Editor’s Note: On the last Monday of each month, Lori Gottlieb answers a reader’s question about a problem, big or small. Have a question? Email her at dear.therapist@theatlantic.com.

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Dear Therapist,

My husband and I have been together for five years. In that time, his parents have separated and are now divorcing. My husband and his two sisters are not particularly close with either parent because of their less-than-ideal childhood.

As adults, my husband and his siblings have established their own holiday traditions. My husband spends most holiday time with my family, and his siblings spend theirs with their in-laws. Before the divorce, my brother and his siblings would all get together with their parents for a simple dinner or gift exchange every year (for both Thanksgiving and Christmas), but now there’s no plan to bring the different parts of the family together.

In recent weeks, both parents, who each live by themselves, have started hinting at not wanting to be alone during the holidays and hoping to potentially join our plans. Neither parent seems willing to host—they just want the invitation. My sisters-in-law have made it clear that they won’t be inviting their parents to their plans with their own in-laws. This leaves my husband feeling like the onus is on us to “take care” of his parents by including them in our plans, which are really my family’s plans.

What’s the right move here? Ask my family to include them knowing that it shakes up our dynamic, or figure out how to navigate his parents truly being alone for the holidays?

Dear Reader,

I empathize with the fantasy that there’s an objective “right move” in this situation, but the reality is that different choices will have different consequences, none more “right” than the others. The best you can do is reflect on the options and, with the clarity that comes from reflection, choose the one that feels best for now.

I say “for now” because whatever you do this year isn’t what you have to do forever. Your extended family is going through a significant transition, and at this time next year, and in the years to come, the dynamics will shift and settle. Eventually, your husband’s parents might be fine attending a gathering together, or one or both might find a new partner and have other places to go. Holiday plans that make sense this year might look completely different in the future.

That should take some pressure off, because if whatever you do this year doesn’t work out as well as you hope, you can view the decision as nothing more than a well-intentioned and temporary experiment.

To help you design that experiment, let’s first think about the bigger dynamics at play. The reason you and your husband feel so conflicted is that your question touches on a complex intersection of family loyalty, emotional boundaries, and holiday expectations—each of which, by itself, is weighty and fraught. Add to this some painful childhood history, and it’s easy to feel confused and pulled in different directions. Even so, your family had come up with a viable solution, and now this divorce has transformed what was once a manageable annual gathering into something even more complicated.

[Read: The only two choices I’ve ever made]

I want to emphasize the impact of this divorce not just on your holiday plans, but on the family as a whole. Although your husband and his siblings aren’t particularly close with their parents, I imagine that they’re still dealing with the emotions of what’s known as “gray divorce”—a divorce that occurs later in life and that creates unique challenges for adult children. Many people assume that parental divorce affects adult children less significantly than young children, but it can be just as destabilizing, in different ways. Many adult children find themselves in exactly your husband’s position—managing their parents’ emotional needs while trying to maintain their own family structures and traditions.

On a deeper level, a late-in-life divorce signals a fundamental shift in family identity—even if your husband’s parents were less than ideal, he saw himself as being part of an intact family—and he has some adjusting to do. For one, he may be experiencing role reversal, in which adult children tend to take on a quasi-parental role and feel responsible for their parents’ well-being. He may also be feeling pulled back into certain unhealthy family dynamics that he would rather avoid. Notice how the divorce has highlighted different coping strategies among the siblings. Your sisters-in-law have chosen strict boundaries in upholding their in-laws’ traditions, whereas your husband feels pulled toward accommodation. This divergence can lead to resentment reminiscent of long-standing family roles (for example, was your husband historically the “responsible” or “peacemaking” child?). And finally, he may be feeling stuck in the middle of his parents’ newly separated lives, forced to navigate competing needs and perceived obligations.

For all of these reasons, you might want to have a conversation with your husband about his emotional response to his parents’ divorce. What does it bring up for him? How does it affect his relationship with his siblings and whether he feels alone or supported as his family goes through this change? What’s driving his sense of responsibility to “take care” of his parents? Is it a genuine desire for connection, is it simply guilt, or is there also a sense of real compassion? Once you understand more about how he feels, the two of you can have a candid conversation about the three interconnected challenges you as a couple are facing: your husband’s feeling of obligation to his parents, your commitment to your own family’s traditions, and the broader question of how much responsibility adult children bear for their parents’ emotional well-being.

[Read: Couples therapy, but for siblings]

If you can have these conversations with grace and empathy—for each other, for yourselves, and for his parents—you’ll likely find that they not only help you understand each other better, but that the options are less binary than you presented in your letter.

For instance, you can ask his parents to join your family without “shaking up” your family dynamic by not focusing so much on whether his parents are having a good time, and just letting everyone be. You can choose not to invite his parents to your family’s holiday gatherings but also not leave them “truly alone”—by calling or doing FaceTime instead, perhaps including some real-time virtual cooking or gift-opening. Alternatively, you can still do the simple dinner and gift exchange you’ve always done with both parents by telling them that if they don’t feel comfortable being in the same room together, they can always say no—but that’s what you’re able to offer given that you have two families to consider, and three celebrations are just too many. Or you can decide that doing another simple dinner and gift exchange isn’t that burdensome (because, as you say, it’s “simple”) and invite them individually for a version of the traditional plan—or schedule even shorter, separate visits with each of them.

