When the Helper Needs Holding: A Therapist’s Story of the Holiday Season
There’s a certain feeling that creeps into the therapy room around mid-November—a shift in energy that therapists learn to recognize long before holiday lights go up in the neighborhood. Sessions take on a different tone. Clients arrive carrying heavier emotional bags than usual, filled with childhood memories, relationship tensions, grief anniversaries, and the inevitable “I thought I’d be doing better by now” self-judgments that surface as the year comes to a close.
For therapists, the season brings a familiar blend of tenderness and intensity. And for those of us who work with other therapists, there’s an added layer of complexity: we are supporting clinicians who are supporting their own clients, families, and communities, all while trying to manage their own internal world. It becomes a season where the helper often needs help, even if they rarely say so.
This time of year, many therapists walk into the therapy room already carrying the emotional residue of the day. They may have just held space for a client who’s grieving a parent they lost last winter, or supported someone preparing for a complicated holiday visit with family, or grounded a client experiencing a trauma trigger related to religious traditions. Therapists offer compassion, steadiness, and presence—even when they themselves feel stretched thin.
What is often invisible to the outside world is that while therapists are tending to the emotional upheaval of the season in their clients, they are also navigating their own. The holidays tend to stir up old stories: memories of childhood traditions that felt magical or painful—or sometimes both at once. Family expectations that still feel impossible. The tension between wanting to be home and dreading what “home” brings up. Grief that catches in the throat when the lights dim. The pressure to show up, to be present, to give even more of themselves when they already feel spent.
Many therapists share privately that December feels like walking through a fog with a backpack full of emotions—some theirs, some borrowed, some absorbed through the week’s sessions. There is a quiet guilt that shows up too: guilt for wanting time off, guilt for feeling tired, guilt for not having the emotional bandwidth they feel they “should” have, guilt for closing their calendars for a few days and hoping their clients will be okay.
It’s a particular kind of paradox to be the emotional anchor for others in a month that pulls so deeply on your own reserves.
The holiday break, for example, often takes more energy to prepare for than the actual time off provides. Therapists feel responsible for making sure their clients have everything they might need while the office is closed—talking through coping strategies, exploring grounding techniques, anticipating triggers that might surface at family gatherings, role-playing boundaries, and sometimes offering extra check-ins before clients leave town. Therapists hope that when they close their laptops for the last time in December, they’ll be able to breathe. But for many, the mind doesn’t fully shut off. They replay sessions in their heads. They worry about clients who are going through their first holiday season after a loss. They think about the client who struggles with suicidal ideation and hope the safety plan they reviewed will hold.
It’s not that therapists don’t trust their work—it’s that they care. Deeply.
And while all of this is happening, therapists are also attempting to be humans in their own families. They’re shopping for gifts, attending school events, wrapping presents at midnight, juggling travel logistics, or bracing for interactions with relatives who still see them as the kid they once were instead of the adult they’ve become. They’re navigating their own grief, their own burnout, their own sense of loneliness or longing. They’re worrying about finances, managing holiday expectations, and trying to create moments of connection at home while their emotional energy is being drawn in too many directions.
Some therapists feel a sense of pressure to “put on a good holiday” for their families, even when internally they feel numb or overwhelmed. Others feel the pull of spiritual trauma as holiday traditions resurface—songs, prayers, or rituals that used to feel sacred but now feel complicated. Some experience sensory overload. Some feel the familiar ache of missing someone who used to fill the room with laughter. Some fear that if they slow down, everything they’ve been avoiding emotionally will finally catch up.
And the truth is, therapists deserve someone to talk to about all of this.
This is where the work of supporting therapists becomes especially meaningful. In sessions with therapist-clients this time of year, there is often a noticeable exhale—one that says, “I don’t have to carry this alone.” The therapy room becomes a place where they can finally take off the professional mask they’ve been wearing all day, the one that says, “I’m fine, I’m grounded, I can hold anything.” Here, they can be human. They can say the things they’d never say to their clients. They can admit they are tired. They can explore their own holiday triggers without worrying about overshadowing someone else’s. They can name the resentment they feel when they’re expected to be the emotional glue for everyone in their orbit. They can talk about their fears, their exhaustion, their longing for rest.
Therapists often apologize when they begin to unravel a little in their own therapy during this season. “Sorry, I’m all over the place,” they’ll say. Or, “I should be able to handle this.” Or, “I know other people have it worse.” These apologies are unnecessary but deeply human.
Being a therapist does not make you immune to emotional overload. If anything, it makes you more attuned to it.
Our conversations often center on repeating themes: the guilt around taking time off, the heaviness of holding many emotional stories at once, the pressure to create a calm space for clients when their own internal world feels anything but calm. We talk about boundaries—not the kind they help clients set, but the ones they struggle to set for themselves. We talk about their own grief, their own families, their own desire for traditions that feel safe and meaningful, not obligatory. We talk about fatigue, not as a failure, but as a signal. We talk about the longing for permission to rest.
And through all of this, something softens. Therapists begin to reclaim their right to be cared for. Their right to take breaks. Their right to have needs. Their right to say no. Their right to feel messy and complicated and overwhelmed. Their right to be human.
One of the most powerful parts of supporting therapists during the holidays is helping them reconnect with the truth that they do not have to earn rest. They do not have to hold it all. They do not have to be the holiday hero. And they do not have to wait until January to care for themselves in the ways they’ve encouraged others to care for themselves all year.
At Hopeful Horizons Counseling, this season becomes a space to pause and reflect. To ground. To attune. To breathe. To honor the truth that even the strongest helpers deserve to be held. The work is not about giving therapists more skills or strategies—though those come naturally. It’s about offering them a space where they can let go. Where they can feel the weight of everything they’ve been carrying. Where their emotions have room to exist without being minimized or compared. Where they can feel supported instead of responsible.
Therapists are often the ones holding the emotional weight of the world. Letting someone hold them back is not a sign of weakness—it’s an act of resilience.
So if you’re a therapist reading this, let this be your gentle reminder: you don’t have to be okay all season long. You don’t have to enjoy the holidays. You don’t have to give from a place of depletion. You don’t have to show up perfectly. You don’t have to carry everyone’s emotions. And you don’t have to pretend you're unaffected by the very things you help others navigate.
You deserve a space where your humanity is allowed to breathe.
If this season feels heavy, complicated, or simply exhausting, you’re not alone. And you don’t have to hold it alone.
