When Strangers Become Family: What The Holdovers Teaches Us About Love Without DNA

A lonely Christmas at a boarding school shows how the people we never expected can become our truest family.

Sometimes the most profound family bonds aren’t written in our genes; they’re written in shared moments of vulnerability, understanding, and unexpected grace.

There’s a scene in The Holdovers where three people who barely knew each other a week earlier are sitting around a Christmas table, laughing over stories and bad jokes. Paul Hunham, the curmudgeonly classics teacher. Angus Tully, the angry teenager abandoned at school. Mary Lamb, the grieving cafeteria manager who lost her son in Vietnam.

On paper, they have nothing in common. In reality, they’ve become something beautiful: a family.

In a year when loneliness has been declared a public health crisis, this quiet little Christmas table feels almost radical. It offers something medicine alone can’t: proof that belonging can still be built in real time, between imperfect people who choose each other.

The Family We Choose vs. The Family We’re Given

Women know the weight of family expectations. They are often the ones keeping traditions alive, smoothing over conflicts, remembering birthdays, and quietly managing everyone’s emotional temperature. That emotional labor — invisible, constant, often taken for granted — is one of the most overlooked drivers of stress and burnout we see in clinical work.

But what happens when the family we were born into is distant, complicated, or simply unable to show up? What happens when the people who feel safest are the ones we weren’t raised with at all?

The Holdovers widens the frame. Paul, Angus, and Mary don’t seek each other out. They’re thrown together by circumstance and then held together by a series of small, voluntary acts: Paul choosing compassion over punishment, Mary choosing inclusion over isolation, Angus choosing loyalty over self-protection.

Clinically, these are the building blocks of attachment repair — relationships that prove, again and again, “You are not too much, and I’m not going anywhere.” For many adults, especially those with chaotic or neglectful early environments, chosen family is the first time that kind of steadiness lands in the nervous system.

Mary Lamb: Grief, Care, and the Cost of Loving Widely

Mary is the emotional center of the film, and she embodies something we see constantly in women we treat: grief colliding with an almost reflexive drive to keep caring for others.

She has lost her son to war. That kind of loss fits squarely in what we call complicated grief — a slow, disorienting ache that makes ordinary life feel both meaningless and too much. Some people respond by withdrawing. Others, like Mary, respond by expanding: pouring maternal energy into anyone who seems adrift.

Her impulse is deeply human and clearly healing for Angus. But from a psychiatric standpoint, we also see the risk. Many women who “love widely” end up caring without being cared for, offering emotional presence to everyone while having no one who consistently holds them.

Over time, that dynamic feeds directly into caregiver burnout: exhaustion, irritability, trouble sleeping, a sense of self being eroded by everyone else’s needs. Mary’s generosity is both beautiful and costly, and the film never fully lets us forget that she is giving from a well that is not being refilled.

Paul Hunham: When Depression Looks Like Detachment

Paul is a familiar figure in clinical practice: the chronically isolated man whose life has gradually narrowed around disappointment, self-protection, and unexamined shame.

Male depression often doesn’t present as “I feel sad.” It shows up as irritability, rigidity, workaholism, sarcasm, or emotional shutdown. Men are frequently rewarded for those defenses and punished socially when they drop them.

Paul hides behind intellect, rules, and contempt. But once he lets Angus and Mary close enough to see the man under the armor, his depression loosens. The film illustrates something research has shown repeatedly: connection is not an extra in depression treatment; it is a core part of recovery. Medication, therapy, and skills help — but being known changes the terrain.

Humans don’t heal isolation by thinking harder. We heal isolation by being seen and believed.

Angus Tully: Abandonment, Anger, and the Question “Will You Stay?”

Angus is a case study in adolescent attachment wounds. He has been left behind by the adults who were supposed to claim him. That abandonment doesn’t just hurt; it reorganizes how he relates to the world.

