RELATIONAL TRAUMA

Why and how you should consider creating your own holiday rituals.

Maya’s Table Had Six Chairs and No Script

It’s the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and Maya is standing in the produce aisle of her grocery store holding a butternut squash, completely unable to move forward.

She has a beautiful apartment. A career she’s proud of. Friends who love her. And yet every November, without fail, this happens. The weight of what the holidays are supposed to look like settles over her like a fog she can’t think her way out of.

Her family of origin is complicated — a mother who swings between warmth and withdrawal, a father she’s estranged from, a sister she loves but can only take in small doses. The Thanksgiving table she grew up at was never exactly a safe place. It was a place where tension lived behind the green bean casserole, where silences meant something, where she learned to read the room before she could read a chapter book.

And so now, at thirty-eight, she stands in the produce aisle wondering: what does any of this mean for me? Whose holiday is this, exactly? And is there a version of this season that I actually want?

If any part of Maya’s story sounds familiar — if the holidays bring more dread than delight, more obligation than joy, more grief than gratitude — this post is for you.

Because creating your own holiday rituals isn’t a radical act of rejection. It’s one of the most psychologically healthy things a person from a complicated family background can do. And it’s something we’ve been doing as humans since long before department stores told us otherwise.

What Are Chosen Holiday Rituals?

Since time immemorial, humans have hungered for ritual. It’s woven into the architecture of how we make meaning. Across cultures and centuries, ritual has marked beginnings and endings, helped us metabolize loss, and stitched us into community. It’s not a relic. It’s a psychological necessity.

Today our fall and winter holiday rituals might look like flying home for turkey dinner, late-night services at church, or Christmas morning present-opening. But if those inherited rituals don’t actually nourish you — or if your family dynamics make them actively harmful — you get to build something new.

The distinction between routine and ritual matters here. Routines are instrumental — they get things done. Rituals are symbolic — they mark something as meaningful. Barbara H. Fiese, PhD, Professor Emerita of Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Illinois and one of the foremost researchers on family ritual, spent decades documenting this distinction. Her landmark review of fifty years of family ritual research found that rituals — unlike mere routines — carry a sense of continuity and commitment that shapes our emotional sense of belonging and our psychological wellbeing across the lifespan.

The key word is intentional. You don’t stumble into a chosen ritual. You build it, deliberately, out of the specific texture of who you are and what you need.

And if you’re someone who grew up in a family where the holidays felt more like a minefield than a celebration — where belonging was conditional, where the table wasn’t safe, where the season carried grief alongside any glitter — then building your own rituals isn’t optional. It’s healing work. It’s one of the ways you claim authorship over your own life rather than living out someone else’s script.

The Science of Ritual: Why It Works in the Brain and Body

This isn’t just philosophy. There’s solid neuroscience underneath it.

Stephen Porges, PhD, Distinguished University Scientist at Indiana University and developer of the Polyvagal Theory, has spent decades mapping how our nervous system responds to cues of safety and threat. His research demonstrates that the human nervous system is fundamentally social — it’s constantly scanning the environment for signals of connection or danger. Predictable, repeated rituals function as powerful safety signals. They tell your nervous system: this is known, this is safe, I belong here.

That signal matters enormously during the holiday season, when nervous systems that were shaped in chaotic or painful family environments are on high alert. The cultural machinery of the holidays is relentless — it broadcasts imagery of warmth, togetherness, and belonging at an almost aggressive volume. For someone with a complicated family history, that imagery doesn’t feel aspirational. It feels like evidence of what they don’t have.

What rituals do — especially chosen ones — is interrupt that loop. They shift your nervous system from the hypervigilant scanning mode (what Porges calls the sympathetic or dorsal vagal states) into the ventral vagal state: the state where you feel genuinely safe, connected, and regulated. Not because someone told you to feel grateful, but because you’ve created a real, embodied experience of belonging.

Robert A. Neimeyer, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Memphis and Director of the Portland Institute for Loss and Transition, is one of the world’s leading researchers on grief and meaning-making after loss. His work on “meaning reconstruction” offers a crucial frame for understanding why creating new rituals matters so much for people whose family histories are painful.

