A Digital Permission Slip If The Holidays Feel Hard For You

By Annie Wright, LMFT · Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist (#95719)Clinically reviewed May 2026

A Digital Permission Slip If The Holidays Feel Hard For You

EMOTIONAL REGULATION & NERVOUS SYSTEM • December 8, 2019

SUMMARY

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

The holidays are presented as universally joyful in ways that can make them particularly painful when your family situation is complicated. Estranged, grieving, difficult, or simply not what you wish it were. This is a digital permission slip: to feel what you actually feel, to opt out of performances that don’t serve you, to survive the season with your dignity and self-knowledge intact. Plus a clinical framework for understanding why the holidays hit so hard, and what actually helps.

Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. The December That Clarified Everything
2. Why the Holidays Amplify What’s Already There
3. The Neuroscience of Holiday Grief and Longing
4. Your Permission Slip
5. Free Guide
6. The Both/And of Hard Holidays
7. The Systemic Lens: Who the Holidays Were Not Made For
8. How to Actually Get Through the Season
9. Frequently Asked Questions
10. References & Related Reading

“You may shoot me with your words, / You may cut me with your eyes, / You may kill me with your hatefulness, / But still, like air, I’ll rise.”

Maya Angelou, poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist

The December That Clarified Everything

Jenny, 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.”

Jenny’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.

UNDERSTANDING

Why the Holidays Are So Activating

The holidays combine several elements that reliably activate relational trauma: condensed time with family systems, cultural scripts that insist on joy, comparison to an idealized image of what family should look like, reduced routine and sleep, increased alcohol consumption, and the particular weight of returning to the physical spaces and interpersonal dynamics of childhood. For people with relational trauma histories, the holidays are not simply stressful. They are a full-system activation of the nervous system patterns formed in those early environments.

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.

DEFINITION ANTICIPATORY GRIEF

Anticipatory grief is the experience of loss-related distress before the actual loss event occurs. Arising from the anticipation of pain, absence, or difficult circumstances, as described by Therese Rando, PhD, clinical psychologist and trauma specialist and author of Grief, Dying, and Death. In the context of holiday seasons, anticipatory grief can begin weeks or months before December. As the cultural build-up intensifies awareness of what is missing or painful.

In plain terms: It’s the heaviness that descends in November. The dread that appears in October when the stores start decorating. The way a song on the radio in early December can undo you before the holiday has even arrived. That’s anticipatory grief. Your nervous system pre-loading the pain so you’re ready for it, even when readiness isn’t possible.

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. (PMID: 8941953)

This is why Jenny’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

RESEARCH EVIDENCE

Peer-reviewed findings that inform this clinical framework:

• 76% of unaccompanied refugee minors screened positive for PTSD symptoms [Sarkadi et al., Eur Child Adolesc Psychiatry](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5893677/) (PMID: 29260422)
• CRIES-8 PTSD score reduced from 29.02 to 25.93 (p=0.017) after TRT intervention [Sarkadi et al., Eur Child Adolesc Psychiatry](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5893677/) (PMID: 29260422)
• CAPS score reduced by 32 points (from 68 to 36, d=1.26, p=0.001) vs waitlist in Somatic Experiencing for PTSD [Brom et al., J Trauma Stress](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5518443/) (PMID: 28585761)
• 44.1% lost PTSD diagnosis after Somatic Experiencing treatment [Brom et al., J Trauma Stress](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5518443/) (PMID: 28585761)
• Hedges' g = 0.53 for mindfulness interventions vs waitlist on PTSD symptoms [Boyd et al., J Psychiatry Neurosci](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5747539/) (PMID: 29252162)

Your Permission Slip

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

DEFINITION DISENFRANCHISED GRIEF

Disenfranchised grief, coined by Kenneth Doka, PhD, grief scholar and professor at the Graduate School of The College of New Rochelle, refers to grief that is not acknowledged, sanctioned, or publicly mourned. Grief for losses that society does not recognize as losses worthy of grieving. Holiday grief. For estranged families, for childhoods that weren’t what the holiday implies they should have been, for absent or deceased loved ones. Is frequently disenfranchised.

