When the Holidays Hurt: A Therapist’s Journey Through Religious Trauma and Seasonal Expectations

There is a moment every year when the holiday season begins to announce itself. Sometimes it’s the first cool morning after months of heat. Sometimes it’s the way the stores fill with reds and greens overnight. Sometimes it’s the quiet pressure we feel in our bodies before we’ve even had time to name it. For many people, this shift brings nostalgia, warmth, anticipation. But for therapists who have lived through religious trauma or are actively deconstructing their faith, the holidays can feel like a storm gathering on the horizon.

There’s a certain loneliness that settles in when the world around you seems to celebrate a season that your body still associates with fear, pressure, performance, or spiritual control. And that loneliness can be layered with guilt because as therapists, we often feel like we should have healed from it by now. We sit with clients through their own family triggers, religious wounds, and holiday dread — and part of us whispers that if we can help them move through it, why can’t we just do the same?

But healing doesn’t work that way.
Especially not when the trauma was spiritual.

My own discomfort with the holidays crept up on me slowly, like a wave pulling at my ankles long before I realized it was pulling me out to sea. For years, I went into the season assuming my internal reactions were simply stress or exhaustion or being “too busy.” It took me a long time — longer than I want to admit — to realize that the heaviness I felt wasn’t about the holidays themselves. It was about what the holidays symbolized in the environment I grew up in. It was the rituals, the expectations, the pressure to perform joy, the messages about worthiness and holiness, the rules that shaped my sense of identity long before I had the chance to choose one for myself.

When I became a therapist, my relationship with the holidays became even more complicated. Clients would enter November with their own stories: fear of seeing family members who once shamed them, anxiety about returning to churches that triggered their trauma, grief over the spiritual identities they were letting go of, and guilt for not feeling the way they were taught they were supposed to feel. Their stories mirrored my own experiences so closely sometimes that I could feel memories rising in my throat like smoke.

I had to learn how to be both the therapist and the human. I had to learn how to hold space for others without abandoning myself. And I had to learn how to navigate the holidays without feeling like I was betraying the younger version of me who worked so hard to be “good” for so many years.

One of the most challenging parts of holiday-related religious trauma is the way the body remembers. You can deconstruct the theology. You can reject the church. You can understand, intellectually, that you are no longer in danger. But the sensations live in your nervous system like ghosts. A Christmas hymn can make your stomach tighten. A nativity scene can bring back memories of sermons that taught you fear instead of love. A family invitation to Christmas Eve service can make your heart race even if you have no intention of going.

For therapists, those reactions can feel especially disorienting. We are trained to understand trauma. We are trained to help others regulate, reframe, and reclaim. But when it’s your own body sending up flares, the work becomes deeply personal. It becomes tender. It becomes messy in the ways therapy textbooks never prepared us for.

I remember the first year I allowed myself to say out loud that Christmas didn’t feel comforting to me anymore. That it felt complicated. That it brought more dread than joy. I didn’t say it to a client or to a colleague. I said it quietly to myself while driving alone, noticing the familiar ache in my chest as holiday lights appeared across front lawns. It felt strange to admit it. Almost like a confession. Almost like I was breaking some rule I didn’t know I was still obeying.

But saying it didn’t break me.
It freed me.

Once I acknowledged how the season made me feel, I stopped forcing myself to pretend I was fine. I stopped telling myself that I was just being dramatic or sensitive. I started honoring the parts of me that were still trying to heal from messages I internalized long before I understood their impact.

Many therapists with religious trauma carry a deep sense of responsibility to maintain peace during the holidays — even in their own families. We were once the children who absorbed emotional tension, who softened conflict, who performed faithfulness, who kept quiet to avoid punishment or disappointment. It makes perfect sense that as adults, especially as clinicians, we fall into those roles without thinking. We walk into family gatherings and suddenly we are the compliant version of ourselves again, the version we thought we’d outgrown.

