When the Holidays Hurt: Why This Season Is So Hard for So Many People

The holidays are usually sold as joyful, sacred, family-centered, and full of meaning. But for a lot of people, they are also activating, painful, lonely, or deeply confusing.

If this season feels heavy in your body, if your anxiety spikes earlier every year, or if you notice yourself bracing before anything has actually happened, you are not doing the holidays wrong.

This post is part of a 12-Day Tinsel & Trauma Holidaze Survival Guide Series exploring how the holiday season can impact people navigating religious trauma, adult family conflict, and family estrangement.

The goal here is not to fix you, rush forgiveness, or make the holidays palatable at all costs. The goal is simply to offer language, validation, and nervous-system-informed support so you can understand what is happening inside you.

Take what resonates. Leave what doesn’t. There is no correct way to move through this season.

When the Holidays Hurt: Why This Season Is So Hard for So Many People

The holidays are supposed to feel warm, meaningful, connective, and vaguely like a Hallmark movie where everyone is healed, forgiven, well-rested, and somehow emotionally regulated by December 24th.

In reality, for a lot of people, the holidays feel less like Hallmark and more like the emotional equivalent of doomscrolling in a dark room with Mariah Carey whistling in the background... Again.

You might notice your anxiety ramping up weeks before anything festive actually happens. Your sleep goes to shit. Your body feels tight, buzzy, heavy, or completely offline. You are suddenly irritable, numb, or crying in your car over the fact that they sold out of the christmas tree sugar cookies. Old memories pop up like unskippable ads and your nervous system is already packing a go-bag.

If that is you, I want to say this clearly and without and therapy-speak.

You are not broken.

For people navigating religious trauma, adult family conflict, or estrangement, the holidays are basically a pressure cooker set to high. Old wounds, family roles, moral expectations, power dynamics, and unresolved grief all get crammed into a short period of time and topped with a cultural demand to be grateful, forgiving, and pleasant about it.

It is a lot. And it makes sense that your body is not thrilled.

Why the Holidays Are So Damn Activating

The holiday season has a special talent for bundling centuries worth of historically charged, Jesus-coated, colonial indoctrination into one neat little clusterfuck with a bow on it.

Here's one heaping pile of Santa's finest gifts for your holiday season:

• Family systems you may have spent years untangling

• Religious language and rituals that still put a pit in your stomach

• Unspoken rules about obedience, forgiveness, and keeping the peace

• A social narrative that says this is the happiest time of the year, so if you are struggling, that sounds like a you problem

Merry Fucking Christmas! Lol

That combination can overwhelm even the most self-aware, therapy-literate, emotionally mature person.

You may finally understand your family dynamics. You can even reject the bullshit belief systems you were raised with. You might even have the life you dreamed of.

But your body will still react like it is under threat.

I promise that ins't a personal failure. That's just your nervous system doing its job, albeit very aggressively.

It's Not Just Emotional, It's Physiological Hell

One of the most common things I hear around the holidays is some version of: Why is this still bothering me?

That's because trauma isn't stored in your personality or your willpower. It is stored in your nervous system, silly.

Music, smells, prayers, phrases, family group texts, religious imagery, and even the damn calendar can act as a cue for danger. All these things tell your body that you are approaching something that once required you to stay small, comply, perform, dissociate, or survive.

Your nervous system doesn't care that you are an adult now. It doesn't care that you have been in therapy for the last 6 years. It doesn't care how many crystals you have or how well you know your attachment style or that you're on episode 78 of your favorite trauma healing podcast.

It cares about pattern recognition and protection.

Your body is not betraying you.

It is remembering. Loudly.

When Faith & Family Are Part of the Same Mess

For a lot of people, religious trauma and family trauma are two strings in the same knotted up mess of yarn.

Belief systems were enforced through family roles. Obedience was framed as love. Loyalty was framed as morality. Disagreement or setting a boundary was framed as sinful, selfish, or a betrayal.

So when the holidays roll around, those layers come back online all at once. Family gatherings are not just family gatherings. They are moral exams. Spiritual performances. Unspoken tests of how much you are willing to contort yourself to make everyone else feel comfortable.

Of course your body reacts. It has all the receipts.

This is also why the season can feel disproportionately heavy even if your current life is stable and supportive. Your nervous system is not responding to who you are now. It is responding to what it learned back then.

You Are Not Failing at Healing

If the holidays feel hard, it does not mean you are regressing, broken, or secretly bad at therapy.

It means your body is responding to a season that historically demanded silence, compliance, and self-abandonment from you.

This series is not about forcing joy, pretending everything is fine, or gaslighting yourself into gratitude just because there are twinkle lights everywhere.

This is about holding space for what comes up for you, trusting your nervous system more than the cultural script you were raised with, and slowly reclaiming your agency where you may not have had any before.

A Quick Note From Me

If this resonated (or even made you spit out your hot cocoa), I hope you know you’re not alone. I’ll be back tomorrow with more unapologetic, real talk about navigating the holidays while protecting your nervous system and your sanity.

If you’re ready to move beyond surviving the holidays and start working with a therapist who gets it, I’d love to hear from you. You can schedule a consultation call with me, and together we’ll figure out how you can navigate your nervous system, build up your boundaries, and the survive the messy, human realities of this season. No judgment, no fluff, just real support and real strategies that work for you. Let's do the damn thing!

Click here to schedule a free 20-min consultation call to see how I can best support you!