Neimeyer’s research shows that grief isn’t just about mourning what was lost. It’s also about mourning what was never received — the safe childhood, the present parent, the holidays that felt genuinely warm. And the pathway through grief isn’t passive endurance. It’s active meaning-making. Creating new rituals is, in Neimeyer’s framework, a concrete act of meaning reconstruction: you’re not just getting through the season, you’re actively building something that honors the life you’re choosing now.

That’s what a chosen holiday ritual does. It isn’t a consolation prize. It’s a declaration. It says: I lived. I’m here. And I’m building something real.

How Holiday Grief Shows Up in Driven Women

In my work with clients — driven, ambitious women who’ve built impressive external lives — holiday grief tends to look specific. It doesn’t always announce itself as grief. It comes in disguise.

It looks like the woman who throws herself into relentless productivity in November and December, scheduling her calendar to the minute so there’s no room to feel anything. It looks like the one who agrees to every family obligation even though she’s been working sixty-hour weeks, because saying no feels too dangerous — too much like being the difficult one, the ungrateful one, the one who finally confirmed everyone’s worst suspicions about her. It looks like the woman who genuinely loves the people in her chosen family but feels a particular, specific ache around the holidays that she can’t quite name.

Nadia knows that ache well.

She’s forty-two, a physician, and one of the most emotionally intelligent women I’ve worked with. Every December, without fail, she describes a low-grade sadness that settles in like weather — not acute, not debilitating, but present. A sense of absence. She calls it “the gap.” The gap between what the season is supposed to feel like and what it actually feels like for her.

Nadia’s mother was loving but unpredictable — warm one day, emotionally absent the next. The holidays in her childhood home were marked by her mother’s moods, which meant that Nadia never knew what to expect, never knew if a given Christmas morning would be the good kind or the quietly devastating kind. As an adult, even in the context of her own beautifully curated life, her nervous system still braces in December. Still waits for the other shoe to drop.

This is attachment trauma showing up in real time. The nervous system learned, in childhood, that this time of year is uncertain. And nervous systems have long memories.

What Nadia has learned in our work together is that she doesn’t have to just endure December. She can build something. She’s started a handful of intentional practices: a long, solitary walk on Christmas morning before anyone else is awake, a December dinner with three close friends who’ve become her chosen family, and a quiet end-of-year ritual of writing down everything she wants to leave behind — then burning the paper. Small. Specific. Hers.

And the gap? It’s still there, sometimes. Grief doesn’t always fully resolve. But it no longer runs the show. She’s built something alongside it.

When Obligation Masquerades as Love

One of the most painful dynamics I see in my work with women from relational trauma backgrounds is the confusion between obligation and love.

Many of them grew up in families where love was conditional. Where belonging required compliance. Where saying no — to the family dinner, to the holiday visit, to the emotional labor of managing everyone else’s experience of the season — felt genuinely dangerous. Not just uncomfortable. Dangerous. Because in a family system organized around conditional approval, any deviation from the expected script felt like it might cost you everything.

That learning doesn’t just disappear when you grow up, get a graduate degree, and build a life that looks, from the outside, like evidence of all the freedom in the world. The nervous system still remembers. The body still knows the cost of saying no to family.

And so driven women — women who are extraordinarily competent in every other domain — often find themselves capitulating, year after year, to holiday arrangements that don’t serve them. Flying home when they don’t want to. Sitting at tables that feel hostile. Managing parents who are still, at seventy, as emotionally volatile as they were when their daughter was eight.

They do it because it feels like love. Or at least, because it’s been coded as love for so long that the distinction has blurred.

Part of what working on relational trauma makes possible is learning to tell the difference. Love is freely chosen. Love doesn’t require you to abandon yourself to maintain the relationship. And the holidays — culturally loaded as they are — can be an extraordinarily useful mirror for where that confusion still lives in you.

If you consistently leave family holiday gatherings feeling depleted, invisible, or worse than you arrived, that’s data. Not about your ingratitude. About the reality of those relationships.

Creating your own rituals — even small ones, even alongside the obligatory family events — is a way of saying: I also matter in this season. My experience of this time of year deserves some intentional investment too.

The Both/And Reframe

Here’s where I want to offer what I call the Both/And — because this is where the nuance matters most.

You can love your family of origin and recognize that the holidays with them aren’t healthy for you right now. Both can be true.

You can grieve the holidays you didn’t have and still build something genuinely nourishing out of the ones you do have. Both can be true.

