There’s No Place like Home: How Unresolved Familial Trauma Can Emerge around the Holidays

Holidays are filled with expectations that challenge even normal, happy families; the sheer volume of extra activities and celebrations can be both exhilarating and exhausting. This is the season for reaffirming relational bonds and commemorating connection of all kinds. 

But in contrast, family trauma is often characterized by a loss of connection. Because holidays stand for all that is filled with hope and togetherness, they can highlight what feels missing as well as what is there, making the gap between what is and what we wish were seem more pronounced. Words never spoken and feelings never felt can create a sense of estrangement from the core of what makes us tick as a family unit, particularly when there is an expectation to be in a holiday mood. And holidays are inevitably a time of imbibing, which for families that have dealt with addiction can add another layer of complication.

We’re all filled with images of the ideal or even the “normal” family approaching and during the holiday season. For most of us there’s a pressure to get together with family that there isn’t at other times of the year and more than that, a pressure to be happy, grateful, and filled with joy at the opportunity to be with those we love. But if those we love have been the source of some of the greatest pain in our lives, then this pressure can become devastating. The pressure we feel from the inside and the pressure we feel from the outside coalesce, creating a cauldron of emotions that can be difficult to manage. And dysfunctional families have often not developed good skills of self-regulation or relational regulation; they may experience the kinds of emotional mood swings and unmanageability that relational trauma kindles. Approaching the holiday season we may find ourselves trying to dispel memories of gatherings gone wrong, drunkenness, fights, doors slamming, and tears—disturbing recollections of festivities from the past that became explosive and painful. 

We may carry this unsettling mix of emotions along with presents, ribbons, and bows into family events. We’re torn between the holiday we wish for and the one we fear might happen. We’re confused about why we’re afraid of the people we love so much. We don’t know what to do with the resentment we carry over the family pain that has gone unacknowledged and unexpressed, that is vibrating beneath the smiles we’re holding in place somewhere across the bottom halves of our faces. We may look like (or sort of like) we’re holiday happy, but we feel on the inside like a fractured, cubist period Picasso: all our parts are more or less there, but in all the wrong places. We can feel distorted on the inside, our inner world threatening to leak out sideways at the slightest provocation. 

Or maybe we’re choosing not to reconnect with family at all and are dealing with feelings of estrangement, guilt, and perhaps even relief around that. Whatever our situation, the holidays can act as a powerful trigger for the kind of unresolved pain that, without treatment, passes from one generation seamlessly into the next, finding ever more veiled ways of coming out.

Relational trauma is not a one-time car accident; it isn’t a hurricane or an operation or something that has a clear beginning, middle, and end. It’s about the twisting of our inner world that we have to do to adapt to those close to us who are not acting anything like normal, or the shapes we bend into to stay connected, when another part of us is dying to flee or fight or simply to curl up into a little ball and hide. These are the patterns of intimacy that we learn in our traumatized family and carry into subsequent, intimate relationships. We long to be close but fear being close all at the same time. We mistrust deep connection, having experienced too many times how it has led to so much pain and hurt. And this is what we walk in the door with at a family gathering: a longing to be close and have fun with those we love and an equal dread and frozenness around what might happen. It’s the elephant in the room, the secret that everyone knows, the holiday cheer and fear that hangs in the room and is picked up on by all present, even the children. 

The hypervigilance that grows out of trauma makes us vulnerable to overreacting to things in the present that carry a pain-filled scent or overlay from the past. In other words, our fear of something going wrong might mean we over react to slights that we’d otherwise let pass by. Our mistrust, our waiting for the other shoe to drop can actually become the other shoe dropping. Resentments fill us with the kind of judgment that does not allow new energy to flow in, and it prejudices our perceptions of others. Pain that has not been processed, understood, and left in the past where it belongs develops an afterlife; it seeps into the underground relationships in the present, becoming a part of what fuels new and often distorted growth. The past and the present become a tangled mass within us, and there is a pull because of the repetitive tradition of holidays, to move back to our baseline of functioning, wherever we left it.

Children make sense of the world and their family members with the equipment that they possess at any given moment along their developmental continuum. This phenomenon is part of the family story and when that story gets revisited around a holiday tree or table, family member can regress in the blink of an eye to that place inside them that is calling the loudest to a level of maturity that is not necessarily equivalent to their current age, but rather represents a maturational arrest caused by family trauma. In some ways children who are overchallenged by early adversity can become mature beyond their years—little adults functioning on behalf of parents who are dropping the ball. But there are other ways in which these same children have not had their gradual needs for nurturance and safety adequately met. They have had to grow up too fast and as a result they may have left significant parts of themselves behind. These forgotten childhood selves call to them on the inside, not in a voice that can be heard or even understood, but in a silent scream, a stage whisper, an invisible current of need and hurt that shoots through the atmosphere of a family gathering with the alacrity of an electrical storm. The sensation inside of family members can be both frightening and awesome. Frightening because they have all been here before and it ended badly, awesome because maybe this time someone will say the right thing instead of the wrong thing, maybe this time some magical deus ex machina will descend from the heavens and deliver, once and for all, an inspired resolution to this whole mess. Maybe it will make sense of why we, a family who loves each other, can have caused such consistent and overwhelming pain to those we are supposed to care about the most. 

The holidays cast a spotlight on family dynamics that may be problematic, creating a heightened reality for all present. Holidays present a script, “be happy, love one another, connect,” but family members who carry buried and denied pain can experience themselves at these times like actors going through the motions, inauthentic, mouthing the words. There is an awkwardness that lingers in the air and a powerful but unrequited wish for something we feel we cannot have.

So the question is this: Do I recover myself and suffer the survivor’s guilt of getting healthy while the rest of the system is still mired in dysfunction? Or do I go down with the ship? 

Perhaps there is a third path, a deep recognition that the family we love and want may not be the family we have, but that we can enter consciously where possible and without the almost magical expectation that things will be as we wish. Because ultimately healing this kind of pain has to be done person by person and the point of healing it is so that we do not pass it down unconsciously to another generation, so that we don’t let the pain of yesterday leak into and shape our relationships of today. To do this we need to take that beautiful and wise advice of the Twelve Step programs: “Detach with love.” Because any other way of detaching leaves us in pain and closes a door to healing that may or may not come in our families of origin, but can and will come in the families we create if we can let it. 

Without rigorous help and dedication to recovery, traumatized families tend to live out legacies of pain, but this of course need not be the case. Help is always there if we can seek it out for ourselves and for our children. But first, we need to speak up about the great human rights crisis right in front of us: the millions of silently suffering children of alcohol and drug addicted parents. These children need and deserve better efforts from society to protect, support, and empower them. They are in our pediatric clinics, in our schools, on our sports teams, and in our religious communities. They are the children of our clients, who do not know that they are not alone, that they are not to blame for the chaos and sadness and chronic fear they feel every day in their homes. 

These children can access the help that is available when the adults in their lives speak up and guide them to support groups in their schools, to a knowledgeable pediatrician, to the youth group in their church, to Alateen or to a caring recovering adult who will share the truth with them about addiction and who will help them understand that they and the whole family have a right to recover from the pain and anguish addiction has inflicted on them. In a civilized society the elders protect and support the young. It is time that we all step up and own our responsibility to the children right in front of us waiting for someone to say something that can help.