There is something profoundly painful about returning to environments that shaped your spiritual trauma while simultaneously trying to maintain your professional identity as a therapist who “knows better.” But knowing better doesn’t erase conditioning. It doesn’t override years of fear-based messaging. It doesn’t eliminate the reflex to shrink yourself in order to avoid conflict.

There is a unique grief that surfaces when you realize you can no longer participate in certain traditions the way you once did. For some therapists, that grief comes with guilt — guilt for disappointing their families, guilt for stepping away from rituals that once felt sacred, guilt for questioning something everyone around them still seems to believe wholeheartedly. And for others, the grief shows up as longing — longing for a sense of spiritual connection, longing for community, longing for the comfort religion once provided before it became a source of harm.

Holiday gatherings can become emotional minefields. Someone asks where you go to church now. Someone comments about “keeping Christ in Christmas.” Someone brings up politics. Someone makes a passive-aggressive remark about people who have fallen away. And suddenly the therapist part of you — the part that knows how to remain neutral, grounded, and composed — becomes overwhelmed by the human part of you that remembers being shamed or silenced or controlled.

The hardest part is that many therapists feel like they can’t talk about this with anyone. Not with religious family members who wouldn’t understand. Not with colleagues who haven’t experienced spiritual trauma. Not with clients, because the therapeutic space isn’t about us. And not even with themselves sometimes, because admitting the pain feels like admitting defeat.

But there is nothing weak or shameful about carrying religious trauma into the holiday season. There is nothing unprofessional about struggling with parts of your story that were never yours to choose. There is nothing wrong with navigating old wounds while helping others navigate theirs.

Therapists deserve the same compassion we give our clients.
We deserve support.
We deserve space.
We deserve to unlearn what hurt us.

My healing didn’t happen in one holiday season. It happened slowly, across many of them. It happened through small acts of self-permission — allowing myself not to attend certain gatherings, choosing to create my own traditions, honoring my discomfort without judgment, and building boundaries that would have terrified my younger self. It happened in therapy sessions where I finally said out loud the things I had held inside for years. It happened in moments of rage, moments of grief, moments of emptiness, and surprisingly, moments of relief.

One December, I skipped a service I once attended every year. I stayed home, made tea, sat on my couch with a blanket, and listened to rain. For the first time in my life, I felt a sense of peace that had nothing to do with performative spirituality and everything to do with choosing myself. I didn’t realize until that moment how deeply my nervous system had been conditioned to associate the holidays with obligation instead of rest.

That was the year I decided the holidays would no longer control me.
That I could reclaim them.
Redefine them.
Or walk away from them entirely if I needed to.

And I’ve learned since then that therapists walking through religious trauma often experience a second wave of healing during the holidays. The forced proximity to old environments, expectations, and messages creates an opportunity — not a comfortable one, but a meaningful one — to understand what still hurts and why. To hear the parts of your story that still need compassion. To notice where your body still braces, and where it wants to soften.

The holidays may always carry a bit of complexity for those of us who were wounded in religious settings. But complexity is not the same as brokenness. And just because it feels heavy doesn’t mean you haven’t grown.

There is a powerful kind of freedom that emerges when you stop trying to force yourself to love a season that once harmed you. When you allow your holidays to look different than what you were taught. When you stop measuring your healing by how close you are to your old beliefs and instead measure it by how safe you feel within yourself.

If you are a therapist navigating religious trauma this holiday season, please hear this:

You are not behind.
You are not failing.
You are not “less healed” because this time of year hurts.

You are a human being whose body remembers.
You are a survivor of an experience that shaped you deeply.
You are permitted to protect your peace.
You are allowed to rest instead of perform.
You are allowed to choose distance.
You are allowed to grieve.
You are allowed to build new traditions that feel safe, grounding, and wholly your own.

You are allowed to redefine the meaning of this season, without guilt and without apology.

Healing from religious trauma — especially during the holidays — is not a linear process. It is a tender one. It is a brave one. And it is a profoundly human one.

And you deserve every ounce of compassion you offer to the world.