For many, the holidays are upon us, a time of connection and reflection with family and friends. While there are plenty of family clichés to accompany the eggnog, I want to draw your attention to an academic concept that may help reframe how you approach your interactions in this season of joy.
The inconsistency-avoidance theory offers a useful lens for understanding why families so often stay locked in the same patterns for years. The human brain is built to defend what it already believes—habits, roles, conclusions, and identities—because changing them requires effort and introduces uncertainty; we avoid the inconsistency. Once a belief forms, even a flimsy one formed early in life, the mind treats it like a stable truth worth protecting. That instinct keeps life efficient, but in families it often keeps people stuck.
You can see this in how childhood roles persist well into adulthood. A sibling once labeled as the responsible one, the creative one, or the difficult one often carries that identity long after it has stopped being accurate. The same happens with the quick interpretations family members create of one another: “He never listens,” “She’s too emotional,” “They don’t respect my point of view.” These assumptions harden, not because they’re right, but because the brain prefers the comfort of consistency over the discomfort of reconsidering old conclusions.
During moments of tension, these ingrained patterns reappear with remarkable force. Even highly capable adults can slip back into childhood scripts—defensiveness, avoidance, over-functioning, retreat—because under stress the brain defaults to what it knows. This is one of the reasons families often say they feel “stuck,” even when everyone genuinely wants change. Updating a family system requires updating personal narratives, and the brain instinctively resists rewriting them.
There are practical ways to loosen this grip. The most powerful first step is simply slowing down the speed of judgment. When family members interrupt that first, rapid interpretation—especially during conflict—they create space for a more accurate understanding. Deliberately seeking disconfirming evidence helps too. Darwin trained himself to look for data that challenged his preferred hypotheses; families can do the same by asking, “What might I be missing about their intention or constraint?”
It also helps to consciously separate past roles from present capacity. Treating one another as evolving adults, rather than characters frozen in an old family story, opens the possibility for healthier interaction.
Change rarely comes from dramatic reinvention. It comes from a series of micro-shifts: small, consistent behavioral adjustments that gradually make the old pattern impossible to maintain. When families name the dynamic without blame - “We’re repeating an old loop, not an old truth” - they transform the tension into a shared problem rather than a personal flaw.
The reward for doing this work is significant. Relationships become more flexible because people no longer assume they already know everything about one another. Once a family stops treating early patterns as destiny, it frees itself to choose a better future.
This holiday season, make a choice, lean into the uncertainty - the inconsistency - and instead of avoiding it, embrace it. Tis the season.
"We don't see things as they are; we see them as we are."
<br/><span class="body-2 opacity-80" style="padding-top:0.75rem">~ Anaïs Nin</span>
"Peace begins when we learn to look at each other with the curiosity we reserve for strangers."
<br/><span class="body-2 opacity-80" style="padding-top:0.75rem">~ Thomas Merton</span>
