Team Christmas and the three gifts of Christmas

How can we push past the stresses of the festive season to rediscover the magic? Roger Bretherton tells us how he learned to find joy in being on Team Christmas. Part 2 of Unwrapping God this Christmas.

Roger Bretherton

Roger is Associate Professor of Psychology, at the University of Lincoln. He is a UK accredited Clinical Psychologist.

An animated scene shows a man in a Christmas jumper and a child look around a corner into something and be delighted

Arthur Christmas, Roger Bretherton's doppelgänger.

Aardman Animations.

There is one job at Christmas I always forget I have to do. It’s the one where you get the Christmas tree home only to realise that, if it isn’t going to be dead of dehydration by Christmas Eve, some chump has to saw one inch off the bottom of it. In my mind there is another version of myself who is admirably skilled and handy at things like this. That Roger- let’s call him manly-Roger- has a neatly ordered garage full of power tools ready for any task, and a set of multi-sized saws hanging outlined by a perfect silhouette on the wall. Unfortunately, this Roger- let’s call him real-Roger- does not own that garage. To give you an idea of just how chaotic our garage is, the police once woke us up at 3am to tell us it had been broken into and trashed by burglars. When I joined them in my dressing gown to inspect the ‘crime scene’, it turned out the kids had left it open, and I was forced to confess that our garage always looks like that.

So as the rest of the family disappear into the house, pinning up lights in a joyous cacophony of festive music, I’m swearing in the garage trying to find a saw. It’s usually completely inaccessible; wedged under a leaf blower, a bottle of windscreen fluid, and some discarded dumbbells which manly-Roger, were he to exist, might have actually used. Eventually I’ll emerge brandishing something completely ill-fitting for the task- some garden secateurs, a metal file, or a rusty axe, and I’ll then spend the next twenty minutes sweating over the base of the Christmas tree, thinking it all would have been much easier if real-Roger had bothered to pick up those dumbbells more than once this year. If a bad workman blames his tools, a truly abysmal workman has no clue what his tools even do. By the time I’ve finished clipping, hacking, and filing, the base of the tree looks not so much neatly sawn as gnawed-by-a-passing-beaver. I enter the house like a war hero flushed and dirtied from battle, defeatedly clutching the mangled tree. It requires every spare inch of inner resolve not to declare Christmas cancelled.

When I was a kid Christmas seemed so much easier. It was something that just happened. The festive magic occurred as if by magic. It took me longer than it should have to realise that Christmas only happens because someone makes it happen- and when you have kids and family that someone, is you. Given my incompetence with Christmas trees then, it may come as a surprise to know that I’ve learned to love being part of Team Christmas, being part of the gang who are in on the act and can make the magic happen. (And not just because our teenage sons reckons I look like Arthur Christmas in our wedding photos.) I have learned that there is, just beneath the surface, a bone-deep satisfaction in the hard work of hosting Christmas at home. It has become a spiritual discipline for me, and I should probably explain why.

We go into Christmas knowing that this year there is joy and beauty to be found in responding to other people’s demands.

Ronald Rollheiser, in his book Domestic Monastery, tells the story of a monk who followed the call to prayer deep into the solitude of the Sahara Desert. His name was Carlo Caretto, and after all his spiritual exertions and mystical extremes, he reflected that he was still no holier, no more godly, no less selfish than the mother he had left at home. His view was that the very act of raising children and constantly responding to the needs of the household had shaped her, even more effectively than the desert winds, into the attentive caring presence he had come to know. Rollheiser extends this story to us all. In the monastery, life is ordered by the monastery bell. When it rings the monks turn to prayer. Whatever they are doing – eating, speaking, half-way through a sentence – they stop and turn their attention immediately to God. Rollheiser suggests that we view the demands and interruptions of home and work just like this, as the monastery bell inviting us to turn to whatever is demanded of us in that moment. In doing so, we find ourselves shaped, like Caretto’s mother, into a more gracious and attentive form.

Christmas, more than any other time of year, has started to have a similar effect on me. When people need food or drink, when the presents need to be wrapped, when board games are needed for entertainment, when fresh air is needed to break the monotony, when someone needs to talk… I hear the sound of the monastery bell. The demands can be relentless, and easy to resent, but I have come to find some delight in willingly responding to them without a second thought.

Psychologists have written something similar about the things that motivate us towards being at our best. Self Determination Theory for example, holds that there are three basic psychological needs to which we are all intrinsically drawn. They are the conditions for feeling that what we do was initiated by us and hasn’t been imposed by the tyranny of our circumstances.

