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December 18, 2013

Negotiating Conflicts, Part 2: Holiday Hostility

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Sheila Heen, an expert in negotiation and difficult conversations, is answering reader questions about how to resolve disputes within families and in other parts of life.

Ms. Heen is a founding partner at Triad Consulting Group and a Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School, where she has taught negotiation since 1995. She wrote “Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most” (Penguin, 2000), with Douglas Stone and Bruce Patton. Ms. Heen and Mr. Stone have a book coming out in March called “Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well (Even When It’s Off Base, Unfair, Poorly Delivered, and Frankly, You’re Not in the Mood)” (Viking, 2014). Her answers draw on insights and strategies from both books.

Here is the second set of responses from Ms. Heen; Part 1 can be found here. After a break for the holidays, more responses will be posted on Wednesday, Jan. 8. Because of the volume of questions, not all may be answered, and this feature is now closed to new questions.

Introduction

The holidays are famously fraught. When adult children get together under one roof, old dynamics and accumulated wounds also gather, and the big questions come up: “How is my life turning out (compared to yours)?” “Why are you making those choices?” “Do you respect my choices?” Amid the cranberry sauce and wrapping paper, we may feel heightened feelings of love and connection. But it’s all the worse when things turn sour. This week we turn to some specific tensions that can accumulate around the holidays.

‘Stuck’ Hosting Every Holiday

Q. I’m stuck this Christmas, but how do I approach my brother and sister-in-law about hosting Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners? With my mother and other siblings and my kids we come to a total of 12 people. Add in my brother and his kids and grandkids it jumps to an impossible 26. I have tables set up all over the place, so it’s not like we can converse. When I gently tried three years ago to suggest that our extended families were just getting too big to eat together on holidays it was met with an aghast silence and then a huffy, “well, if you don’t want us we’ll just stay home.” — Dee.

A. To get a better handle on your situation I need to join you this Christmas. Is that O.K.? I’ll have my husband, three kids and the dog in tow.

Please say no. If you have been hosting both Thanksgiving and Christmas for 26 people for three years running, you deserve a medal and a trip to Hawaii, not an expectation of greater graciousness.

The first question is what you want. You actually proposed something different three years ago (not getting together) than you are suggesting now (your brother hosts). It sounds like your underlying interests are in being able to sit down and have a real conversation together (not scattered all over the house), lowering the stress of planning and executing such a big event yourself each time, and not feeling “stuck” with the responsibility without any discussion. What would you add to this list?

These are entirely reasonable interests, and I’d encourage you to share them with key players (your mom and siblings). Four things to remember when doing so:

· Don’t raise it at the holiday meal. Yes, everyone is there. But this isn’t the time to have a thoughtful or coherent conversation. There’s too much chaos, and you risk bringing your own resentment to the table with the turkey. It may be heard as “I wish you weren’t here,” re-generating the huffy hurt you got three years ago.

· Present it as a shared problem. Rather than proposing a solution, share the problem and ask if you can think it through together. Say: “I love seeing everyone at the holidays, yet as our numbers have grown, I’m feeling overwhelmed by the task of accommodating everyone — our house isn’t great for it, and it is a lot of work. Sometimes I get to the end of the holiday and didn’t even get to have a real conversation with many of you. I don’t know what the answer is, but I’d love to think together about different ways we could handle the next holiday to maximize what we all love about getting together, while lowering the stress.”

· Come up with at least three options before deciding. Separate the idea generation from the deciding. If the assumption is that you’ll take the first idea that is named, people may hesitate to volunteer. If you are clear that the first task is to think of as many ways to handle it as we can, people will relax and toss off a wider range of options: stay home, go out for Chinese, take turns hosting, get together on a different day, gather for dessert, drinks and home movies rather than a formal dinner. While Idea #1 was workable, you may find that idea #3 or 5 gets people excited.

· Cast it as an “experiment.” Once you’ve listed a few options, you can ask which appeal most, and suggest that you “experiment” with a new way of doing things, just for the next holiday or two. “So we’ll do Thanksgiving at your house, and for Christmas, it sounds like most of us would like to do something informal on Christmas Eve, and then spend Christmas Day at home. Let’s try it, and then we’ll see how we feel about how it’s working.”

What if ... the rest of the family swings around to suggest that having you host really works best (for them)? Make it clear that you need to take that option off the table, and describe why. It may sound like this: “I’m happy to hear that dinner at our house has been wonderful for the last few years. I just don’t think I’m up to continuing to shoulder the burden, at least not this coming year. I need a year off (at least). It makes me cranky and stressed and less able to enjoy the holiday.”

