'Happiest Season' Harper's got some work to do

And we are back with the second installment of a therapist reviewing HULU’s latest and greatest Christmas spectacular Happiest Season! 

If you missed the first part about how Jane is unsung hero who teaches us all about some good ol’ differentiation and how wonderful and lonely it can be, you can check that one out here. 

Lastly, here’s another gentle reminder and disclaimer that while I am a therapist, this is in no way serving as a replacement for actual psychological treatment or medical advice. It’s really just serving as a means for entertaining myself during quarantine and I hope that maybe you too find some simple joy out of gently psychoanalyzing some fictional characters! 

So let’s jump back in and start with a rather obvious statement:

Harper’s got some work to do…

Oh Harper, Harper, Harper. She’s a complex character, isn’t she? We understand that what she’s going through isn’t easy AND we’re crazy frustrated at her decisions. Here’s what we’ll be talking through below:

My therapist’s eye caught: Gaslighting

Why it’s both/and: There is wisdom AND problems in her choices

What we can takeaway: Telling the truth

First, let’s acknowledge that for those of us cis, straight people, we will never understand all of the complexities and truly know what it’s like to come out to the people you love the most. While we take a closer look in this article at how she didn't handle the situation well, I personally can't imagine how hard it would be to hide the person you're in love with from your family. It's good to always remember that everyone in the LGBTQ community is doing their best and to be extra compassionate to those managing these types of situations. With that being said, let’s take a look at their relationship dynamics that translate across all types of romantic and non-romantic relationships.

Gaslighting. 

If you’ve ever wondered what gaslighting is, because, let’s be honest, it’s a word that’s garnered quite a lot of popularity in 2020, Harper gives us a great illustration. Following her night out with her ex-boyfriend Conner, Abby wakes her up the following morning to make sure she’s okay and also to reconnect and get back on the same page after what happened the night before. From the moment she wakes up, literally, Harper talks to Abby from a place of deep defensiveness. She’s sarcastic, she’s not making eye contact and is skirting around all the concerns that Abby has every right to name. Instead of looking honestly at how she did screw up, you watch Harper avoid any semblance of responsibility as she makes Abby’s feelings and concern the focus so as to deflect from herself. “I didn’t know I had a curfew.” “Nothing is wrong with me, I just don’t know why you’re keeping tabs on me.” 

Essentially, she’s saying you shouldn’t and can’t be mad at me for this situation that I put us in because you agreed to this when I told you twenty minutes before I pulled up to my parents house that not only do my parents not know I’m gay, they don’t know we are in a relationship, so I need us to hide the relationship, and I need you to hide your sexuality too….why is this such a big deal to you? 

That’s gaslighting in a nutshell folks. It’s incredibly harmful, it’s crazy making for the person on the receiving end of it, and it happens all the time when a person won’t confront their own wrong doing. Not okay in the least and if this was a real life relationship, this whole incident would take a lot, a lot, a lot of time and work to repair.

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All harm and gaslighting aside, I do want to affirm there’s a good deal of wisdom in Harper hiding her authentic self from her parents- and there’s likely a lot of wisdom in what you hide from your parents too. Why? You are hardwired from the time you are born for love, safety, and belonging- especially from your parents. You learn early on who you need to be and what you need to do to stay in their good graces, because you need their love and support to survive. 

So it might be your sexuality and it might also be past traumas, an eating disorder or maybe even the career you actually want to pursue…regardless, you are not crazy or bad for hiding these parts of your self or being afraid to show them to the world. There’s room for understanding of why Harper does this with her parents, and there’s room for you too.

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Back to the movie, Harper named this experience in a jarringly clear way after Abby confronted her that she made a choice to hide their relationship and it wasn’t going to work anymore…

“I am not hiding you. I am hiding me. Okay. Our entire life we have been expected to be these perfect, golden children. I mean, the love in our house wasn’t something we just got for free. It is something we competed for and if we veered off their course, we lost it. I know it’s messed up, I get it, but they’re my parents and I’m scared if I tell them who I really am, I will lose them and I know if I don’t tell them, I will lose you.”

Her reasons for hiding her authentic self from her family are not all bad and nor are they all good. They’re complex and nuanced human reasons. It is good to want to be accepted and to be accepted. It is good to want to belong and to belong. And if you haven’t found this out already, there is a time in all of our lives where we have to choose between belonging to our family or belonging to ourselves. 

