I have mentioned this in our numerous posts this season about the loss Christmas reminds us of when we have PTSD from dysfunctional families. I'd like for us to support each other in grieving that we're not sharing happy holidays with family. But I'd also like for us to support each other as witnesses if we are NOT sharing unhappy holidays with dysfunctional families in abuse like we used to as well. Only the kind of people we are here, people who have gone through crazy holidays with dysfunctional family trauma, can bear witness to what an improvement that is.

The hardest thing about recovery is recognizing the evidence of healing is as much in the things we're NOT doing any more as it is in the things we ARE doing. The fact that I have NOT gone back to my family's house for Christmas is evidence of my healing, not of a grudge. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result.

Me, I used to spend all year recovering in therapy from being the target of a lifetime of family violence. I would work hard all year every year only to waste it all at the end of the year every Christmas in a suicide mission. The mission: to visit my family and try to make my year's worth of therapy calm them down to have a Norman Rockwell family portrait of a holiday. "Maybe this year is the year," I'd tell myself in breathless anticipation, about as realistically as a 52 year old expecting Santa Claus to come down his chimney.

Then all hell would break loose instead of family bonding. Instead of being told family was proud of me, I would get insulted at the family table for not being a "real" doctor since I have a PhD to teach community college with instead of an MD like a doctor in a hospital. Or another year I'd get punched in the face after the family dinner because gay people went to my church--a church they never attended, so it was hard to see why they would care. The definition of insanity, going there over and over expecting a different result every Christmas.

So the evidence of my PTSD recovery is in NOT going there so those things will NOT happen again. But just like foiling a terrorist attack doesn't make the news like a terrorist attack does, staying home and avoiding more family abuse by being alone doesn't get seen very easily as the triumph of sanity that it is.

Me, I'll be here for Christmas company so I can round up some witnesses to the fact that I'm having a good Christmas now. A good Christmas instead of going to be with my family for Christmas. A good Christmas instead of having to go on the lam because my family had an outbreak of violence again as predictably as the eruption of a volcano. Here's to peace this Christmas for us all. One more day.

Witness the peace.