You can honor the traditions that genuinely mean something to you and let go of the ones that don’t. Both can be true.

You can feel the sadness of estrangement during a season that celebrates family togetherness and also feel relief, liberation, and pride in the distance you’ve created for your own wellbeing. Both are true simultaneously.

The Both/And is important because the cultural narrative around holidays is insistently binary. You either love the holidays (good person, grateful, connected) or you don’t (ungrateful, difficult, broken). There’s very little room in that binary for the genuine complexity of people who grew up in complicated families and are doing the hard, real work of figuring out what it means to celebrate on their own terms.

This is where Elena’s story comes in.

Elena is thirty-four, a product manager at a tech company, and someone who describes herself as having a “confusing relationship” with her Cuban-American family. She loves them. She also knows that extended time with them — particularly around the holidays, when family expectations intensify and every cousin is asking about her relationship status and her mother is making pointed comments about her apartment in San Francisco — costs her a week of recovery time afterward.

For years, Elena handled this by white-knuckling through every holiday obligation, then collapsing in January. Last year, she tried something different. She flew home for Christmas Eve and Christmas morning — her real non-negotiables, the parts she genuinely loves — and then, on December 26, she got on a plane and went to a cabin in the mountains with her best friend. Just the two of them. Hot chocolate, board games, long walks in the snow, and no one asking her anything about her life plan.

It was, she told me, the first December in a decade where she felt like herself by New Year’s.

She didn’t abandon her family. She didn’t blow up Christmas. She did something far more sophisticated: she identified the specific elements of the season that genuinely nourished her, protected them, and built a container for herself that included both her family and her own wellbeing. She made herself a Both/And rather than a sacrifice.

That’s the work. It’s not dramatic. It’s not a rejection letter to your family. It’s a careful, thoughtful process of figuring out what you actually want — and then having the courage to make some of it real.

The Hidden Cost of Living Someone Else’s Holiday

There’s a real cost to skipping this work. And it’s worth naming it clearly.

When you spend the holiday season on autopilot — enduring rather than choosing, complying rather than creating, white-knuckling through December in service of other people’s expectations — you’re not just having a bad holiday. You’re reinforcing a deeper pattern.

The pattern that says your needs don’t have a seat at the table. The pattern that says belonging requires self-erasure. The pattern that says you don’t get to want things — only to accommodate, to manage, to survive.

These are the same patterns that show up in relational trauma recovery work across every domain of life: at work, in romantic relationships, in friendships. The holidays just put them in particularly sharp relief, because the cultural stakes feel so high and the pressure to perform gratitude and togetherness is so relentless.

What I see consistently in my work is that the women who don’t do the work of creating intentional holiday rituals — who just endure, year after year — arrive in January more depleted than they were in November. The season becomes a drain rather than a resource. And that’s a loss, because the holidays, at their best, can be a resource. They can be a pause, a reset, a gathering of genuine nourishment.

But only if you participate in building them. Only if you treat your own experience of this season as worth designing.

When you’re enrolled in executive coaching or deeper clinical work, one of the things that often surfaces around the holidays is this exact question: what would it look like if I actually cared for myself during December the way I care for everyone else? What if the season included me?

That question — radical as it sounds for some women — is where chosen ritual begins.

The Systemic Lens

It’s important to name the larger context, because individual healing never happens in a vacuum.

The pressure to perform a specific kind of holiday experience — the nuclear family table, the togetherness, the tradition — is not culturally neutral. It’s a particular, historically specific, economically loaded ideal. And it’s worth noticing who it serves and who it excludes.

It tends to center the experiences of people with intact nuclear families, sufficient financial resources to travel and celebrate elaborately, family-of-origin relationships that are functional enough to be worth the trip. It says very little, implicitly, to people who are estranged from their families, who are the first in their families to set limits on dysfunction, who are queer and not welcomed at the family table, who are immigrants navigating hybrid cultural identities around the holidays, who are grieving a death, who simply don’t have the money or the family or the Norman Rockwell tableau that December advertising insists they should have.

For driven women from relational trauma backgrounds, many of whom grew up as the functional adults in their families, the holiday season can carry an additional layer of systemic pressure: the expectation that because you’ve “made it” professionally, you should be able to manage the family dynamics too. That your competence in the world should translate into an ability to absorb whatever the family throws at you over the holiday table.

It’s a particular kind of invisibility. And it’s worth naming.

