By Annie Wright, LMFT · Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist (#95719)Clinically reviewed May 2026Navigating Holidays with Family Trauma: A Therapist’s Complete Guide
Clinically Reviewed: April 2026 · Last Updated: April 2026
Holiday family trauma describes the reactivation of relational trauma symptoms triggered by family gatherings, cultural rituals, and seasonal obligations. For adults with histories of childhood emotional neglect, enmeshment, or abuse, holidays compress unresolved attachment wounds into concentrated, unavoidable exposure. This guide covers the neuroscience of holiday triggers, the distinction between nostalgia and grief, boundary-setting strategies, evidence-based treatment approaches, and systemic factors that pressure women to maintain family harmony at their own expense.
Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT
- What Is Holiday Family Trauma?
- Holiday Nostalgia vs. Holiday Grief
- The Neuroscience of Holiday Triggers
- How Holiday Trauma Shows Up in Driven Women
- Boundaries and the Family System
- Both/And: Loving Your Family and Protecting Yourself
- The Systemic Lens: Why Women Carry the Emotional Labor of Holidays
- Evidence-Based Treatment for Holiday-Related Trauma
- The Path Forward
- Frequently Asked Questions
What Is Holiday Family Trauma?
Holiday family trauma isn’t about disliking the holidays. It’s the reactivation of relational trauma. The emotional neglect, enmeshment, criticism, or abuse experienced in one’s family of origin. Triggered by the forced proximity, ritualized roles, and cultural expectations embedded in holiday gatherings. For adults with unresolved childhood wounds, holidays function as concentrated exposure to the original relational environment.
Every November, therapists across the country watch their caseloads intensify. It’s not coincidence. Holidays create a unique psychological pressure: they compress unresolved family dynamics into a bounded, culturally mandated container. You’re not just visiting your parents. You’re re-entering a system that shaped your nervous system. Often the same dining room where you learned to scan for danger, the same kitchen where you learned to manage someone else’s mood, the same hallway where you learned that your needs were inconvenient.
What makes holidays particularly activating isn’t the big, dramatic events (though those happen too). It’s the accumulation of small moments. The comment about your weight, the passive-aggressive remark about your career, the sibling dynamic that snaps back into place as if you’re all still fourteen. These aren’t isolated incidents. They’re activations of complex relational trauma patterns that were laid down across years of developmental experience.
The reactivation of relational trauma symptoms. Including hypervigilance, emotional dysregulation, somatic distress, and regressive behavior. Triggered by family gatherings, holiday rituals, and seasonal expectations. Clinical psychologist Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD, author of Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, identifies the core mechanism: holidays place adults back into proximity with the emotional systems they developed adaptive strategies to survive, often before those strategies have been consciously identified or therapeutically addressed.
In plain terms: Holiday family trauma is what happens when you go home for the holidays and your body starts reacting as if you’re a child again. Tense, hyperalert, bracing for the next emotional landmine. Even though you’re a grown adult with your own life. Your nervous system doesn’t know it’s 2026. It thinks it’s 1998.
For driven women, this dynamic carries an additional layer. You’ve spent years. Possibly decades. Building a life that proves you’re nothing like how your family made you feel. You’re competent, successful, independent. And then you walk through the front door on Thanksgiving and within twenty minutes you’re the person who can’t say no to seconds, can’t set a boundary with your mother, can’t stop trying to mediate your parents’ tension. The gap between who you are in the world and who you become in your family’s presence can feel disorienting, even shameful.
Understanding that this isn’t weakness. It’s neurobiology. Is the first step. The patterns you revert to aren’t character flaws. They’re attachment-level adaptations that were literally wired into your nervous system during the developmental period when your brain was most plastic. The holidays just happen to be the annual stress test that reveals whether those patterns have been addressed or merely outgrown geographically.
Holiday Nostalgia vs. Holiday Grief
Nostalgia is the warm ache of remembering something good that’s past. Holiday grief is the ache of mourning something you never had. The safe, connected family experience the culture tells you everyone else is having. These two experiences look similar on the surface but operate through entirely different neurological and psychological mechanisms, and confusing them can keep you stuck for years.