Teenagers rarely say, “I feel abandoned.” They show it. They test limits. They push people away before those people can leave on their own. They oscillate between defiance and desperation. Underneath it all is a simple, brutal question: “Are you going to leave me like everyone else?”

When Paul and Mary fail him, he spirals. When they come back, we see his nervous system recalibrate. Safety is relearned not through speeches, but through repeated proof that someone you care about leaves, apologizes, and then returns — and stays.

For many young people, those stabilizing figures are not biological parents, but teachers, coaches, neighbors, or mentors who show up again and again.

Women, Emotional Labor, and the Terms of Chosen Family

Women are often the emotional regulators of their families, workplaces, and social circles. They notice subtle shifts in mood. They remember who is struggling. They host, text, soothe, and anticipate. But they may feel they have no room to unravel. 

None of this is pathological. In many ways, it’s a strength. But when that role is automatic and unexamined, it quietly teaches women that their value lies in holding everyone else. Chosen family can become yet another setting where they over-function — expanding to make space for everyone while leaving no space for themselves.

Loving widely is most protective when it is reciprocal and boundaried. It becomes hazardous when every relationship turns into unpaid emotional labor and there is no room for your own fear, grief, or anger.

A Psychiatrist’s Guide: Building Chosen Family Without Losing Yourself

Here’s how to build the kind of chosen family that protects mental health rather than quietly eroding it.

1. Take inventory: Is the support mutual?

   Healthy relationships have multiple reciprocal ties — not a single person doing all the emotional lifting.

   
   

2. Separate instinct from obligation

   If your first impulse is always to rescue or absorb, ask: “Do I truly want to do this?” Generosity should be a choice, not a reflex.

   
   

3. Choose people who can tolerate your emotional range

   Look for people who stay present when you’re disappointed, upset, or afraid — not just when you’re pleasant.

   
   

4. Allow yourself to need others

   Letting someone care for you is not a burden; it’s a corrective experience that shifts long-held beliefs about worth and closeness.

   
   

5. Build small, reliable rituals

   Weekly calls, standing dinners, shared traditions — these are attachment scaffolding. They help the nervous system learn safety through repetition.

When chosen family is mutual, boundaried, and supported by rituals, it becomes a powerful buffer against the loneliness now recognized as a clinical and societal threat.

Building Your Own “Holdovers” Family

The magic of The Holdovers isn’t that three misfits collide. It’s that they recognize — slowly and awkwardly — that something real is forming between them, and they choose to nurture it.

From a psychiatric perspective, that choice matters. We know that:

• chronic loneliness increases the risk of depression, anxiety, and physical illness

• secure, reliable relationships are among the strongest protective factors in mental health

• chosen family often becomes the first experience of emotional safety for adults with painful early lives

If you paused and looked carefully at your own life, who would be at your table if everything fell apart? Who moves toward you, not away, when you’re not at your best?

Those people are not peripheral. They are your core.

The Permission to Love Widely — and Protect Yourself

The Holdovers captures something many people feel but rarely articulate: that their deepest family ties are the ones built through choice, not birth.

For women, especially, the work is to hold onto that truth while also protecting themselves from the slow erosion of constant caregiving. Loving widely is healthiest when it’s mutual — when your needs have a place in the room too.

As psychiatrists, we worry about the health effects of loneliness — but we also see, every day, how people quietly resist it. Each time you build a ritual with a friend, let someone see you unguarded, or choose a relationship that feels safe and reciprocal, you are pushing back against that epidemic in a way no medication can replicate.

Have you found your own “holdovers” family — people who were never meant to be central but somehow became essential? If you feel comfortable, share a small piece of that story with someone you trust. It may be the moment you feel less alone, and it might quietly reassure them that they aren’t alone either.

If you haven’t seen it yet, The Holdovers is streaming now on Peacock.

Authorship

Frederic Kass, MD — Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, Columbia University Medical Center; former Clinical Vice Chair, Department of Psychiatry Profile: Medical News Today