In the meantime, you’re not entirely “stuck” this year. As the host, you can call for reinforcements. Make personal calls to ask whether your mom can bring a couple of her fantastic pies, for instance, or if your brother would be willing to take responsibility for the extra tables, chairs and a choice movie for the grandkids. Personal calls (rather than a “marching orders” email) reinforce your request as an appeal for help, rather than a dictated process. And it will help your family members appreciate all that goes into your holiday extravaganza.

Holiday Dinner

Q. How do I handle a sibling who dominates holiday meals when I am the hostess and cook? By way of explanation: She’ll express dissatisfaction with the menu and bring her preferred foods because it wouldn’t be [insert holiday] without them. She’ll bring her version of the family traditional food, which I’ve told her I’ve made, because she “wants to make sure that there’s enough.” She’ll bring her serving platter because “it’s so pretty” and I’d be “foolish” not to use it. There’s more, but I think that gives you an idea.

— bparenteau

A. Oh, I’m sure there’s more. And I can imagine how exasperating this is.

Holiday meals are tricky territory in terms of “ownership.” Unlike run-of-the-mill dinner parties, where it’s your party and you can fry if you want to, holiday meals are hosted by the host but in some sense “belong” to everyone in attendance. If you don’t have a traditional favorite on offer, it is missed by all who adore that family favorite. Imposing that absence on them when they have to wait a year for the next holiday indulgence in some sense rattles the mores of good hosting, which is all about providing for your guests.

Of course, they should also be following the rules of being a good guest – not criticizing the menu or trumping your plans with platters of their own. That’s absolutely true.

The problem is that you can’t control what your sister does. You can control how you receive it. You can hear her behavior as a put down of your own food or menu judgment, an insult to your role as sole host. Or you can “hear” it as a desire to help or be included, to get attention, or to have some valued role.

Does your sister get to host her share of holiday meals, where she has free range to show off pretty platters and serve all her preferred foods? If not, for goodness sake, suggest it. She may just need her share of the spotlight. If you don’t gather at her house for logistical reasons — it’s far from everyone else, she doesn’t have enough room — she may be feeling resentful that she doesn’t get her turn. (Siblings are like that.)

Whatever the cause, I’m guessing (based on what you’ve described) that she’s not meaning to upset you. She may enjoy the process of cooking and planning and plating, and it’s hard for her to resist that urge in anticipation of the big holiday gathering. She also probably thinks she is being “helpful” and that if you’re annoyed, you’re just not appreciating her help. If she fully understood how frustrating you find her behavior, would she be surprised? Too often we say nothing and wonder why others don’t understand how we feel.

Your best bet might be to channel her energy in a direction that is actually helpful to you. Call her ahead of time to discuss the menu, and ensure that all of the “family favorites” are included. Then negotiate for the things that are most important to you. If you want to be in charge of the full menu, give her another role: “Could you be in charge of how we handle gifts/music/activities?” This may or may not work – it depends in part on whether you both feel most strongly about the food. For people who love to cook and to eat, everything else about the event can feel secondary.

So you may have better luck sharing some of the food responsibilities and negotiating who will take care of what on the menu. Your goal is to find clear agreement about what you will do, and especially what she won’t do. A few things to keep in mind:

· Hinting won’t work. “We have plenty of food.” Too vague. Remember that “We have plenty” doesn’t necessarily mean “Don’t bring more.”

· Make a clear request. “O.K., so I’m going to handle the sweet potatoes, and I will make plenty for everyone, so please don’t bring extra.” Or, “I’ll handle the main dishes. Can you focus on the appetizers, including bringing that platter you have?” Or, “I know you would cook the meat differently, but please don’t criticize.”

· Ask for her reaction. Leave space for her to react so that you know whether this plan actually works for her or not. “Does this work for you?” or even, “So you won’t bring extra, right?”

With a clearer pre-conversation in place, it’s easier to be transparent about your reaction if she does show up with the sweet potato plate. Tell her you’ll set it aside until it’s needed, and send it home with her for her leftovers fridge.

If you want to, sit down later to talk about why she brought it. Share the impact on you, “It makes me feel as if you don’t trust me to do it ‘right,'” or “I’m frustrated. I can’t tell if you don’t understand my concerns, or if you do but are choosing to ignore them.” And ask her how she’s seeing all of this: Is she just trying to help? Does she have genuine concerns about the preparation of the food? Does she realize how critical she is and how hurtful it is? Your goal is to be clear about your feelings and make clear and reasonable requests.

Your goal can’t be to make her listen. It may be that there is nothing you can do or say that will get through. My mother spent forty-eight years asking my grandmother not to bring extra food, and for forty-eight years my grandmother arrived and popped open her Samsonite to unpack the entire contents of her fridge. I knew it drove my mother nuts, but when I asked, my mother explained that feeding us was a big part of how grandma expressed caring for us, and that as a Depression-era adult she probably couldn’t bear to see food go to waste. When my grandmother passed away last year at age 105, it was stories like this that had us laughing late into the night. Working to find the humor in it all while it’s happening is sometimes the best self-preservation strategy out there.