One of the most painful aspects of holiday family trauma isn’t what happened. It’s the collision between what you experienced and what the culture insists the holidays should be. Every advertisement, every movie, every social media post of matching pajamas and mulled cider reinforces the narrative that the holidays are warm, safe, and joyful. If yours aren’t. If yours never were. You’re left carrying not just the original wound but the shame of not matching the cultural script.
| Feature | Holiday Nostalgia | Holiday Grief |
|---|---|---|
| Core experience | Remembering something good that existed | Mourning something that never existed |
| Emotional quality | Bittersweet warmth; sadness and gratitude coexist | Disenfranchised grief; often experienced as shame, anger, or emptiness |
| Trigger | Specific sensory memories. A song, a scent, a tradition | Cultural depictions of “normal” family holidays; others’ celebrations |
| Nervous system response | Gentle activation; contained within window of tolerance | Dysregulated activation; often outside window of tolerance |
| Relationship to the family of origin | Connected to real positive experiences | Connected to idealized fantasies of what the family could have been |
| Resolution pathway | Honoring the memory; creating new traditions | Grief work; mourning the family you deserved but didn’t get |
| Cultural validation | Socially sanctioned. People understand missing good memories | Largely invisible. Grieving a living family is culturally illegible |
A term introduced by bereavement researcher Kenneth J. Doka, PhD, professor of counseling at the Graduate School of The College of New Rochelle, describing grief that is not socially recognized, publicly acknowledged, or openly mourned. In the context of family trauma, disenfranchised grief describes the experience of mourning the safe, attuned family you never had. A loss that is invisible to others because the people you’re grieving are still alive. Doka’s framework explains why this grief often manifests as shame, depression, or anger rather than recognizable mourning.
In plain terms: You can grieve people who are still alive. You can grieve the parent you needed but never had, the childhood that should have been safe but wasn’t. This grief doesn’t have a funeral. Nobody sends flowers. Nobody says “I’m sorry for your loss.” But the loss is real, and the holidays are when it hurts the most. Because everyone around you seems to have exactly the thing you’re mourning.
The distinction matters clinically because the treatment is different. Nostalgia can be honored. It doesn’t need therapy, it needs space. Holiday grief, however, often needs structured therapeutic attention: grief work, inner child work, and sometimes the courageous decision to stop attending events that re-wound you in the name of family obligation. Understanding which one you’re carrying changes everything about how you navigate November through January.
The Neuroscience of Holiday Triggers
Holiday triggers aren’t psychological weakness. They’re the predictable result of how the brain encodes and retrieves emotional memory. Sensory cues (specific foods, music, the smell of a particular house) are processed by the amygdala before the prefrontal cortex has a chance to contextualize them, which is why your body reacts to your mother’s kitchen before your mind has decided how to feel.
The neuroscience of holiday triggers begins with understanding state-dependent memory. Your brain doesn’t store memories as neat, verbal narratives. It stores them as multisensory networks: the sight, sound, smell, taste, and physical sensation of the original experience, bundled with the emotional charge and the beliefs that formed in response. Neuroscientist and psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, MD, author of The Body Keeps the Score and professor of psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine, has demonstrated through neuroimaging that traumatic memories are stored differently from ordinary memories. With heightened sensory encoding and reduced integration with the narrative, language-based brain regions.
Holidays are particularly potent triggers because they are saturated with sensory cues. The smell of a specific dish. The particular quality of light in a childhood home. A relative’s laugh. A song playing on the radio. Each of these cues can activate the original memory network. Not as a conscious recollection, but as a physiological reactivation. Your amygdala responds to the cue before your prefrontal cortex has a chance to evaluate it. This is why you can walk into your parents’ house genuinely intending to stay calm and find yourself activated within minutes. Your thinking brain has a plan. Your survival brain has a memory.
