By: Martin Merritt, esq.
Past President, Texas Health Lawyers Association
Past Chair, DBA Health Law Section
“Please Tell Me you Didn’t. . . How to Keep Clients Out of the Jailhouse, Poorhouse and Lawyers Out of the Nuthouse” -Blog
As you can tell, I love talking about health law & litigation issues, and general wellbeing, if you have any health law questions or better yet, need to refer a case, just call or drop me an email and I will happily talk.
“Can I refill your eggnog, get you anything to eat? Drive you out to the middle of nowhere and leave you for dead?”
–National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation
It is Thanksgiving again and you get to spend time with your family! If that makes your brain hurt, here’s at least something to be thankful for: “Pain” means you are on the right side of the dirt. You are “on it,” and not “in it.” If you’ve got a family, chances are, you have some “Cluster B’s,” which is what psychologists say to each other as an inside joke. It’s code for “difficult” people. (And you are just going to have to deal with it.)
When I was a kid in the 70’s, Thanksgiving meant travelling 500 miles (and 100 years back in time) to my grandparent’s tobacco farm in Cumberland Gap, Tennessee. We piled 17 people in a four-room shack (not “four bedrooms,” but four “rooms”). It was freezing in the mountains. They had no indoor bathroom and no central heat. A 5-ton pile of coal in the front yard fueled a single pot belly heater in just the main room. At night, we piled under a half-dozen patchwork blankets to keep warm.
But mostly, I remember all the livestock on the farm was actively trying to kill us. There were bulls, mules and even Banty roosters. Probably because we children were irritating them, but I just remember running away a lot.
These days, Thanksgiving is more like National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. It is “a death of a thousand cuts.” It is true, I always find when I am visiting someone else’s family, it is only close family members who understand why they annoy each other so much. From the outside looking in, it doesn’t seem that bad. This is because it is the little annoyances, repeated over time, that will make you insane.
How to survive this Thanksgiving.
1. “Avoid and Evade.” Like running from a Banty rooster, It’s not always about you. Those dodgy little bastards just woke up “ticked.” The hard part about being human is that we are at the center of our own universes. (If you look to the left, half of it is that way. To the right, is the other half.) Plus, we are the only ones who know what it is like to be “us.” It is really weird, that we somehow just got planted in the middle of where we happen to be. And at Thanksgiving, where we happen to be, is in the middle of “kooks” that we didn’t pick. They just happen to be related to us for some reason. And some are just unpleasant.
When people do things that are upsetting, it isn’t personal. Think of your mission, not to “engage the enemy,” but to “avoid and evade.”
2. Tune into the “higher frequency.” I have this “woo woo” hippie-chick friend, who says some of the smartest things I have ever heard any human say, one of which is that there are two “frequencies,” metaphorically, a “high” one and a “low” one. They are always out there, but the one you tune into is the one that comes in loud and clear. You have to be aware that the low frequency is always calling for your attention. But you get to choose to ignore it. Which is the same as choosing not to be in agony. Find the higher frequency, which is a way of saying, “find your happy place.”
3. Treat everyone like they are hurting. Zig Ziglar, the self-help pioneer used to tell audiences, “treat everyone like they are hurting, and nine times out of ten, you will be treating them the right way.” If your version of “Aunt Edna” in the first Vacation movie is super annoying, consider that when you are in your 70s and 80s, it is really painful just to be alive. Hell, at 62 I wake up with injuries I didn’t have when I went to bed.
Sometimes, being grumpy is the “default,” because they can’t go around saying “ouch” all the time.
4. Try a little empathy. Back when people made sense, (circa. 2019), we used to be able to say there were differences between men and women, and we wouldn’t get a pie in the face. One big difference was in how we approach problems. The rule was that wives want to strangle their husbands most of the time, because when wives told husband’s their problems, husbands would tell them how to “fix it.” Apparently, they want us to understand how they “feel.” Maybe repeat back to them, “that must have made you feel terrible.” And somehow, this helps. Men don’t understand this, but that’s not the point. It is about “validation.”
If one of your family members keeps talking about “walking into an airplane propeller, then expresses how their head keeps hurting,” they might not be asking you to fix their problem. They want you to understand how they feel about it. Don’t get drawn into telling them they are wrong.
5. Don’t taunt the green monster. The reason Cain slew Able in Genesis was because one was a farmer and one a shepherd. God found favor in the offering of Able and Cain became envious that Able was God’s favorite. What this means, is that from the beginning of time, some people are just lucky, or work harder and smarter. People aren’t always happy hearing about the good fortune others have to share. It isn’t right, but it is “real.” And at Thanksgiving, this is an “airplane propellor” just waiting to be walked into. You might try walking around it, just to keep the peace.
6. If you still have a “Dementor,” and all else fails go “gray rock.” Harry Potter has these wraiths called “Dementors” who try to suck your soul out through your face. When you get trapped with one of these, try going “gray rock.” In the YouTube world of videos on surviving toxic or narcissistic people, a new breed of life coaches has popped up, who describe the technique of going “gray rock.”
Gray Rock Method. “The gray rock method is a technique used to deal with toxic people by making yourself uninteresting and unresponsive. Like a gray rock. The goal of the gray rock method is to make the other person lose interest in you and move on to another. It is like burglar bars. It doesn’t stop crime, it just keeps you from being the victim.
How it works You make yourself boring and unresponsive by:
· Minimizing emotional reactions
· Avoiding arguments or debates
· Keeping interactions brief and neutral
· Limiting eye contact
· Keeping your facial expressions neutral
· Staying calm, cool, and collected
· Limiting your responses to “yes” and “no”
· Using canned responses
Practice makes perfect! The whole goal here is to survive Thanksgiving, and if it doesn’t kill you, you will get another chance to practice. It is only 33 days until Christmas.