Reclaiming Trauma Triggers Around the Holidays
The fall and winter holiday season is offered up as a time of tremendous cheer, comfort, and love. A time of feasts and friends, family and gifts, happiness and togetherness. The holiday season is also a time of tradition, of repeating ceremonies and festivities that have happened for years, maybe generations.
This connection to the past around the holidays, to tradition and celebration, can make it a particularly difficult time of year for people who have seasonal trauma triggers around the holidays. Family trauma, religious trauma, and holiday-specific traumas like Christmas trauma, all can invade what feels like it should be a happy time. What’s worse, it can feel like a time you should be enjoying no matter what, and the guilt and sorrow at losing the feeling of celebration to trauma can weigh heavily.
Getting through the holidays, let alone enjoying them, can feel impossible. The weight can feel unbearable.
Seasonal triggers and reclaiming holidays
When a traumatic event happens in your life in or around the holidays, it can cement that trauma as part of your associations with the season, sparking PTSD anniversary reactions each year as the holiday season comes back around. That society puts so much emphasis on this time of year can make it even harder to manage.
What then, should you do about the holidays?
There are several ways you can offer yourself grace and space to celebrate on your own terms in the holiday season. Your pain is real, and your experiences are worth recognizing and working through. Finding ways to celebrate a season that used to have happy meaning for you can be a way to help yourself heal, to recognize that you deserve more than you’ve been offered. You deserve holidays on your own terms, that feel like celebrations to you.
Allow yourself to grieve
It can be tempting to turn your back on the holiday season entirely, to shun celebration, and to ignore everything. But with the persistent social acknowledgment of the holiday season, and the painful loneliness of isolation, your struggles with trauma triggers won’t be solved by ignoring what’s happening around you.
Allow yourself to grieve what you’ve lost. Through trauma, you’ve lost a sense of joy in a season that is supposed to connect us to each other. Because of seasonal triggers, the zest and happiness of traditions and togetherness are lost to you.
Losses matter; acknowledging your experiences and sitting with your grief, perhaps even seeking out a therapist, is a good first step toward recognizing how you’ve been impacted by trauma. This may even allow you to start taking steps to recognize the holiday around which your trauma triggers revolve but on your own terms.
Dealing with toxic family: make plans and set boundaries
It can feel impossible to say no to family contact around the holidays. However, increased family contact can increase time around family conflicts, and dealing with toxic family members who may have traumatized you in the past can be retraumatizing. Even if your family isn’t the source of your trauma, they may be less-than-understanding about what you’re experiencing, and, they may guilt you for being a “Grinch” when really, you’re just hurting and in need of support.
Make a plan for family gatherings
If you find yourself wanting to experience a family holiday but are concerned about family trauma, make a plan. Set boundaries ahead of time; you will only do this much, or will only go to this event, but not that one. You will only talk to the people you want to see or will have separate family time with particular members you enjoy. Figure out what boundaries and limits you can set to protect you from seasonal triggers. Recruit trusted family, a spouse, partner, or friend to help you stick to your boundaries if you worry you’ll struggle.
Work with a therapist on boundary-setting
Not sure where to start on what boundaries would serve you? Having input from a therapist about your plan can help. Having a plan for how to deal with anxiety in the moment, and how to stand up for your boundaries, can make all the difference in letting you have a decent holiday experience. A therapist will have your best interests at heart and know you well and can encourage and celebrate your efforts to protect yourself.
Rewrite anniversary reactions with new traditions
One of the great things about traditions is that someone had to start them; they haven’t been around forever. That means they’re flexible. You can change them, you can let them go, you can create your own. If holiday traditions you used to participate in have become seasonal triggers for you, it’s time to create yourown.
Make new holiday traditions to suit your needs
Creating your own traditions can be as simple as a small observance you make privately around a holiday that means something to you, or as substantial as a large gathering you put together. New traditions also offer you space to celebrate without acknowledging a specific holiday; a game night, or heading to the movies or a concert, can be just as celebratory without demanding you observe a specific holiday. You’re in the driver's seat here and can make the holiday into anything you like.
Found family can help remake the holiday season with you
You can also include whoever you like in your new traditions. If family trauma makes seeing extended family during the holidays unhealthy for you, consider connecting with found family, and surrounding yourself with close friends and community who support you. You can rewrite your PTSD anniversary reactions, one new tradition at a time.
As you navigate the holiday season, working around seasonal triggers and anniversary reactions, know that you’re not alone in how you feel. If you find yourself in need of a helping hand along the way, Robin is here for you, helping you better understand your trauma and how to work through it in a way that is more helpful to you.