A phenomenon in which information encoded in a particular emotional, physiological, or environmental state is more easily retrieved when that state is re-entered. Research by psychologist Gordon H. Bower, PhD, professor of psychology at Stanford University, demonstrated that emotional states function as retrieval cues. Meaning that returning to the environment and emotional conditions associated with a memory significantly increases its accessibility and felt intensity. In the context of holiday trauma, returning to the family home recreates the state conditions under which childhood trauma was encoded.
In plain terms: When you walk back into your childhood home, your brain doesn’t just remember what happened there. It starts to feel like it’s happening again. The environment itself acts as a key that unlocks the original emotional experience. That’s why you can be a composed, competent adult in every other setting and feel like a terrified child within an hour of arriving at your parents’ house.
Stephen Porges, PhD, Distinguished University Scientist at the Kinsey Institute, Indiana University, and developer of Polyvagal Theory, has shown that the autonomic nervous system is constantly scanning the environment for cues of safety and danger. A process he terms “neuroception.” In families where relational trauma occurred, the cues associated with the family environment are mapped as danger signals in the nervous system, regardless of whether the current visit is objectively dangerous. Your vagal system detects the familiar vocal tones, spatial arrangements, and interpersonal dynamics and responds accordingly: by mobilizing you for fight or flight, or by sending you into a freeze or shutdown response that looks, from the outside, like you’ve just “gone quiet” at the dinner table.
This is why the advice to “just don’t let them get to you” is neurologically naive. Triggers aren’t a choice. They’re a feature of how your brain encoded survival information during the developmental period when you were most vulnerable. The solution isn’t willpower. It’s therapeutic work. EMDR, somatic therapy, nervous system regulation. That addresses the stored memories and updates the nervous system’s predictions about what these environments mean.
FREE QUIZ
Do you come from a relational trauma background?
Most driven women don’t realize how much of their adult life. The overwork, the people-pleasing, the chronic sense of not-enough. Traces back to early relational patterns. This 5-minute quiz helps you find out.
How Holiday Trauma Shows Up in Driven Women
There’s a particular version of holiday dread that arrives in driven, ambitious women. And it doesn’t look like what most people expect. She’s not curled up on the couch unable to function. She’s planning. Over-planning. Strategizing. Building contingency plans for a four-day visit to her parents’ house with the same intensity she brings to a product launch or a courtroom.
The driven woman’s holiday trauma often wears the disguise of competence. She manages the family gathering the way she manages her team: anticipating conflict, smoothing tension, tracking everyone’s emotional temperature in real time. She’s the one who cooks, who mediates, who redirects the conversation when Dad starts drinking too much, who holds her mother’s feelings while nobody holds hers. She’s brilliant at it. And she’s exhausted by it. And she’s been doing some version of this since she was seven years old.
Carmen is 38, a product director at a Fortune 500 company, and every year she dreads Thanksgiving more than any quarterly review. On paper, her family holidays are “fine.” Nobody throws things. Nobody screams. But her mother’s comments about her weight have a surgical precision that Carmen can still feel three weeks later. Her father’s emotional absence. The way he disappears into the television while her mother orchestrates everything. Mirrors a dynamic she now recognizes in her own marriage. The worst part, Carmen says, isn’t the visit itself. It’s the two weeks beforehand, when her anxiety ramps up so gradually she doesn’t notice until she’s snapping at her partner and sleeping four hours a night. And the week afterward, when she can’t stop replaying every interaction, searching for what she should have said differently.
What Carmen describes is a textbook trauma response cycle. Anticipatory anxiety, hypervigilance during the event, and rumination afterward. The fact that she can identify it doesn’t mean she can stop it. This is the gap that makes driven women particularly frustrated: they understand the pattern intellectually but can’t seem to override it. That’s because the pattern isn’t operating at the level of cognition. It’s operating at the level of the nervous system, where the window of tolerance was shaped during childhood.