In plain terms: No one sends a casserole when the holidays are hard because of a complicated family. There’s no social structure that says: your grief over what Father’s Day or Christmas represents is real and you deserve support. Disenfranchised grief is often the loneliest kind. Because it must be carried without the community containers that help other kinds of grief feel bearable.

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.

What I want to offer here is something different from the standard holiday survival advice. The tips and the gratitude lists and the permission slips that tell you to set limits and then imply you should feel fine once you’ve done so. The truth is more complicated than that, and driven women deserve a more complicated truth.

The holiday season, for women with relational trauma backgrounds, is often a compressed re-experiencing of everything that was missing in their families of origin. And everything that is missing now. The cultural version of the holidays is saturated with images of warmth, belonging, togetherness, generational continuity. If what you’re bringing to this season is a family of origin that was never safe, or the grief of estrangement, or the loneliness of having built a life far from your people, or the particular complexity of navigating the holidays after a significant loss. The gap between the cultural script and your actual experience can be genuinely painful. Not just sad. Painful in the specific way of feeling like you are failing at something that everyone else seems to find natural.

Judith Herman, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher and author of Trauma and Recovery, writes about how trauma survivors are often triggered by events that have symbolic resonance with the original injury. Not necessarily because the current event is traumatic in itself, but because the nervous system recognizes the emotional territory and responds as if the original threat is present. Holidays are that kind of symbolic territory for many women with relational trauma backgrounds. The expectation of warmth and belonging activates the memory of their absence. The pressure to perform family harmony activates the old role. The one that required managing everyone else’s emotions while suppressing your own. The table that should feel like home activates the embodied knowledge that home was never entirely safe.

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Jenny is a forty-three-year-old executive who has spent the last eight years systematically building what she calls her “chosen family”. A group of friends and colleagues who know her fully, with whom she has genuine intimacy and reciprocal care. She is, by her own account, far less lonely than she was when she was still in regular contact with her family of origin. And yet December arrives every year and produces a grief she describes as “irrational.” She has what she needs. She has more than what she had. The grief doesn’t come from current loneliness. It comes from the child who still lives somewhere inside her, who wanted the family that was available and couldn’t have it, and for whom the holidays have always been the season when that wanting was most acute. Both/And: she is genuinely thriving, and she is also still grieving what she couldn’t have. There is nothing irrational about that. It’s the faithful reporting of two simultaneous truths about what it means to build a good life from a painful starting point.

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.

Simone, 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.

If what you’ve read here resonates, I want you to know that individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also explore my self-paced recovery courses or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.

One of the most important things I tell clients in early sessions is this: the patterns we’re going to look at together aren’t character flaws. They’re the residue of strategies that once kept you safe. The over-functioning, the difficulty resting, the way you find yourself absorbing other people’s moods before you’ve registered your own. Every one of these adaptations made sense in the original environment that shaped them. The work isn’t to shame the strategy. It’s to update the system that keeps generating it.

How to Begin Healing: Permission to Take the Holidays at Your Own Pace

In my work with clients during the holiday season, one of the most common things I hear is something like: “I know I should be grateful, but I just feel awful, and I don’t understand why.” That gap between what the season is supposed to feel like and what it actually feels like can be one of the loneliest experiences there is. If the holidays are hard for you. Because of grief, estrangement, family complexity, loss, or simply the weight of expectations that don’t match your reality. I want to be clear: there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re not failing at the holidays. You’re having a human response to a genuinely difficult season.

The path forward for most people who struggle during the holidays isn’t about fixing the feeling. It’s about creating enough support around yourself that the feeling doesn’t have to be managed alone. That might look like being more intentional about who you spend time with. It might mean scaling back participation in rituals that deplete rather than restore you. It might mean being honest. With yourself and with at least one other person. About what this time of year actually brings up for you, rather than performing a version of holiday cheer you don’t feel.

If the holidays are hard because of family relationships, Internal Family Systems (IFS) offers a particularly useful framework. Family systems during the holidays tend to pull us back into old roles. The peacemaker, the scapegoat, the invisible one. IFS helps you recognize when you’ve slipped into a familiar part and gives you the internal resources to choose how to respond rather than simply reacting from old programming. This doesn’t mean you’ll navigate every family gathering perfectly. It means you’ll understand what’s happening inside you as it’s happening, which is already a significant shift.

