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

Tips and Support from a Psychotherapist for Navigating Post-Election 2016 Thanksgiving

EMOTIONAL REGULATION & NERVOUS SYSTEM • November 23, 2016

Last updated: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT

The Thanksgiving Table Has Never Felt More Complicated

You know the feeling. The car pulls into the driveway, the familiar smell of whatever the family always makes hits you as the front door opens, and before you’ve even taken off your coat, you’re already doing the mental calculus: who will bring it up, how quickly, and which version of yourself you need to be in order to get through the next several hours without either completely silencing yourself or setting the whole room on fire.

This year , this Thanksgiving, in the weeks following an election that shook a significant portion of the country to its core , that particular calculus is harder than usual. The divide at the table isn’t just about political preference. For many people, it’s about whether their safety, dignity, and rights are being acknowledged by the people sitting across from them. That isn’t an abstract policy disagreement. That’s personal. And your nervous system knows it. (PMID: 35645742)

This post is written specifically for those of us navigating post-election Thanksgiving with people who voted differently , and who may not understand why you’re still grieving. I want to offer you some concrete, psychotherapist-perspective guidance on how to protect yourself, show up with integrity, and make it through the day in one piece. Because you can do this. It’s just going to take some intention.

What Are Relational Boundaries?

Boundaries are one of the most misunderstood concepts in popular psychology. They’re frequently imagined as ultimatums , dramatic lines drawn in the sand that end relationships or create conflict. In clinical practice, they’re something far more ordinary and far more powerful: they’re the clear communication of what you need to feel safe and respected in a relationship.

At a Thanksgiving table, boundaries might look like deciding in advance what topics you’re willing to engage with and what you’re not. They might look like having a plan to excuse yourself when conversations become too activated. They might look like agreeing with a supportive family member in advance to have a signal that means “I need to step outside for a few minutes.” They are not punishments. They are not rejections. They are care , for yourself, and ultimately for the relationship itself, because a relationship in which one person is constantly overwhelmed isn’t actually working for anyone.

The capacity to maintain clear boundaries in highly emotionally charged family environments is what family systems therapists call differentiation , the ability to stay connected to your own values and sense of self even when the emotional system around you is pushing you toward fusion (going along to keep the peace) or cutoff (disengaging entirely to protect yourself). Neither extreme serves you long-term. Differentiation , staying in connection while also staying yourself , is the harder and more sustainable middle path. Therapy can help you build this capacity before, during, and after the holidays.

One more important distinction when it comes to boundaries at the holiday table: there is a difference between a boundary and a demand. A demand is: “You are not allowed to have your political opinions.” A boundary is: “I’m not going to participate in a conversation that goes in that direction today.” The first is an attempt to control someone else. The second is an act of self-definition. Only the second is actually in your power. And only the second is actually a boundary.

The distinction matters because many women confuse the two , and end up either refusing to set any limits (because they don’t want to control others) or setting limits that are actually about trying to change the other person’s behavior. Neither works. The clean boundary is always about yourself: what you will engage with, what you won’t, what you need to remain regulated and present. Everything else is out of your control , and trying to control it will exhaust you. Understanding how perfectionism and control patterns show up in your own behavior can help you see where you’re expending energy you don’t have.

The Neuroscience of Conflict in Intimate Settings

Why does conflict with family members feel so much more activating than conflict with strangers? The answer is neurobiological. Our nervous system has learned, over the course of our developmental history, to read the emotional states of our primary attachment figures with particular sensitivity. The people we grew up with , parents, siblings, extended family , have a neurological “weight” in our systems that acquaintances and colleagues simply don’t.

Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher and author of The Body Keeps the Score, describes how the social nervous system is exquisitely sensitive to the emotional states of those we are in relationship with. (PMID: 9384857) In a family gathering where emotional tension is high , where grief, anger, and political difference are all present simultaneously , the nervous system is under significant load. For women who already carry histories of having to manage or regulate other people’s emotional states within their families of origin, the Thanksgiving table can feel less like a holiday and more like a performance endurance test.

This is why preparation matters. Going in with a clear internal plan , what you will and won’t engage with, who you will lean on, when you will take breaks , is not rigidity. It’s regulation strategy. Your prefrontal cortex can make those decisions in advance, so that when the heat rises at the table, you’re not trying to think your way through it in real time from an already-activated nervous system. Understanding how nervous system activation shows up in family contexts is foundational to navigating them with skill.

How This Shows Up for Driven Women at Family Gatherings

For driven women with relational trauma histories, family holidays often activate a very specific set of patterns. You may be the one who holds things together , the mediator, the peacekeeper, the person who notices everyone’s feelings and manages the emotional temperature of the room. That role is exhausting on an ordinary day. In the weeks following a politically distressing election, while you’re already carrying your own grief, it can be nearly unbearable.