“Children who are not getting their needs met will adapt to whatever environment they’re in. They become hypervigilant, they become caretakers, they become invisible. Whatever the family system requires. And those adaptations don’t just vanish when they grow up and leave home. They go underground, and they resurface whenever the original conditions are recreated.”
Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD, Clinical Psychologist, Author of Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents
Common presentations of holiday trauma in driven women include:
- Over-functioning as a survival strategy. Taking on the emotional and logistical labor of the entire gathering because letting anyone else do it means risking the chaos she’s spent her life trying to prevent.
- Emotional regression. Reverting to childhood roles. The peacemaker, the invisible one, the performer. Despite decades of personal growth.
- Somatic symptoms. Migraines, stomach pain, insomnia, jaw clenching, and muscle tension that begin days before the gathering and persist afterward.
- Post-holiday collapse. Needing days or weeks to recover. Not just from travel fatigue, but from the nervous system depletion of sustained hypervigilance.
- Guilt-driven attendance. Going to gatherings she doesn’t want to attend because the guilt of not going feels more unbearable than the pain of going.
Boundaries and the Family System
Boundaries during the holidays are one of the most searched topics in therapy-adjacent content. And one of the most poorly understood. The internet is full of advice about “setting healthy boundaries” as though it’s as simple as making a declaration. In families with relational trauma, boundaries aren’t a communication skill. They’re a confrontation with the family system itself.
In families with relational trauma, boundaries don’t just create personal space. They disrupt the homeostasis of the family system. Family systems theorist Murray Bowen, MD, demonstrated that when one member differentiates (acts on their own values rather than the system’s rules), the system will mobilize to pull them back. This is why setting a boundary often makes things temporarily worse before they get better.
Driven women often struggle with boundaries during the holidays not because they lack assertiveness. They set boundaries at work every day. But because the family system operates on fundamentally different rules than the professional world. At work, boundaries are respected (or at least professionally managed) because the consequences of violating them are clear. In the family of origin, boundary-setting often triggers guilt, punishment, withdrawal, or what clinicians call “boundary testing”. The family’s attempt to return the system to its familiar configuration.
What makes holiday boundary-setting particularly complex for women with relational trauma is that the boundaries they most need to set. “I won’t stay overnight,” “I’m leaving if you comment on my body,” “We’re doing Christmas on our own this year”. Are precisely the ones that activate the deepest attachment fears. The child part of you that learned love was conditional on compliance doesn’t disappear when you write a firm text message. She’s terrified. And she has reason to be: in the original family environment, setting boundaries was dangerous.
This is why boundary work in therapy isn’t about scripting the perfect response. It’s about addressing the relational patterns that make boundaries feel life-threatening, processing the grief of accepting your family may not be able to meet you where you need them, and building the internal resources to tolerate the discomfort that comes when the system pushes back.
FREE QUIZ
Do you come from a relational trauma background?
Most driven women don’t realize how much of their adult life. The overwork, the people-pleasing, the chronic sense of not-enough. Traces back to early relational patterns. This 5-minute quiz helps you find out.
Both/And: Loving Your Family and Protecting Yourself
One of the most important shifts in healing holiday family trauma is moving from an either/or framework to a both/and framework. The either/or version sounds like: “Either I go home and suffer, or I cut my family off entirely.” “Either I’m a good daughter, or I’m a selfish person.” “Either the holidays are wonderful, or they’re ruined.” These aren’t choices. They’re trauma-generated binaries. And they keep you trapped.
Simone is 42, a physician who runs a busy practice and sits on two hospital boards. She hasn’t missed a family Christmas in her adult life. Not because she enjoys them, but because the guilt of her mother’s disappointment has always been more unbearable than the four days of emotional exhaustion. This year, Simone’s therapist asked a question that changed something: “What if you could love your family and also not go?” Simone sat with that for three full minutes. She’d genuinely never considered that both things could be true at the same time. She’d been operating, for decades, inside a system where love and sacrifice were fused. Where the only way to prove you cared was to absorb whatever pain the caring cost you.
The both/and of holiday family trauma looks like this:
- You can love your parents and acknowledge they weren’t safe caregivers.
