeply disturbed by what he said.

It’s tempting to shut out people whose opinions are so counter to our core values, but people are complex and have many different facets to them. We will always have divergent opinions with people, even our closest family and friends. What can help us navigate these differences is a willingness to put ourselves in other people’s shoes, and to know that doing so doesn’t compromise our values, and in fact, may help us understand ourselves better.

In this case, I was able to be truly empathic to my friend’s fears and concerns without normalizing or taking on his opinions. I know that I will continue to be unwavering in my values today, tomorrow, and four years from now. My friend may or may not change his opinions, but that isn’t the point. We left our conversation still friends, each of us feeling like we’d had the chance to say our peace and express what we valued.

In these increasingly tense times, we must find a way to move forward and not let fear, anger or anxiety fuel our relationships and behaviors. United we stand, divided we’ll fall.

I wish you all a peaceful and pleasant Thanksgiving.