The holidays are full of uncomfortable situations.

Take family gatherings.  Please.  (Cue rim shot.)

If you choose to see your loved ones even though it puts you face to face with family members you’d rather not see, try Martha Beck’s Dysfunctional Family Bingo.

Here’s how it works:
You make a bingo card much like traditional ones.  But instead of letters and numbers, you use situations.

Situations you would rather avoid.

Like…
Mom criticizes my hair
Uncle Jim touches me inappropriately
Angie’s family ignores me
Suzie brags about her house in Boca
Dad gets drunk and picks a fight
Ann is passive aggressive
Everyone gets a present except me

You get the idea.

You check each one off until you complete an entire row or column.

BINGO!!

Once you choose to be in a situation that makes you cringe, why not make it less painful?
Change your thoughts from painful to gleeful.

It’s a major reframe.

You may actually be rooting for Grandpa to suck his teeth after dinner if it means you win.

A friend and I have been talking about feeling broken recently.

You see, I think being broken is a good thing, she thinks it’s a bad thing.

I think the difference is that she has people using those words as a weapon.

“You are a broken person.”

Yeah, that would hurt.

But here’s how I see it.

You might feel broken, but you’re never actually broken.

You are broken open.

It’s like my son working out for football.

He bench presses more than his weight.

That tears (or breaks) the fibers in his muscles and makes them stronger.

It takes the breaking to create the growth.
You can visually understand breaking and beauty with the Japanese form of art called Kintsugi.

They take a pot that has broken, and instead of gluing it together and trying to disguise the break and make it look new again, they look at the break as a part of the pot’s history, and repair it with gold. Their old pottery is laced with beauty.

Kintsugi treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.

Sometimes when you are in pain, it takes being broken open to let in the cleansing light.

Shame is a feeling that is only dissolved by breaking open and letting the words out.

Shame is like a vampire. It thrives in the dark, but dies in the light of day.

If someone calls you broken, that’s on them, not you.

They are trying to hurl their crappiness on you in a way that makes them feel better.
You may hear it as broken and can’t be fixed.

I prefer to think of you as broken open, getting stronger and more golden every day.