- You can grieve the family you wished you had and accept the family you actually got.
- You can attend a holiday gathering and leave early when you need to.
- You can say “I’m not coming this year” and still be a good person.
- You can feel sad about missing the holidays and also feel relief.
“Loyalty to your family of origin is not the same as loyalty to the patterns that harmed you. You can honor where you came from without returning to a place that wounds you.”
Terrence Real, MSW LCSW, Family Therapist and Author of I Don’t Want to Talk About It
This framework isn’t about cutting people off (though for some, family estrangement is the healthiest choice. And that deserves its own conversation). It’s about recognizing that healing doesn’t require you to either stay enmeshed in a painful system or reject it entirely. There’s a middle path, and it requires the kind of emotional maturity your family of origin may never have modeled for you. Which is precisely why this is therapeutic work, not just a mindset shift.
The Systemic Lens: Why Women Carry the Emotional Labor of Holidays
There’s a reason it’s usually women sitting in therapy in November, processing their dread about the holidays. It’s not because women are more emotionally fragile. It’s because the cultural and familial systems have assigned women. Disproportionately, structurally, and often invisibly. The role of emotional manager during the holidays.
The research is clear: women perform the vast majority of “kin-keeping” labor. Maintaining family relationships, organizing gatherings, remembering preferences, navigating interpersonal dynamics, and managing the emotional temperature of the room. Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, PhD, professor emerita of sociology at UC Berkeley and author of The Managed Heart, coined the term “emotional labor” to describe the management of one’s own and others’ feelings as a form of work. Work that is expected, unpaid, and culturally invisible.
For driven women from families with relational trauma, this systemic expectation lands on top of a personal history that already trained them to monitor, manage, and maintain other people’s emotional states. The culture says: women should make the holidays beautiful. The family system says: you’re responsible for keeping the peace. The trauma history says: if you don’t manage everyone’s feelings, something terrible will happen. These three pressures align so perfectly that they become invisible. She doesn’t recognize the weight because she’s been carrying it since before she could name it.
The relational and logistical work of maintaining family connections. Organizing gatherings, managing gift-giving, remembering important dates, mediating conflicts, and sustaining communication across family members. Research by sociologist Carolyn J. Rosenthal, PhD, at McMaster University demonstrated that kin-keeping labor falls disproportionately on women, is culturally expected rather than chosen, and increases during holidays and life transitions. This labor is largely invisible when performed and noticed primarily when absent.
In plain terms: Someone in every family remembers that Uncle David doesn’t eat gluten, knows not to seat your sister next to your aunt, and makes sure everyone gets a card on their birthday. That someone is almost always a woman. And during the holidays, this invisible labor intensifies dramatically. Planning meals, managing logistics, mediating decades-old tensions. While everyone else shows up and enjoys the result.
The systemic piece matters for treatment because it means that a woman’s holiday distress isn’t just about her individual psychology. It’s about the convergence of personal trauma, family system dynamics, and cultural expectations. Addressing only the individual level (coping skills, boundary scripts) without addressing the systemic level (the unjust distribution of emotional labor, the cultural weaponization of women’s guilt) produces incomplete healing. This is why over-functioning patterns don’t resolve through willpower alone. They’re held in place by systems larger than any one person.
Evidence-Based Treatment for Holiday-Related Trauma
Holiday family trauma doesn’t require a separate diagnosis. It’s the seasonal expression of relational wounds that are present year-round. Effective treatment addresses the root: the attachment injuries, the complex trauma patterns, and the nervous system adaptations that were formed in the family of origin and reactivated by holiday proximity.
EMDR Therapy
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is one of the most effective treatments for the kind of stored, sensory-rich memories that holidays activate. Because holiday triggers are often sensory. A smell, a voice, a room. EMDR’s ability to target and reprocess these specific memory networks makes it particularly well-suited. After EMDR, the memory of the critical comment your mother made when you were twelve may still exist, but it loses its emotional charge. Your body stops reacting as though it’s happening now.