Harper shows us so much “both / and”.

Harper has chosen herself in some ways and she’s also not chosen herself in some ways. Can’t we all relate to this? 

Both of those choices have hurt her and others in deep ways, just like our decisions do for us. One distinction I want to call out though, is that it is one thing to hide parts of yourself for acceptance. It is an entirely other thing to ask someone else to collude with you in the way Harper asks her girlfriend Abby to not only hide they are dating, but to hide her own sexuality to fit in with the family. (This isn’t just specific to the LGBTQ community, but oftentimes we and other people will not only hide ourselves- but ask or demand others to hide as well. THIS is not okay.)

So not surprisingly, from the moment they walk into her family’s house having agreed to the lie, chaos follows suit because when you actively avoid the thing you need to confront, things don’t stay neutral and neat, they boil over. And what does boiling water do? It expands. And once it can no longer stay in it’s given container, until it leaves the pot and then spills all over the place… it becomes a much bigger mess to clean up.

Hence me not being a rocket scientist for naming Harper has a lot of work to do and needs to take a lot of responsibility here. This is why the notion of holding both is so important here. You can hold compassion for Harper for hiding this from her family AND you can also hold anger because what she’s asking her partner to do is incredibly harmful and not okay in an attempt to protect her ego. Both are true and both need to be faced. If you just stay with compassion for her, you end up enabling the behavior. And if you just slam her in anger for the bullshit of it all, it only serves to make a person cower in shame more. So you find a way to sit in the tension that Harper isn’t a bad person, but she’s acting in really harmful ways. 

What we can takeaway: The day will come where there is nowhere to go but telling the truth. 

There’s a place we all come to where you can’t actually go any further, until you face the thing that you don’t want to face. It’s the oh-so-common-experience of being stuck and working very hard to do literally anything BUT be honest about the thing that you need to be honest about. And you can get very creative in your attempts to avoid reality! Welcome to being human. But eventually the game gets old and you see how you aren’t actually growing or changing or really fooling anyone, especially yourself. 

Remember: we all come to a place of a deciding to be our authentic selves, and no one escapes this. Will we tell the truth, or continue with the exhausting game of hiding? 

Our truth may be shameful, terrifying, glorious, relieving, or a mix of all. Either way, there is so much beauty and bravery in finally choosing to no longer hide and let ourselves be seen. As a therapist, here are some real-life examples I’ve seen of people telling the truth: 

You may come out and tell your people you’re gay or queer or bisexual or trans. 

You finally come clean that you’ve been having an affair. 

You name that you have an eating disorder that’s out of control and you need help. 

You sit your family down to let them know you’ll be breaking away from the family business to start a new career. 

You take a deep breath and you let your loved ones know you are getting a divorce. 

You finally say the decades long buried secret out loud that you were sexually abused. 

I’ve come to this moment in my own life, and trust me when I say I know just how scary this choice and the moment you say it is. 

But what I can tell you, from my own life and my work, is that when you finally say the thing out loud, you often find relief. Not always, but more often than not. And even if the people you shared it with respond in a way that’s dismissive, shaming, or harmful, it says something about them, not you. You get to start living in freedom. 

For Harper the choices were to keep playing the game for her parents approval masked as love and lose the love of her life OR it was to choose herself, her truth, and Abby- and risk losing her parents love. What are the choices between in your life?

ps. Movies like us believe these things happen neatly and quickly in well contained 90 minute segments, but in reality, these things take lots of time to play out. So please be mindful your life is not an episode of Fixer Upper and you might want to settle in that demolition phase because it’s important we hang out there long enough to really see and understand what’s happening so we can grow and build the right way, not the hasty way. 

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To the folks who have chosen themselves and it has cost you greatly - well done, well done, well done. Thank you for teaching us what it means to live with courage and authenticity. And to the folks who are on their path to getting ready to choose themselves - keep going, keep going, keep going. May the folks who have gone before you be the lamp holders on your journey to freedom. 

I’ll be back soon to unpack the love that is lost between Mama and Papa Caldwell and their daughters. Talking about parents is such a neutral, casual topic that will likely not bring up any feelings what-so-ever! 

TTFN (ta-ta-for-now),
Blake