Spotlight on The Ottawa Pastoral Counselling Centre (The OPC) — Holiday stress

The Ottawa Pastoral Counselling Centre is one of the five Anglican Community Ministries. This is the fourth in a series of articles introducing readers to the OPC’s team members and their work.  Alexa Delroy is a therapist who has worked with the OPC for 25 years.

The holidays bring joy but can also be a stressful and difficult time for many people.

“Often there’s a big difference between the ideal that people hold in their hearts and their minds about how things should be on these significant occasions, especially Christmas. The reality of is that it is often full of difficult emotions. Grief … anger, resentment, guilt. All kinds of very strong emotions come up when you have a time like this that encapsulates an expectation of family. And I think we all have an image in our minds of how a family should be. Everybody’s supposed to be in harmony, gathered together, enjoying each other’s company. And so often that’s not the reality….Relationships can be fractured. People can be living so far apart that they can’t see each other. Families are split by marital splits.

There is also the busyness of the season. Do people talk about those kinds of pressures?

Yes, and it can be very hard to figure out how to prioritize those things. What’s actually going to determine how I answer all those requests and demands? Am I going to go with other people’s expectations? Am I going to figure out what’s most meaningful for me? Who am I going to let down? Especially if families are trying to [divide their time] at Christmas between two sets of parents or maybe more…. Trying to please everyone…. Often it’s felt afterwards too. People have some excitement going in, but sometimes they feel pretty bruised coming out.

How do you help your clients through those things?

I trained in a model called voice dialogue, which is similar to something that’s becoming very prominent now, IFS, internal family systems therapy. I trained in a precursor of that… And that’s about parts….We think of ourselves as a unitary entity, you know, ‘I’m just me.’ But in reality, we have all kinds of different parts that operate differently in different situations and have come in to answer the needs of different situations.

Often these parts have come in to protect our vulnerability…. We adopt these protectors because they answer our needs. So, we’re born into a family, we have to fit into it and manage in it. So the parts come in to help us do that. And every person’s accommodation to their family will be different. The parts are protective and creative. …So if I, for example, learn to please other people as a way of accommodating to my family, that protects my vulnerability, but it also gives me a way to interact….

These parts usually work up to a point, and then they hit a wall, and they don’t answer all the needs anymore. And that’s when people usually come to therapy.

My approach is always that what people have learned to protect themselves with is always valid because it worked, and it was necessary for survival. That doesn’t mean it’s working now.

Do people sometimes create or discover a new part?

That would be part of the work, to protect your vulnerability in an alternate way so that you don’t have to use that one that you learned way back when. You now have other options…

There’s also a capital S self … the one who can know all the parts and understand them in their own terms….  Meeting the parts with compassion and understanding is the way to help them loosen up, not to call them some kind of pathology and try to rip them off.

You highlighted a Christmas theme in that.

Being oneself is not toxic. We can come before God as we are at Christmas, We shouldn’t shut ourselves out of the stable because we think we or our families aren’t good enough. The message is goodwill to all people.