IFS Therapy (Internal Family Systems)
Internal Family Systems therapy is especially valuable for holiday family trauma because it provides a framework for understanding the competing internal voices that holidays activate. The part that wants to go home, the part that’s terrified, the part that feels guilty, the part that’s furious. IFS doesn’t ask you to silence any of these parts. It helps you understand them, hear what they’re protecting you from, and lead from a centered, compassionate place.
Somatic Therapy
Somatic therapy addresses what the body holds. The tension in the jaw, the stomach knots, the shallow breathing that begin days before a family visit. Because holiday trauma is so sensory, working with the body directly is often more effective than cognitive approaches alone. Somatic experiencing, developed by Peter Levine, PhD, helps complete the fight-flight-freeze responses that were interrupted during the original traumatic experiences.
Nervous System Regulation
Nervous system regulation work provides practical tools for staying within your window of tolerance during family gatherings. Not as a replacement for deeper trauma work, but as a complement. Polyvagal-informed strategies help you recognize when your nervous system is shifting from regulated to dysregulated and give you options for returning to safety without leaving the room.
The Path Forward
Healing holiday family trauma doesn’t mean the holidays suddenly become joyful. It means they stop having the power to undo you. It means you can make conscious choices. To go, to stay, to leave early, to skip entirely. Based on your actual needs rather than the guilt, obligation, and fear that have been driving the decision for years.
It means the gap between who you are in the world and who you become in your family’s presence gets smaller. Not because you’ve perfected your performance, but because you’ve done the work to stay in your adult self. Your regulated, resourced, compassionate self. Even when the environment is pulling you backward.
This is deep work. It often involves mourning the family you wished you had, accepting the one you actually have, and making choices that honor your own wellbeing even when the system pushes back. It may involve difficult conversations about estrangement. It will almost certainly involve grief. And it will, eventually, involve building holiday traditions that feel like yours. Not inherited obligations, but chosen rituals that reflect the life you’ve built and the person you’ve become.
If this guide resonated. If you recognized your own experience in these pages. That recognition is itself a form of progress. You’re seeing the pattern. And that’s where the work begins. If you’re ready to explore what this work might look like with professional support, therapy with Annie focuses specifically on helping driven women heal the relational wounds that conventional success hasn’t been able to reach. You can also reach out to start a conversation about whether this work is right for you.
Q: Is it normal to dread the holidays even when my family isn’t abusive?
A: Absolutely. Holiday dread doesn’t require abuse. Emotional neglect, enmeshment, chronic criticism, unpredictable moods, parentification, and conditional love all create nervous system responses that holidays reactivate. The fact that your family “wasn’t that bad” by dramatic standards doesn’t mean your body’s response isn’t real. Relational trauma accumulates through patterns, not just events. And holidays recreate those patterns with remarkable precision.
Q: How do I set boundaries with my family during the holidays without causing a blow-up?
A: The honest answer: you may not be able to. In families with entrenched relational dynamics, any boundary disrupts the system’s homeostasis, and the system will often respond with guilt-tripping, anger, or withdrawal. The goal isn’t a conflict-free boundary. It’s a boundary you can hold regardless of the system’s response. Therapeutic preparation makes a significant difference: working with a therapist to identify your limits, process the guilt in advance, and develop a plan for what you’ll do when (not if) the boundary is tested.
Q: Is it okay to skip the holidays entirely?
A: Yes. Full stop. Skipping a family holiday isn’t abandonment, selfishness, or failure. It’s a valid choice. And for some people, it’s the healthiest one available. The guilt you feel about not going is often the internalized voice of the family system, not your own values. If attending a gathering consistently leaves you dysregulated, depleted, or emotionally harmed, choosing not to attend is an act of self-preservation, not cruelty.
Q: Why do I regress to childhood behavior around my family of origin?