Miriam is a 39-year-old physician who grew up in a family where she learned early that her job was to smooth the tensions between her parents , to be the one who could read the room and make it safer. She’s extraordinarily good at it. And every Thanksgiving, she arrives at her parents’ house already exhausted, because the anticipatory management starts days before , the mental preparation, the scripting, the emotional bracing. “I spend more energy preparing for Thanksgiving than I spend on anything in my actual clinical work,” she told me. “And I’m a hospitalist. That says everything.”

What Miriam is describing is a survival strategy that served a purpose when she was a child and now costs her enormously as an adult. The good news is that it can be changed. Healing the relational patterns that drive the compulsive peacekeeper behavior , the hypervigilance, the fawn response, the deeply internalized belief that the room’s wellbeing is your responsibility , is some of the most liberating work there is. But it doesn’t have to happen before Thursday. Right now, the goal is just to get through the day with your own integrity intact.

There’s another pattern I see frequently in driven women at family gatherings during periods of collective stress: the compulsion to educate. The belief that if you could just explain it clearly enough , frame the argument precisely enough, cite the data convincingly enough , the family member who voted differently would understand, and perhaps change their view. I want to gently but firmly release you from this responsibility. You are not your family’s political educator. And the Thanksgiving table is not a debate venue where the right argument wins the day.

People change their political views through relationship, not rhetoric. Not through being presented with better information, but through sustained, trusted connection with people whose lives illuminate the stakes of the issues. The most effective thing you can do for the longer arc of persuasion is to stay in relationship with people who see things differently , to be present, warm, and fully human in a way that doesn’t require them to agree with you right now. That is a long game. It doesn’t look like winning Thursday’s argument. But it’s the game worth playing. And that means protecting yourself enough to still be in it five Thanksgivings from now. Coaching can help you develop the long-game relationship skills that make this possible.

Grief at the Table: Permission to Still Be in It

One of the most important things I want to say to you: you have permission to still be grieving. It’s been two weeks since the election as I write this, and the pressure to have “moved on” , to have accepted it, to have gotten to the action and away from the feelings , is very real. That pressure is worth resisting.

Grief doesn’t move on anyone’s schedule. And the grief many of us are carrying isn’t just about the election outcome , it’s about what that outcome says about the communities we live in, the people we share a country with, the safety or precariousness of the people we love. That grief is real. It’s legitimate. And sitting across from someone at Thanksgiving who either doesn’t understand it or actively disagrees with it is genuinely hard. You don’t have to pretend otherwise.

What you can do is decide, in advance, how much of that grief you’re willing to be present to at the table , and how much you need to hold privately for another time. Both are legitimate choices. Choosing not to process your grief at Thanksgiving dinner isn’t suppression if you have another container for it. It’s strategy. A community of like-minded women who understand what you’re carrying can be one of those containers.

It’s also worth naming that the grief many of us carry after a political upheaval is not just grief for the election itself , it’s grief for the version of community or family connection that we might have hoped for. Discovering that a parent, sibling, or old friend voted in a way that signals disregard for your safety or the safety of communities you care about is genuinely painful. It’s a kind of relational rupture that doesn’t get acknowledged in cultural conversation, because we don’t have good language for “I found out my family sees the world in a way that doesn’t include protecting me.”

That grief is legitimate. It deserves to be named. And it doesn’t have to be resolved at the dinner table to be valid. You’re allowed to be grieving and still show up, and still be present, and still make it through the day. Those things can coexist. The grief doesn’t have to be resolved to be carried gracefully. Navigating the holidays with difficult or emotionally limited family members is a specific skill, and one worth developing with support.

Both/And: You Can Be Honest and Still Keep the Peace

Here is the thing about family conflict around values: the choice is rarely actually between complete honesty and complete silence. There is a Both/And available, and it usually looks something like this: you can be honest about your limits and not get into a full-scale debate about the election. You can honor your grief and choose not to make the dinner table the venue for processing it. You can love someone and disagree with their politics without resolving that tension today.

Both/And also means: you can show curiosity about another person’s perspective , genuine, warm, Gestalt-contact-style curiosity , and not have to be persuaded by it. You can acknowledge the complexity of what drove someone to vote the way they did and still be very clear about why you see it differently. Famed Gestalt psychotherapist Fritz Perls wrote that genuine contact requires “the appreciation of differences.” That doesn’t mean agreement. It means the willingness to really see the other person , their fears, their values, their worldview , without requiring that you become them.