Chronically Late

Q. My sister-in-law and her fiancé come late to all family events, including meals. They blame their lateness on his dyslexia and her fibromyalgia. My mother-in-law pressures us to wait for them before we start eating when the meal is at her house, so dinner can start at 8:30 or 9 p.m., which I find uncomfortably late after a long day. Sometimes they arrive an hour late for restaurant meals. We do not wait for them to start eating when at restaurants, but I find their late arrivals very disruptive. All my suggestions to resolve this (eg., asking them to call me when they are leaving their house so we can arrive at the same time, or allowing me to opt out of attending family meals) have been rejected. My husband’s family (and my husband) think I am unreasonable to be irritated by this behavior and I am accused of “tearing the family apart.” — GK

A. I suspect most readers are on your side here. I also suspect that your sister-in-law and her fiancé don’t really understand the impact their behavior has on you. They may understand it intellectually, as in: “GK is annoyed that we’re late.” But they don’t understand it emotionally: how the behavior itself, plus the predictable repetitiveness of it, leaves you feeling ignored and disrespected (not to mention hungry).

That’s especially true since “lateness” doesn’t seem to be an issue in your husband’s family, so nobody else is saying anything, or even feeling too upset. If it’s never been a big deal, then it’s not a big deal. For them. This is the challenge of being an in-law (or an out-law). You have to learn to survive in what is often a very different (and baffling and infuriating and exasperating) family culture.

Time is treated differently in different cultures, and your husband’s family culture is clearly one where time doesn’t matter. This isn’t “good” or “bad” necessarily, except to the extent that it negatively impacts someone from a culture where timeliness does matter.

So plan for those dinners at your in-laws like you would for a visit to a strange land. Assume they are anthropological forays to a place you can’t change and must adapt to in order to survive. Eat ahead of time so that you’re not hungry (and extra touchy). If you’ve had a long day and want to head home by 10 p.m. whether dinner has been had or not, give everyone a head’s up that this time you have your own constraints. And by all means, when you invite them to your house, let them know not that dinner is at 7, but that you will be sitting down at 7 — with or without them.

Sibling’s Fractured Family

Q. A sibling’s family has been so torn apart by personal and business disputes that one son no longer talks to his brother or his father and refuses to attend family celebrations. He also refuses to participate in counseling. His perspective on what has caused all this is very deeply felt but not necessarily accurate or realistic, particularly because he refuses to accept any responsibility. Is there any way to break through this impasse? — Concerned Aunt

A. Only if the father and sons want to.

I have seen families in similar situations decide that they want to heal enough to be able to spend holidays together, or for their kids (the cousins) to have good relationships. In these cases, they have found a family mediator who has helped them work through the business and personal disputes — often in pairs first, to work through issues specific to their relationship. I’ve seen (and helped) people do it, and it’s awe-inspiring. They learn a huge amount about their capacity for forgiveness and about being compassionate with themselves and one another. And they teach these things as family values to future generations. It’s an invaluable gift they pass down.

But it is a lot of work, it’s not an easy road, emotionally, and it takes quite a bit of time. There is rarely one breakthrough moment or one conversation that changes everything.

So as the concerned aunt, you can suggest it, you can even ask permission to look for someone to help who might “click” with them. Most major cities have community mediation groups or associations of family mediators. Family mediators usually do primarily divorce work, but many do other kinds of work with families and family businesses too. Some mediators are also therapists, or work closely with therapists, so have strong background in working with families to understand and promote reconciliation. Not everyone has the resources to take advantage of resources like this, of course, but if they do and they are committed to it, progress can often be made.

It’s important to note (as a number of readers commented last week) that there are situations – particularly when mental illness, addiction, abuse, or deep dysfunction is involved – where the boundaries that family members draw are a healthy and necessary response. As a bystander, it’s tempting to think that the answer is always reconnection. But separation – temporary or long term -- is often crucial for self-protection and healing.

At the end of the day, it is their road to walk. Your job is to cheer them on from the roadside, whichever road they choose.

COMING JAN. 8: Ms. Heen addresses questions about fractured families, a bullying co-worker and money.

Previous Ask an Expert columns can be found here.Booming: Living Through the Middle Ages offers news and commentary about baby boomers, anchored by Michael Winerip. Sign up for our weekly newsletter here. You may also follow Booming via RSS here or visit nytimes.com/booming. Our e-mail is [email protected].

Previous Ask an Expert columns can be found here.

Booming: Living Through the Middle Ages offers news and commentary about baby boomers, anchored by Michael Winerip. Sign up for our weekly newsletter here. You may also follow Booming via RSS here or visit nytimes.com/booming. Our e-mail is [email protected].