For those whose holiday difficulty is connected to grief. The absence of someone who should be at the table, or the ongoing grief of estrangement from people who are still alive. Brainspotting can be a gentle and effective support. Grief often lives in the body in very specific ways: a weight in the chest, a hollowness in the stomach. Brainspotting works with these embodied grief locations directly, creating space for the nervous system to process what the mind sometimes can’t fully reach. Sessions in the weeks leading up to or following the holidays can provide meaningful relief.

A practical step that I often suggest to clients who dread a specific gathering: create a containment plan before you go. Name, concretely, how long you’ll stay. Identify one person in the room who is genuinely safe for you. Give yourself explicit permission to step outside, use the bathroom, or take a brief walk as a regulation break. And decide in advance what you’ll say if you’re asked a question you don’t want to answer. Having these micro-plans in place reduces the amount of in-the-moment decision-making your nervous system has to manage.

And if the most honest thing you can say is that you’re dreading the holidays and you don’t really know why, that’s enough to bring into a therapy space. You don’t need a fully articulated problem. You just need to be willing to tell the truth about what’s present for you.

If you’re moving through the holidays carrying something heavy, you don’t have to carry it alone. Therapy with Annie is a space where you can say the true thing, including the things that feel too messy or ungrateful to say out loud anywhere else. Or if you’d like to get a sense of what kind of support might help most right now, the free quiz takes just a few minutes. Whatever this season holds for you, I hope it also holds some gentleness. Especially from yourself.

Jenny, a 38-year-old partner at a consulting firm, described the specific texture of her holiday grief this way: “I’m fine at work. I’m fine with friends. And then I walk into a grocery store and there’s a display of gingerbread houses and I have to leave.” The gingerbread houses weren’t the trigger in any meaningful sense. They were the surface that a deeper current ran under. The holiday imagery activated a whole-body memory: of what it felt like to be a child in a home that didn’t feel safe, where the holidays meant more tension, more unpredictability, more of what was already too much. Her adult nervous system, encountering the familiar cultural cues, remembered.

That remembering is involuntary. It is not weakness, and it is not a failure to “be over it.” It is the body and nervous system doing what they were designed to do: anticipate based on pattern. The work is not to stop the triggering. That’s not realistic. But to build enough capacity to notice what’s happening and respond with care rather than shame. That capacity grows in therapy, in supportive community, and in practices that teach the nervous system a wider range of responses. You can explore holiday-specific grief work through individual therapy, and the Strong & Stable newsletter offers community and reflection for exactly these difficult seasonal transitions.

Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher and author of The Body Keeps the Score, has written extensively about how relational trauma changes the way the brain processes threat, attention, and self-perception. The amygdala becomes hypervigilant. The medial prefrontal cortex. The part of the brain that helps you contextualize what you’re feeling. Goes quiet. The default mode network, where the felt sense of self lives, becomes muted. None of this is metaphor. It’s measurable, and it’s reversible. The therapies that actually move the needle for driven women. Somatic work, EMDR, IFS, attachment-based relational therapy. Are all therapies that engage the body and the implicit memory systems where this material is stored.

Jenny 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.

What I see consistently in my work with driven, ambitious women is that the body holds the truth long before the mind catches up. By the time a client lands in my office describing what isn’t working, her nervous system has been signaling for months. Sometimes years. The tightness in her jaw at 3 a.m., the way her shoulders climb toward her ears during certain conversations, the unexplained fatigue that no amount of sleep seems to touch. These aren’t separate problems. They’re a single integrated story the body is telling about an emotional terrain the conscious mind hasn’t been able to face yet.

References

Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)

1. 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.
2. Cloitre M, Stolbach BC, Herman JL, van der Kolk B, Pynoos R, Wang J, et al. A developmental approach to complex PTSD: childhood and adult cumulative trauma as predictors of symptom complexity. J Trauma Stress. 2009;22(5):399-408. doi:10.1002/jts.20444. PMID: 19795402.

Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)

• Brown, Brené. Daring Greatly. Penguin Audio, 2012.
• Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Random House, 1969.
• Dickinson, Emily. The complete poems of Emily Dickinson. Little, Brown, 1960.

About the Author

Annie Wright, LMFT

LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author

Helping ambitious women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.

Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719) 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.

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Medical Disclaimer

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