TL;DR –The week between Christmas and New Year creates a natural pause—a liminal space where time slows, inboxes quiet, and our souls instinctively turn inward to inventory the year's gains and losses. This collective slowing isn't just calendar coincidence; it's a neurobiological reset period when our nervous systems, exhausted from a year of vigilance and achievement, finally permit reflection. For those healing from relational trauma, this pause can feel particularly loaded—we're simultaneously grieving what was missing from childhood holidays while trying to create new traditions, holding both the weight of past wounds and tentative hope for different futures.
Rather than making grand new year's resolutions or specific wishes for 2023, this piece offers something more essential: resilience. Not the toxic positivity version that demands we "bounce back" from everything unscathed, but genuine resilience—the internal fortitude to face uncertainty, pivot when needed, and maintain our center when life inevitably deviates from our careful plans. The 99 curated quotes on resilience serve as emotional nourishment, each one a small reminder that humans have always found ways to endure, adapt, and even thrive despite circumstances. Because if 2020 taught us anything, it's that crystal balls are useless, but inner strength remains invaluable.
If you celebrate, today is Christmas so I want to wish you a very Merry Christmas.
If you don’t, or if you celebrate any other winter holiday – Hanukkah, Yule, Kwanzaa – I hope the weeks and days have been what you have wanted them to be.
For the next week, the last week of this year, it always feels like we’re entering a liminal period of time.
A collective pause and slowing down. A time where our inboxes are lighter and maybe our souls and emotional bodies feel a bit more cozy.
It’s a time where, consciously and unconsciously, many of us reflect on the last year, taking stock, inventorying our gains and losses, lessons learned and mistakes made.
It’s a time, too, where, for many of us, we dream and hope and set intentions for what the next year – 2023 – might hold.
None of us have crystal balls. None of us know what 2023 will hold (remember New Year’s Eve 2019 into 2020?). So I no longer wish for myself or anyone else anything other than resilience to face what may come to pass.
Internal fortitude and resilience to address, manage, overcome, and pivot no matter what life may bring.
As a small gift to you, to strengthen your own resilience as we move forward into the next year, I want to leave you with this emotional nourishment: 99 of my all-time favorite quotes on resilience.
May even just one line speak to you and make you feel a tiny bit stronger and more capable after reading the post.
I’m wishing you a wonderful 2023. And above all else, I’m wishing you resilience for whatever life brings despite our plans, intentions, and goal setting.
Curious if you come from a relational trauma background?
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START THE QUIZBuilding Resilience Through Year-End Therapy Work
The liminal week between Christmas and New Year offers a unique therapeutic opportunity—when the world slows down, your psyche naturally opens to deeper reflection that busy daily life typically prevents. In therapy during this period, you’re not just reviewing the year’s events but examining how your nervous system navigated each challenge, noticing which old patterns activated under stress and which new capacities emerged.
For trauma survivors, this annual inventory can feel particularly complex: celebrating growth while grieving lost time, acknowledging resilience while feeling exhausted from constant vigilance, hoping for change while fearing disappointment. Your therapist helps you hold these paradoxes, understanding that resilience tools in our self-care tool chest aren’t just coping mechanisms but fundamental rebuilding of your capacity to withstand life’s uncertainties.
Rather than setting rigid resolutions that your trauma brain might weaponize into another source of shame, trauma-informed therapy during this transition focuses on building flexible resilience—the kind that bends without breaking when life inevitably surprises you.
Together, you explore what genuine resilience means for someone with your specific history: perhaps it’s learning to ask for help before drowning, recognizing triggers before they consume you, learning how to manage stress, or simply believing you deserve the good things that might come. Your therapist helps you distinguish between the brittle strength of hypervigilance (which exhausts you) and authentic resilience (which sustains you), teaching your nervous system the difference between productive reflection and rumination.
Most importantly, therapy during this threshold time helps you metabolize the year’s accumulated experiences—both triumphs and losses—so you enter the new year with genuine integration rather than just exhaustion. Through processing what 2022 brought, you’re not just creating space for 2023; you’re literally rewiring your capacity to meet uncertainty with grounded presence rather than familiar panic.
Because true resilience isn’t about becoming invulnerable to life’s challenges but developing an unshakeable trust in your ability to meet whatever comes, drawing on both your hard-won survival skills and the new neural pathways of healing you’re courageously building, one session at a time.
Here’s to healing relational trauma and creating thriving lives on solid foundations.
Warmly,
Annie