The first is autonomy. We have to feel on some level that we chose to do what we are currently doing. This is where the monastery bell can be so helpful at Christmas. We may not have chosen our families or the place of our birth, but we can choose how we respond to the obligations these things place upon us. As the guru of meaning, Viktor Frankl once said, we should not ask what the meaning of our lives is, because in the duties and demands of each day, life itself is constantly questioning us. Meaning is to be found in how we respond. Whether we are willing to do the things we have to do, as if we chose to do them. This is an intention we can set for ourselves long before the family rock up for Christmas dinner. We go into Christmas knowing that this year there is joy and beauty to be found in responding to other people’s demands. We only make ourselves miserable by imagining a world where we only ever call the shots and never have to serve them. Like the proverbial puppy, autonomy is not just for Christmas… it’s for life.

Some of our best memories of Christmas can be the conversations we had while cooking, or washing up, or serving drinks, or setting the table. If we find it difficult to ask for help, we may need to set up the request in advance.

It’s all very well claiming our intention to serve the family at Christmas, but if we don’t brace ourselves for it, it’s liable to collapse with the first person to turn down our homemade cranberry sauce (it’s a long story- see Unwrapping God this Christmas Part 1). We can choose our duty, but we don’t have to choose it alone. This speaks to our second psychological need: relatedness. We want to connect with other people, to make contact and build relationships. Doing our duty at Christmas is great, but we need to watch out for that subtle moment when our delight at serving others morphs into stomping around wishing we didn’t have to. Often this is because we ignored the moment at which we probably should have asked for help. We start to feel alone in serving and, even worse, we start mentally rehearsing all the reasons why the rest of our family are useless wasters who never lift a finger.

We need to be attentive to the pivot point at which our desire to serve turns into martyrdom, and not be seduced by the moral superiority of going it alone. If we can learn to ask those around us to help when we need it, we can create unanticipated times of connection. Some of our best memories of Christmas can be the conversations we had while cooking, or washing up, or serving drinks, or setting the table. If we find it difficult to ask for help, we may need to set up the request in advance. We let the family know that at some point during Christmas it will all feel a bit too much and we need them to be ready to help. In our house, at such times my other half has ‘permission to boss’. Given that she is more likely than me to be aware and stressed out by what needs to be done, she is free to point it out. And if, at times, that comes across a bit bossy, it’s no big deal- just Team Christmas working together to get things done.

And, if the theory is right, getting things done is the third psychological need (alongside autonomy and relatedness) that motivates positive behaviour. We like to find outlets for our competence, our skills and abilities. To listen out for the monastery bell is to ask ourselves the question: what am I able to do in this moment that would contribute to hosting the family right now? And for me, ultimately, that’s what makes the practice of Christmas a spiritual discipline. A few hundred years ago the Jesuit spiritual director, Jean-Pierre de Caussade (1675-1751), grew tired of convoluted esoteric paths to spiritual enlightenment. He preferred a much more down to earth approach. He wrote: the duty of every moment is a shadow that conceals the action of God. Sometimes we miss God because we are put off by the shadow that conceals the divine presence in everyday life. But when we approach the demands of the festive season, willing to give what we have, to whomever we can, we celebrate once again this Christmas, in our own small way, the coming of heaven to earth.

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Loneliness

23 June 2023

6 min read

The curse of loneliness and the hope of kindness

The tend-and-befriend response is present in many species, but it reaches a particular level of genius in ours, explains Roger Bretherton.

Roger Bretherton

Roger is Associate Professor of Psychology, at the University of Lincoln. He is a UK accredited Clinical Psychologist.

A person stands in a road under misty street lights.

Atharva Tulsi on Unsplash

Loneliness kills. I’ve known that for a while. It dawned on me when, as an undergraduate, I first read the anthropological studies of the so-called ‘voodoo death curse’. An admittedly politically incorrect name for a horrifying phenomenon that has haunted me ever since. The studies, reported in the early twentieth century, attempted to account for the highly effective way in which shaman in tribal cultures were able to pronounce death on aberrant members of their community. Often within days of coming under the curse, the hexed individual was dead. It looked like magic.

Psychologists studying anxiety became interested in this phenomenon as an illustration of the connection between social stress and physical health. On closer examination, they noted that those on the receiving end of a death curse, not only came under the opprobrium of a powerful spiritual authority but were consequently entirely isolated from the community that gave them their identity. The moment the curse was decreed they became a non-person. They ceased to exist in the eyes of the collective. They became a ghoul, a wraith, an abomination to their people. They experienced a social exclusion so absolute and catastrophic that the stress of it killed them. Physical death swiftly followed social death.

When we fall foul of the charismatic leader of a workplace... we may for a moment shiver in the chill breeze of the death curse.

But the death curse is not confined to stone age tribes and agrarian collectives. It is a ubiquitous artefact of human social life. In subtly disguised form it continues to stalk the industrialised societies of the West. We see it in any social situation that terminally frustrates our hardwired biological need to belong. When we are cast out of employment through redundancy, retirement, or sickness. When a social faux pas leaves us persona non grata. When our social media presence is more of a toenail than a footprint. When we fall foul of the charismatic leader of a workplace, a neighbourhood, a family, a church. We may for a moment shiver in the chill breeze of the death curse. We wonder briefly if the silence and the cold shoulders will kill us.

