The December That Clarified Everything

Kira, a 33-year-old architect, came to see me for the first time in early January, right after what she described as “the worst Christmas of my adult life.” She’d spent it with her family for the first time in two years, having convinced herself that enough time had passed, that things would be different, that she’d done enough work on herself to navigate it without being undone.

“By the twenty-sixth I was in the bathroom of my childhood home,” she told me, “sitting on the floor with my back against the door, wondering how I had somehow reverted to being seventeen years old in the span of forty-eight hours. Every dynamic that I’d worked on for years in therapy — activated. Just like that. The criticism, the competition between my siblings, my mother’s passive aggression. I’d felt so prepared.”

Kira’s experience is one of the most common things I see in the weeks following the winter holidays: the grief, the regression, the peculiar shock of discovering that the family you’ve worked so hard to metabolize in the safety of a therapist’s office is different from the family you actually encounter at Christmas dinner.

This post is for everyone navigating complicated holiday seasons — whether that means difficult family dynamics, grief and loss, the loneliness of estrangement, the weight of not belonging to the story the holiday tells, or simply the exhaustion of a season that demands more than you currently have to give.

The Neuroscience of Holiday Grief and Longing

When we return to childhood home environments — or enter the family dynamics of our origin — there is a predictable neurological phenomenon: state-dependent memory retrieval. The same environmental cues that were present during early formative experiences (the smell of a particular meal, the quality of light in a certain room, the sound of a parent’s voice at a particular emotional pitch) can cue the associated memories and nervous system states with remarkable speed and completeness.

Dr. Antonio Damasio, PhD, neuroscientist and professor at the University of Southern California, describes this through his theory of somatic markers — emotional and bodily memories that function as rapid, pre-cognitive guidance systems. When the cues match, the somatic markers activate. You don’t have to consciously remember that Christmas dinner at age nine was miserable. Your body remembers.

This is why Kira’s two years of therapeutic work didn’t inoculate her against the family dynamics. The work is real and it matters — and it happens in the nervous system over time, not all at once. The regression she experienced wasn’t a failure of therapy. It was the normal physiological response of a nervous system encountering its original formative environment.

Additionally, the holidays carry a particular form of grief: the grief of the idealized family, the one you see in advertisements and movies and social media, the one that doesn’t map onto your actual experience. Dr. Pauline Boss, PhD, family therapist and professor emerita at the University of Minnesota, describes this as a form of ambiguous loss — grieving something that was never quite present, and that the culture insists should be.

“I felt a Cleaving in my Mind — As if my Brain had split — I tried to match it — Seam by Seam — But could not make them fit.” — Emily Dickinson

Your Permission Slip

This is the permission slip I offer to clients every year in the weeks before December. It’s yours to keep:

You are permitted to feel exactly what you feel. Not the feeling you think you should have. Not the gratitude you’ve been told to perform. Whatever is actually happening in your body and heart right now — that is the real material, and it deserves acknowledgment before anything else.

You are permitted to decline invitations that will harm you. Family gatherings that reliably leave you dysregulated, triggered, and spending weeks in recovery are not obligations. They are options. It is permitted to decline them, limit them, or show up differently in them than you have before.

You are permitted to grieve. If someone is gone — whether through death, estrangement, or the simpler loss of relationships that used to be different — the holidays are likely to surface that grief. You don’t have to push it down to perform the season. The grief is real. It is allowed to be present.

You are permitted to create new traditions. The rituals you inherited are not the only ones available to you. Many of the best holiday traditions in adult life are the ones people build themselves — smaller, quieter, more honest, more aligned with who they actually are and what they actually value.

You are permitted to be in a hard place. The cultural insistence that December is a season of joy doesn’t require you to perform that joy. Feeling lonely, sad, grieving, or simply flat during the holidays is common, legitimate, and not a personal failing.

You are permitted to ask for support. This is not the season to white-knuckle it through in isolation. If the holidays are hard, reaching out — to a therapist, to a trusted friend, to a crisis line if needed — is wisdom, not weakness.

You are permitted to make it through, in whatever way you make it through. That might look different from what you imagined. It might not feel triumphant. Getting through a hard holiday season intact is itself an accomplishment worth acknowledging.