As you become more flexible with the possibilities, remember that the goal isn’t to solve their loneliness but to help them adapt to their new reality in a healthy way. Maybe that involves connecting them with community resources or social groups for divorced seniors, encouraging them to build their own new traditions and actively engage with their existing social connections while pursuing new ones.

All of these are valid ways to experiment with creating holiday celebrations that balance compassion for his parents with respect for your own family’s needs and joy. As you do this, keep in mind that part of “taking care” of your husband’s parents is helping them build independent lives post-divorce—and that this is one of the most caring things adult children can do.

Dear Therapist is for informational purposes only, does not constitute medical advice, and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician, mental-health professional, or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it—in part or in full—and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.

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In the almost three weeks since his victory in the presidential election, Donald Trump has more or less completed nominations for his Cabinet, and he and his surrogates have made a flurry of announcements. The president-elect and his team have spent much of November baiting and trolling their opponents while throwing red meat to the MAGA faithful. (Trump, for example, has appointed Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to a nonexistent “Department of Government Efficiency,” an office whose acronym is a play on a jokey crypto currency.) And though some of Trump’s nominees have been relatively reasonable choices, in recent days Trump has put forward a handful of manifestly unqualified and even dangerous picks, reiterated his grandiose plans for his first days in office, and promised to punish his enemies.

We’ve seen this before. As I warned this past April, stunning his opponents with more outrages than they can handle is a classic Trump tactic:

By overwhelming people with the sheer volume and vulgarity of his antics, Trump and his team are trying to burn out the part of our brains that can discern truth from fiction, right from wrong, good from evil … Trump isn’t worried that all of this will cause voters to have a kind of mental meltdown: He’s counting on it. He needs ordinary citizens to become so mired in moral chaos and so cognitively paralyzed that they are unable to comprehend the disasters that would ensue if he returns to the White House.

Neither the voters nor the members of the U.S. Senate, however, should fall for it this time. Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University has written that the most important way to resist a rising authoritarian regime is not to “obey in advance”—that is, changing our behavior in ways we think might conform to the demands of the new ruling group. That’s good advice, but I might add a corollary here: People should not panic and exhaust themselves in advance, either.

In practice, this means setting priorities—mine are the preservation of democracy and national security—and conserving mental energy and political effort to concentrate on those issues and Trump’s plans for them. It’s important to bear in mind as well that Trump will not take the oath of office for another two months. (Such oaths do not matter to him, but he cannot grab the machinery of government without it.) If citizens and their representatives react to every moment of trollery over the coming weeks, they will be exhausted by Inauguration Day.

Trump will now dominate the news cycle almost every day with some new smoke bomb that is meant to distract from his attempts to stock the government with a strange conglomeration of nihilistic opportunists and self-styled revolutionaries. He will propose plans that he has no real hope of accomplishing quickly, while trying to build an aura of inevitability and omnipotence around himself. (His vow to begin mass deportations on his first day, for example, is a logistical impossibility, unless by mass he means “slightly more than usual.” He may be able to set in motion some sort of planning on day one, but he has no way to execute a large-scale operation yet, and it will be some time before he has anywhere to put so many people marked for deportation.)

The attempt to build Trump into some kind of unstoppable political kaiju is nonsense, as the hapless Matt Gaetz just found out. For all of Trump’s bullying and bluster, Gaetz’s nomination bid was over in a matter of days. Two of Trump’s other nominations—Pete Hegseth for defense secretary and Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence—might be in similar trouble as various Republicans begin to show doubts about them.

Senator James Risch, for example, a hard-right conservative from deep-red Idaho and the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, declined over the weekend to offer the kind of ritualistic support for Hegseth and Gabbard that Trump expects from the GOP. “Ask me this question again after the hearings,” Risch said on Saturday. “These appointments by the president are constrained by the advice and consent of the Senate. The Senate takes that seriously, and we vet these.”

What Risch seems to be saying—at least I hope, anyway—is that it’s all fun and games until national security is involved, and then people have to get serious about what’s at stake. The Senate isn’t a Trump rally, and the Defense Department isn’t a backdrop for a segment on Fox & Friends.

Similar thinking may have led to Scott Bessent as Trump’s nominee to run the Treasury. Bessent would have been an ordinary pick in any other administration, but in Trump World, it’s noteworthy that a standard-issue hedge-fund leader—and a man who once worked for George Soros, of all people—just edged out the more radical Trump loyalist Howard Lutnick, who has been relegated to Commerce, a far less powerful department. Culture warring, it seems, matters less to some of Team Trump when real money is involved.