We don’t often think about the all-too evident connection between belonging, stress and health- but we should, because social connectedness is the primary way we as a species have made it this far. Most of us are familiar with the physiological responses to acute stress. There are only a few of them. It’s like a multiple choice test, take your pick: a) fight, b) flight, c) freeze, d) faint, or e) some bespoke combo of all of the above. We probably also have some recognition that those of us living in information economies tend to spend too much time in these stressed states of mind. They are designed for short-term threats (like predators), not long-term projects and serial deadlines. The cortisol coursing through our veins designed to deliver us from danger now stops us sleeping at night, and lurks behind all the major killers of our culture: cancer, heart disease, and depression.

But before we get to all that stressed-out running and punching and standing still like startled rabbits, there is a more common everyday way that human beings deal with stress. Our primary way of navigating a challenging and threatening world is our equally hardwired ability to reach out to others- the social engagement system. This tend-and-befriend response is present in many species, but it reaches a particular level of genius in ours. Our capacity to form groups that can coordinate action through a sense of unified purpose is what allowed our ancestors to take down woolly mammoths and survive ice ages. Our principal strength comes not from our ability to make fists, but to join hands.

To fall out of connection with others is an existential threat.

No wonder then, given our history as an eminently social species, that loneliness- the perceived shortfall between desired and actual social contact- is experienced as a menace to our survival. It once was, and still is. To fall out of connection with others is an existential threat. Clinical research has been reporting for decades that social support, or rather the lack of it, predicts and maintains pretty much every form of psychological distress we can bring to mind. In a small-scale way I repeat that finding with my own students every year. We annually distribute a 19-item well-being survey to several hundred university students. Most of it asks about the good stuff, happiness, quality of relationships, sense of purpose and so on. But one question asks them to rate, simply on a 1-10 scale, how lonely they are. Every time we run it on campus, this single lonely question predicts levels of depression, anxiety and stress, better than any other demographic.

So, it is good that loneliness is back in the news. Only last month the US Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, issued a report on the devastating health impact of loneliness. It affects a large proportion of the population- he cites 50% in the US, but UK estimates tend to be more conservative. It is apparently as damaging to our health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and twice as risky as downing six alcoholic drinks daily. Public health officials are partial to measuring mortality in fags and booze. But Vivek Murthy did something very un-like a public health official: he spoke about his own loneliness. How his very success in office had severed ties with friends and family, leaving him isolated, lonely and having to learn to re-connect. He proposes six pillars for addressing the societal scourge of loneliness, but as yet no government funding has been allocated to the initiative.

It is when we give to others that we know we are known- we matter.

When the experts are asked what we can do about loneliness they tend to advocate a multi-level approach. As individuals, we should Get Out. If we are lonely there are things we can do about it. Volunteering, exercise, singing, therapy, reconnecting with old friends, Counter-intuitively, we are more likely to benefit from activities in which we give something, in which we care or contribute. It is when we give to others that we know we are known- we matter.

As groups we should Look Out. Not everybody is able to overcome the barriers to social contact. Some people through physical or mental disability need others to look out for them. I witnessed a heart-warming example of this recently. There is a notorious character who lives locally. He dresses in black, has wild hair, walks with a limp, and speaks in grunts. He’s harmless, but he scares children. I don’t know what trauma or substance reduced him to this state, but he staggers past us twice a day on the way to his allotment. A few weeks ago thieves broke into his shed and stole all his gardening tools. He was pitifully distressed. But within hours the entire neighbourhood had mobilised through social media, and equipped him with every trowel, fork and hoe, that could be spared. I can’t help feeling that there is something in us as people that wants to act kindly like this, and cultivating this instinct gives me hope that we as a society can beat back the spectre of loneliness.

Loneliness it seems may not be just a bug in our software, it may be encoded in our cultural firmware- part of its operating system.

Which leads us to the third level of action, we need to Sort Out the dehumanising trends of our culture that inevitably generate and enable the pandemic of loneliness. As Mother Teresa famously observed, loneliness is the price we pay for wealth in the West, it is our true poverty. There may be something inspiring about the ruggedly individualistic, materialistically motivated, hyper-competitive, ideal of success that presides over our culture. But the studies of psychological wellbeing unanimously conclude that every one of those motivating values leads to misery, distrust and isolation. Loneliness it seems may not be just a bug in our software, it may be encoded in our cultural firmware- part of its operating system. Perhaps that is why most government-led attempts to alleviate the problem (in the UK and US at least) smack of tokenism. As the old organisational mantra goes: our social system is perfectly designed to bring about the outcomes it produces. So, what do we need? Nothing much. Just a completely transformed society. If only there was one of those knocking around, somewhere.