The Both/And of Hard Holidays

The cognitive trap that makes hard holidays particularly painful is the binary it sets up: either the holidays are good (you’re close with family, you feel joy, you have traditions you love) or they’re bad (you’re estranged, grieving, faking it). Either you’re doing the season right or you’re failing it.

The Both/And I want to offer: it’s possible to have genuine moments of beauty and to be genuinely in grief. To feel love for people and to need distance from them. To appreciate some of what the season offers and to find much of it difficult. These are not contradictions — they’re the texture of a complex life, and the holidays tend to bring all of it to the surface at once.

Jordan, a 29-year-old I worked with, chose to spend the holidays alone for the first time one year. She was dreading it, sure it would feel like failure. She texted me on Christmas Eve: “It’s quiet and a little sad and also the most genuinely peaceful holiday I can remember. I didn’t know those two things could coexist.” They can. They often do.

The Systemic Lens: Who the Holidays Were Not Made For

The dominant holiday narrative in Western culture is built on a specific vision of family: nuclear, intact, gathered, happy, and probably quite similar. It is a narrative that does not include estrangement, divorce, death, queerness, non-Christian backgrounds, immigration disruptions, or the simple reality that many families are complicated, painful, or simply not the source of warmth the season promises.

For people whose lives don’t map onto that narrative — and that is a significant portion of any population — the cultural insistence on holiday joy creates what Dr. Brené Brown, PhD, research professor at the University of Houston, identifies as a form of shame: the sense that there is something wrong with you specifically for not experiencing what everyone else seems to be experiencing.

There is nothing wrong with you. The narrative is too narrow. The actual diversity of human family experience is enormous, and the holidays are hard for far more people than the dominant cultural story suggests. You are not alone in your complicated December. You are in very large, very real company.

How to Actually Get Through the Season

Some concrete, evidence-informed strategies for difficult holiday periods:

Set your intention before entering family environments. Before any gathering, ask yourself: what’s my goal here? Not “to have a good time” but something more specific and achievable: to stay regulated. To be present without losing myself. To get through the dinner without a fight. Specific intentions give you something to navigate by when the dynamics activate.

Plan your exits. Know in advance how you’ll leave difficult situations — both logistically (your own car, your own accommodation) and interpersonally (“I need to step outside for a few minutes”). Having an exit strategy doesn’t mean you’ll need to use it. It means you can feel less trapped.

Build in recovery time. Plan for the post-gathering restoration that you’ll need. Clear your calendar for the day after difficult gatherings. Be gentle with yourself during the days following the holiday.

Find your people. Not necessarily blood family. The friends who have become family, the communities that provide genuine belonging, the chosen relationships that hold you well. These deserve intentional cultivation during the holidays, not just in the aftermath.

Maintain your ordinary practices. The routines that support your regulation — movement, sleep, solitude, whatever keeps you tethered — are more important, not less, during high-stress holiday periods. Protect them.

Seek professional support before, not only after. If you know the holidays are reliably difficult, proactive support — scheduling extra sessions with a therapist in November and December, building a support plan with your counselor in advance — is more effective than crisis management in January.

Kira came back to therapy in early February the following year, several weeks after a holiday season she’d navigated very differently. She’d set clear limits on her time at family gatherings. She’d planned her exit. She’d spent Christmas afternoon with a friend instead of white-knuckling through a second family dinner. “It wasn’t perfect,” she said. “But I didn’t lose myself. I got through it as me.”

That’s the measure. Not perfect. Not painless. Getting through as yourself. I hope you do.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Annie Wright, LMFT is a licensed psychotherapist, trauma-informed executive coach, and founder of Evergreen Counseling in Berkeley, CA. She specializes in helping driven women heal relational trauma and navigate difficult family dynamics. Licensed in California and Florida. Learn more about working with Annie.

Annie Wright

LMFT · 15,000+ Clinical Hours · W.W. Norton Author · Psychology Today Columnist

Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist, relational trauma specialist, and the founder and successfully exited CEO of a large California trauma-informed therapy center. A W.W. Norton published author, she writes the weekly Substack Strong & Stable and her work and expert opinions have appeared in NPR, NBC, Forbes, Business Insider, The Boston Globe, and The Information.

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