Michelle is a 43-year-old executive who spent the last Thanksgiving before the 2016 election in an exhausting debate with her father about immigration policy. This year, she decided to try something different: she went in with genuine curiosity about what had driven her father’s political fears, without any investment in changing his mind or defending her own position. “I actually listened to him,” she told me afterward. “Not to argue, just to understand. And I learned something about what he was afraid of that I hadn’t known. It didn’t change my view. But I left less angry.” That’s the Both/And. It doesn’t require agreement. It requires genuine contact.

The Systemic Lens: Why Political Conflict at the Table Is Never Just About Politics

The political arguments that erupt at family holiday dinners are almost never purely about the political content. They are arguments about values, identity, safety, and belonging , and they are inflected by decades of relational history between the people having them. The fight about immigration policy is also about whether your worldview is respected. The argument about the election is also about whether you are seen. The tension around the table is also the tension of every unresolved relational dynamic the family has been carrying for years.

Understanding this systemically doesn’t mean you have to become a therapist at your own Thanksgiving table. But it does mean that when you feel your nervous system activate during a political exchange with a family member, it’s worth pausing long enough to ask: what is this actually about for me? Is it about the policy? Or is it about being dismissed, or not believed, or not valued , feelings that have a much longer history in this family than the current political moment?

That pause , between stimulus and response , is where choice lives. The ability to create that pause is one of the most important skills available to you, and it’s one that can be built with practice. Executive coaching and trauma-informed therapy both offer frameworks for building exactly this kind of intentional self-regulation in high-stakes relational environments.

Finally, the systemic frame asks us to consider: what does it mean when the political has become personal? When the divisions in the body politic are reflected in the divisions at the family table, we are dealing with something that runs deeper than policy disagreement. We are dealing with clashing worldviews, different relationships to safety and threat, different access to empathy for communities we don’t belong to. That is the deeper conversation , and it is one that probably cannot and should not happen at Thanksgiving dinner. But it is the conversation that makes the holiday dinner feel so loaded. Naming it, even privately to yourself, can help reduce the sense that the conflict is about something personal when it is really about something structural.

The families divided by politics are not uniquely failing at relationship. They are reflecting the larger cultural fracture , the same fracture playing out at the national level, rendered intimate at the holiday table. You didn’t cause this. And you can’t fix it by year’s end. What you can do is protect your own nervous system, maintain your own integrity, and stay in connection , with yourself, and where possible, with the people you love , without requiring that you agree on everything in order to belong to each other.

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.

Protecting Your Nervous System Through Uncertainty

Here are the most concrete, practical things I recommend for navigating a politically charged holiday gathering with your nervous system intact:

Decide your terms before you arrive. What topics will you engage with? What will you decline to discuss? What’s your exit plan if things escalate beyond what you can manage? Making these decisions in advance, when your prefrontal cortex is online and available, is far more effective than trying to decide in real time.

Identify your person. Who at the gathering is your ally? Who can you send a look to that means “I need to step outside”? Having one trusted person who understands what you’re navigating makes an enormous difference.

Have your self-soothing strategies ready. Deep breathing, a walk to the kitchen, excusing yourself to check in with a friend via text , these aren’t avoidance. They’re regulation. Use them proactively rather than waiting until you’re already overwhelmed.

Lower your expectations. Not about yourself , about the day. This Thanksgiving does not have to be the gathering where everything gets resolved or everyone understands each other. It just has to be survivable. Set a goal that is actually achievable: “I will get through this day without abandoning myself or exploding.” That’s enough.

Have a recovery plan for afterward. Whatever you need , a call with a trusted friend, a long walk, a session with your therapist, a quiet evening , build it into the plan. The recovery is part of the strategy, not an afterthought.

And finally: be gentle with yourself. You’re navigating something genuinely hard. You’re carrying grief and fear and the weight of a politically fractured moment, and you’re being asked to do it in a room with people who may not share your experience of that weight. That is a lot. You’re allowed to acknowledge that it’s a lot. And you deserve support in carrying it , not just on Thursday, but in the weeks and months ahead. Reaching out for that support is one of the most courageous and self-honoring things you can do. You don’t have to hold all of this alone.

Whatever this holiday brings , warmth and unexpected connection, or grinding tension and the need to count down the hours , it will pass. You will get in your car and drive home, and you will exhale, and you will still be yourself. The family dynamics that made this day hard didn’t start with this election, and they won’t end with it. But your capacity to navigate them with more skill, more self-awareness, and more compassion for yourself , that can grow. That grows every time you choose your own wellbeing without abandoning the relationship. And that, ultimately, is the work.

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.

Warmly, Annie

What I see consistently in my work with driven 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.

About the Author

Annie Wright, LMFT

LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · Author, W.W. Norton 2027

Helping driven 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 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 USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, NBC News, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.

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