A: This is state-dependent memory in action. When you re-enter the environment where your early relational patterns were encoded. Same house, same people, same dynamics. Your nervous system retrieves the emotional state associated with that environment. You’re not choosing to act like a child. Your brain is activating the neural pathways that were formed in that specific context. This is a neurological process, not a character weakness, and it responds well to therapeutic intervention. Particularly EMDR and somatic approaches.
Q: How do I handle the guilt of choosing not to participate in family traditions?
A: Guilt in this context is usually a signal of the attachment system, not a moral compass. If you grew up in a family where compliance was rewarded and autonomy was punished, guilt will show up whenever you prioritize your own needs. Even when those needs are completely reasonable. Therapeutic work helps you distinguish between guilt that signals a genuine values violation and guilt that’s a conditioned response to the family system’s expectations. The former deserves attention. The latter deserves compassion and, ultimately, release.
Q: Can therapy actually help with something that only happens a few times a year?
A: Holiday distress is the visible peak of patterns that are running year-round. The hypervigilance, people-pleasing, over-functioning, and difficulty with boundaries that intensify during the holidays are the same patterns that shape your relationships, your work, and your sense of self every day. Therapy doesn’t just help you “get through” the holidays. It addresses the foundational relational trauma that the holidays expose. Most clients find that as the underlying patterns heal, the holidays naturally become more manageable.
Q: My partner doesn’t understand why the holidays are so hard for me. How do I explain it?
A: Partners who grew up in relatively healthy families often genuinely can’t comprehend why a holiday gathering would be distressing. It’s not a failure of empathy. It’s a gap in experience. Framing it in neurological terms can help: “My body has a stress response to my family’s environment because of what I experienced growing up. It’s not something I can think my way out of.” If your partner is open to it, couples therapy can be a powerful space for building this understanding together.
Q: How do I create new holiday traditions that actually feel good?
A: Start by identifying what you actually want. Not what you think you should want, not what Instagram says the holidays should look like, but what genuinely brings you comfort and connection. This can take time, especially if you’ve spent years performing someone else’s version of the holidays. Many clients find that the traditions that feel most nourishing are small, quiet, and completely their own: a specific meal with chosen family, a solo walk, a ritual of rest. Permission to make the holidays yours. Rather than a replica of what you grew up with or a reaction against it. Is itself a form of healing.
References
Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)
- van der Kolk BA, Wang JB, Yehuda R, Bedrosian L, Coker AR, Harrison C, et al. Effects of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD on self-experience. PLoS One. 2024;19(1):e0295926. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0295926. PMID: 38198456.
- Payne P, Levine PA, Crane-Godreau MA. Somatic experiencing: using interoception and proprioception as core elements of trauma therapy. Front Psychol. 2015;6:93. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00093. PMID: 25699005.
- Porges SW. Polyvagal Theory: Current Status, Clinical Applications, and Future Directions. Clin Neuropsychiatry. 2025;22(3):169-184. doi:10.36131/cnfioritieditore20250301. PMID: 40735382.
WAYS TO WORK WITH ANNIE
Individual Therapy
Trauma-informed therapy for driven women healing relational trauma. Licensed in 11 jurisdictions.
Executive Coaching
Trauma-informed coaching for ambitious women navigating leadership and burnout.
Fixing the Foundations™
Annie’s signature course for relational trauma recovery. Work at your own pace.
Strong & Stable
The Sunday conversation you wished you’d had years earlier. 20,000+ subscribers.
Annie Wright, LMFT
LMFT #95719 (CA) · LMFT #TPMF356 (FL) · EMDR Certified (EMDRIA) · W.W. Norton Author
Helping ambitious women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #79895) and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 clinical hours. She works with driven, ambitious women. Including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs. In repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT #95719)
15,000+ direct clinical hours
California · Connecticut · Washington DC · Florida · Maine · Maryland · New Hampshire · New Jersey · Texas · Virginia · Washington
Creator of House of Life™ and Fixing the Foundations™
The Everything Years (W.W. Norton)
Founder & former CEO, Evergreen Counseling
Regular contributor to Psychology Today. Expert commentary has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information.