None of this is a case for complacency. Hegseth and Gabbard could still end up winning confirmation. The anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could take over at the Department of Health and Human Services. Meanwhile, reports have also emerged that Trump may move Kash Patel—the very embodiment of the mercenary loyalist who will execute any and every Trump order—into a senior job at the FBI or the Department of Justice, a move that would raise urgent questions about American civil liberties.

But Trump cannot simply will things into existence. Yes, “the people have spoken,” but it was a narrow win, and Trump again seems to have fallen short of gaining 50 percent of the popular vote. Just as Democrats have had to learn that running up big margins in California does not win the presidency, Republicans are finding yet again that electoral votes are not the same thing as a popular mandate. The Senate Republican conference is rife with cowards, but only a small handful of principled GOP senators are needed to stop some of Trump’s worst nominees.

The other reality is that Trump has already accomplished the one thing he really cared about: staying out of jail. Today, Special Counsel Jack Smith moved to dismiss the January 6–related case against him. So be it; if enough voters have decided they can live with a convicted felon in the White House, there’s nothing the rest of us can do about that.

But Trump returning to office does not mean he can rule by fiat. If his opponents react to every piece of bait he throws in front of them, they will lose their bearings. And even some of Trump’s voters—at least those outside the MAGA personality cult—might not have expected this kind of irresponsible trolling. If these Republican voters want to hold Trump accountable for the promises he made to them during the campaign, they’ll have to keep their heads rather than get caught up in Trump’s daily dramas.

Allow me to add one piece of personal advice for the upcoming holiday: None of the things Trump is trying to do will happen before the end of the week. So for Thanksgiving, give yourself a break. Remember the great privilege and blessing it is to be an American, and have faith in the American Constitution and the freedoms safeguarded within it. If your Uncle Ned shows up and still wants to argue about how the election was stolen from Trump four years ago, my advice is the same as it’s been for every holiday: Tell him he’s wrong, that you love him anyway, that you’re not having this conversation today, and to pass the potatoes.

Related:

Pam Bondi’s comeback Another theory of the Trump movement

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Revenge of the COVID contrarians The end of the quest for justice for January 6 Caitlin Flanagan on the Democrats’ billionaire mistake

Today’s News

Special Counsel Jack Smith filed motions to drop the federal election-subversion and classified-documents cases against Trump, citing a Justice Department rule against prosecuting sitting presidents. A California judge delayed the resentencing date for Lyle and Erik Menendez, the brothers imprisoned for killing their parents in 1989, to give the new Los Angeles County district attorney more time to review the case. The Israeli cabinet will vote tomorrow on a proposed cease-fire deal with Hezbollah, which is expected to pass, according to a spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli ambassador to the U.S. said on Israeli Army Radio that an agreement could be reached “within days” but that there remain “points to finalize.”

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Climate negotiations at COP29 ended in a $300 billion deal that mostly showed how far the world is from facing climate change’s real dangers, Zoë Schlanger argues. The Wonder Reader: One of the most humbling parts of being alive is realizing that you might need to reconsider some long-held habits, Isabel Fattal writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Everyone Agrees Americans Aren’t Healthy

By Nicholas Florko

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is wrong about a lot of things in public health. Vaccines don’t cause autism. Raw milk is more dangerous than pasteurized milk. And cellphones haven’t been shown to cause brain cancer. But the basic idea behind his effort to “Make America Healthy Again” is correct: America is not healthy, and our current system has not fixed the problem.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

“Dear Therapist”: No one wants to host my in-laws for the holidays. The right has a Bluesky problem. The leak scandal roiling Israel What the broligarchs want from Trump

Culture Break

Everett

Watch. Every generation has an Oz story, but Wicked is the retelling that best captures what makes L. Frank Baum’s world sing, Allegra Rosenberg writes.

Try out. Group fitness classes aren’t just about exercise—they’re also a ridiculous, perfect way to make friends, Mikala Jamison writes.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I often tell people to unplug from the news. (Hey, I get paid to have opinions about national events, and yet I make sure to stop watching the news now and then too.) If you’d like a break that will not only get you off the doom treadmill but refresh and recharge you, allow me to suggest binge-watching the new Ted Danson series on Netflix, A Man on the Inside. It’s charming and funny, and it might bring a tear to your eye in between some laughs.

Danson plays a recently widowed retired professor who takes a job with a private investigator as the “inside man” at a senior-citizen residence in San Francisco. (As someone who watched the debut of Cheers 42 years ago, I feel like I’ve been growing old along with Danson through his many shows, and this might be his best role.) He’s tracking down a theft, but the crime isn’t all that interesting, nor is it really the point of the show: Rather, A Man on the Inside is about family, friends, love, and death.

My wife and I sometimes found the show almost too hard to watch, because we have both had parents in assisted living and memory-care settings. But A Man on the Inside never hurts—it has too much compassion (and gentle, well-placed humor) to let aging become caricatured as nothing but tragedy and loss. It is a show for and about families, just when we need something we can all watch over the holidays.

— Tom

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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