Trauma recovery during the holidays.

For trauma survivors, holidays very often carry high risk for emotional flashbacks. 

One of the main things that makes holidays, holidays, is that they are often steeped in tradition. 

Many people and families do the same things, or same types of things, on holidays, year after year, decade after decade. 

The traditions and rituals associated with many holidays are often so old and so culturally pervasive, that it’s impossible to imagine any point in history where people in our culture wouldn’t know what activities, music, and symbols were associated with particular holidays. 

One of the main reasons many complex trauma survivors in particular can find holidays triggering is, the cultural tropes that surround holidays represent a piece of our past we cannot seem to escape, no matter how hard we try. 

Part of what makes trauma recovery, trauma recovery, is that it allows us to move further and further away from our past. 

Often, moving away from our past— intellectually, emotionally, and even geographically— is one of the most healing things in trauma recovery. 

But on certain holidays, it’s like the past follows us. We can’t get away from it. 

When something is associated with an event or period of time that was painful for us, and we can’t get away from it— our nervous system beings to panic. 

Feeling, or being, trapped is maybe the LEAST favorite experience of the traumatized nervous system. 

Not being able to avoid or ignore certain holidays can very much stoke a sense of inescapably, which can easily trigger our nervous system into trauma responses. 

For survivors of abuse at the hands of a family member, certain holidays were when they were forced to see or spend time with their abuser. 

Many survivors had the experience of trying to disclose about the abuse they had experienced, but being told, essentially, to shut up and tolerate their abuser’s presence at holiday gatherings. 

Other survivors experience holidays as reminders of how alienated from their family and culture they feel. 

It’s hard, when the culture around us is celebrating gratitude, to feel like we don’t have much for which to be “grateful”— and, on top of that, to feel shame ABOUT how “ungrateful” we feel. 

Because, you know, we “should” be grateful— as we’ve been reminded, over, and over, and over again. 

Sometimes holidays can stoke a thought process in survivors that it’s actually our fault for how lonely and unloved we feel— that if we only loosened up and “forgave” our abuser or family, maybe we would have a seat at that table. 

All of which is to say: Trauma Brain and the internal prosecutor will ABSOLUTELY use the occasion of holidays to torture us. 

It means we need to be extra vigilant in our trauma recovery around the holidays. 

Trauma Brain will absolutely take the occasion of a holiday to reconnect us, vividly, with holidays from years past. Many survivors find ourselves thrust into emotional flashback, again and again, during the holidays— and it doesn’t help that, often, holiday gatherings are literally being held in towns and even houses where we grew up. 

The internal prosecutor will absolutely take the occasion of a holiday to make the case they’re always making: that we’re the problem. That we’re the weirdo. That we’re “choosing” to be apart and aliened from our family. 

The good news is: all the trauma recovery stuff we do EVERY day, will support us during the holidays. 

Grounding, Containment. The flashback rundown. The oxygen joint. Grounding mantras and totems. Self-hypnosis. All the tools, skills, and philosophies we use to pull off this thing called “recovery” on ANY day— they will ALL come in handy on a holiday. 

We can get through this. The rules of recovery are the same. Breathe; blink; focus; do the next right thing; and take this one day at a time. 

I am thankful for YOU, by the way.