When I think about holiday parties, the last thing I want is a . After a whole year of dealing with issues, conflicts and opinions, arriving at supper and exhausting all my beliefs, with a relative acting as an indignant commentator, is a very specific form of exhaustion. But it’s not simple to escape, after all, on these occasions the groups most prone to friction come together: extended family, friends, people you sometimes even like, but who don’t live in the same political, moral or religious world.
The outcome of conflicts depends much more on the way of talking than on the topic in dispute. Personal attacks, contempt and sarcasm are associated with more dissatisfaction, while constructive strategies, such as truly listening, validating the other person’s feelings and focusing on the concrete problem, are linked to more stable relationships over time. The problem is not disagreeing, it is turning the person into a target; You can always kick the ball, but not the opponent. The difference between “how can you believe that, it’s absurd” and “I’m worried about this point because of that” is not a frill of language: in the first sentence, the person turns the problem around; in the second, the problem remains the problem.
Things get even more delicate when the topic is politics, because, in recent years, it has become a . Communication scientist Benjamin Warner shows that disagreement itself weighs less than the perception of disrespect; When someone’s values are treated with disdain, the feeling of “we are family” drops, and when communication explicitly recognizes the other’s right to have different values, the negative impact of this divergence visibly diminishes. It’s not that the difference disappears, but it stops being read as a personal rejection.
Phrases like “I still find this position problematic, but you’re my sister and I’m not going to stop liking you because of the election” work as a buffer. You don’t give up on criticism, you just make it clear that the relationship is worth more than the political score, and this framing changes the way the other person listens to everything that comes after.
The data is heading in the same direction: The Pew Research Center shows that a significant portion of adults in the United States have already stopped talking about politics with someone or avoided family gatherings after tense elections. This feeling of not having the energy for another fight is something that appears recurrently in opinion polls.
The literature on perspective-taking reinforces the diagnosis by showing that it is not a lesson in facts that changes attitudes the most, but rather the experience of listening and being heard. Psychologist Emile Bruneau demonstrated that giving space to personal narrative and listening with curiosity work better than spouting arguments. In other words, instead of going for automatic rejoinders, it’s worth testing questions like when did this become important to you or what made you change your mind on this subject. This gesture takes the conversation out of the ring and opens up space for a dialogue in which, even without consensus, one at least understands where the other person came from.
Regarding subject boundaries, completely avoiding any difficult conversations can, in the long run, deplete intimacy; at the same time, turning supper into an ongoing election debate is also not good family welfare policy. Some families work better with a tacit agreement in which politics is for another day, with fewer people and more time, and at parties a certain restraint is practiced.
Maintaining focus on the relationship, taking care of the tone, admitting that the other person is more than their vote and knowing when to change the subject are decisions that sustain bonds that are needed when the party is over. Those who stay are the people who show up when someone gets sick, when a child is born, when life gets difficult. If I can give a pragmatic message for the holidays, it is this: disagreeing is part of it, breaking up is not destiny and, when in doubt, there is always the alternative of going to get more food before responding.
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