Part of what creating your own rituals does — beyond the personal psychology of it — is participate in a quiet cultural act of self-determination. You’re refusing the premise that your value during the holiday season is measured by your compliance with inherited expectations. You’re saying: I get to determine what this season means. My chosen family, my chosen practices, my chosen pace — these are legitimate. These count.

Barbara Fiese’s research on family rituals found that what makes rituals psychologically meaningful isn’t whether they match a cultural template. It’s whether they carry genuine significance for the people practicing them. The template is not the point. The meaning is.

And meaning — this is the radical part — is something you make. Not something you inherit by default.

How to Build Your Own Holiday Rituals

So: how do you actually do this?

Here’s what I’ve seen work — in my own life, and in the lives of the women I work with. It’s less prescriptive than you might expect, because the whole point is that these are yours. But there are useful starting questions.

Start with subtraction, not addition. Before you decide what to add to your holiday season, notice what you want to remove. What, when you think about it, makes you feel a contraction — a tightening, a dread? What have you been doing on autopilot that doesn’t actually serve you? Start there. Saying no to one thing that depletes you creates more space than adding ten things that are supposed to nourish you.

Ask: what do I actually want to feel? Not what do you want to do — what do you want to feel? Connected? Cozy? Grounded? Celebratory? Quietly reflective? Your answer to this question is the seed of your ritual. Work backward from the feeling. If you want to feel grounded, what practices actually produce groundedness in your specific body and nervous system? If you want to feel connected, which specific people generate genuine connection for you?

Start small and specific. The most durable rituals are specific. Not “I’ll be more intentional about the holidays” — that’s a resolution. A ritual is “Every year on the winter solstice, I make soup from scratch, light every candle in my apartment, and read for two hours.” Specific. Repeatable. Yours.

Bring someone with you, if that helps. Chosen rituals don’t have to be solitary. Some of the most powerful ones involve small, intentional gatherings of people you’ve specifically chosen — what’s sometimes called a Friendsgiving or a chosen-family holiday, where you build something new with the people who genuinely see and know you. Research consistently shows that belonging is one of the most powerful modulators of nervous system regulation. You deserve to experience that during the holidays, not just observe it on other people’s Instagram grids.

Give yourself permission to repeat. One of the defining features of a ritual — versus a one-time event — is repetition. The first year you do it, it might feel awkward or forced or like you’re trying too hard. That’s okay. The second year, it starts to feel like something. The third year, it starts to feel like yours. Give it time. Meaning accrues with repetition.

Let grief be part of it. You don’t have to build rituals that only look forward and feel bright and clean. Some of the most meaningful rituals explicitly hold grief — acknowledging what’s been lost, what’s complicated, what you’re still working through. A ritual that makes room for the Both/And of your holiday experience — joy and grief, celebration and longing, gratitude and pain — is more honest, and often more healing, than one that requires you to perform a positivity you don’t actually feel.

If you’re not sure where to start, the quiz on my site can help you identify some of the core patterns beneath your holiday experience — what’s driving the dread, the obligation, the depletion. Understanding the root pattern is often the first step toward building something different.

And if you want more structured support — a container for doing this work intentionally rather than just reading about it — I’d invite you to connect with me to talk about what might fit.

You don’t have to spend another December just getting through it. You can build something real. Something that’s actually yours.

Here’s to the rituals you’re choosing — the ones you’re building from scratch, on your own terms, for the specific life you’re living right now. They count. They matter. And so do you.

Related Reading

• Fiese, B. H., Tomcho, T. J., Douglas, M., Josephs, K., Poltrock, S., & Baker, T. (2002). A review of 50 years of research on naturally occurring family routines and rituals: Cause for celebration? Journal of Family Psychology, 16(4), 381–390.
• Neimeyer, R. A. (2001). Meaning reconstruction and the experience of loss. American Psychological Association.
• Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton.
• Neimeyer, R. A. (2006). Re-storying loss: Fostering growth in the face of grief. Death Studies, 30(1), 11–39.
• Estés, C. P. (1992). Women who run with the wolves: Myths and stories of the wild woman archetype. Ballantine Books.

About the Author

Annie Wright

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

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

As a licensed psychotherapist, trauma-informed executive coach, and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, she guides 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.

Work 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.

MORE ABOUT ANNIE

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