December is hard when you have trauma.

Here's the thing about December: the whole world acts like it's supposed to be magical. Cozy. Joyful. A time for family and gratitude and sparkly lights.

And if you have a trauma history, you might spend most of the month wondering what's wrong with you for feeling like you're barely surviving it.

Nothing is wrong with you. Your nervous system is doing exactly what it was designed to do. It's just that what it was designed to do doesn't play well with forced togetherness, sensory overload, and everyone asking why you're so quiet.

Your Body Remembers What Your Mind Tries to Forget

Trauma isn't stored as a story you can retell at dinner parties. It's stored in the body—in the nervous system, the muscles, the breath. Bessel van der Kolk's research has shown us that traumatic memories are held somatically, which means your body can be triggered even when your conscious mind has no idea what's happening.

December is a minefield of these triggers. The particular quality of late afternoon light. The smell of certain foods cooking. A song on the radio. The sound of raised voices in another room. Your uncle's aftershave. The way tension builds in a house before a family gathering even starts.

Your body registers these cues and responds before you have any say in the matter. This isn't weakness. This is neurobiology.

The Hidden Triggers No One Talks About

Most articles about "surviving the holidays" focus on the obvious stuff—difficult family members, grief, loneliness. But for trauma survivors, the triggers often run deeper and stranger than that.

Sensory overload: Crowded shops, competing music, flashing lights, strong food smells, multiple conversations happening at once. For anyone with a sensitised nervous system (which includes most trauma survivors and neurodivergent people), this isn't festive—it's dysregulating.

Relational surveillance: That constant feeling of being watched, evaluated, monitored. "You're so thin!" "You've put on weight!" "Why aren't you eating more?" "You're awfully quiet today." When hypervigilance is your baseline, this kind of scrutiny is exhausting at best and re-traumatising at worst.

Performance pressure: The expectation that you'll be happy, grateful, present, engaged, warm, patient, helpful, and appropriately festive—while also managing your own internal chaos. For those who learned to fawn to survive, December can feel like one long performance with no intermission.

Forced intimacy: Physical proximity to people who hurt you. Or people who didn't protect you. Or people who still don't believe you. Being expected to hug, to sit close, to make small talk, to pretend.

What's Actually Happening in Your Body

Stephen Porges' Polyvagal Theory gives us a framework for understanding why December can feel so physiologically destabilising. Your autonomic nervous system is constantly scanning for safety or threat—what Porges calls "neuroception." This happens below conscious awareness.

When your nervous system detects threat (even if your mind is telling you everything is fine), it mobilises you for survival. You might notice:

Sympathetic activation (fight/flight): Racing heart, shallow breathing, restlessness, irritability, the urge to escape, snapping at people over small things, difficulty sleeping.

Dorsal vagal shutdown (freeze/collapse): Feeling foggy, disconnected, exhausted, heavy, numb, like you're watching yourself from outside your body, difficulty speaking or engaging.

Fawn response: Over-agreeing, people-pleasing, abandoning your own needs to keep the peace, saying yes when you mean no, apologising for existing.

These aren't character flaws. They're adaptive survival responses that kept you alive. Deb Dana's work on befriending the nervous system reminds us that we don't pathologise these states—we recognise them as the body's best attempt at protection.

What Actually Helps (Beyond "Set Boundaries")

I'm not going to tell you to "set boundaries with toxic family members" as if that's a simple thing you just hadn't thought of. If you could easily do that, you would have done it already.

Instead, some things that might actually help:

Know your early warning signs. What does your body do when it starts to feel unsafe? Learn the specific signals—the tightening in your chest, the clenching jaw, the urge to make yourself small. Early awareness gives you more options.

Have an exit strategy. Not just "I'll leave if it gets bad" but a specific, planned way out. Your own transport. A friend you can call. A code word with someone who gets it. Knowing you can leave makes staying more tolerable.

Create micro-moments of regulation. You probably can't excuse yourself for a 20-minute grounding exercise. But you can press your feet into the floor. Feel the cold water on your hands when you wash them. Step outside for 60 seconds of fresh air. Small interventions matter.

Let your body move the energy. Trauma energy that gets mobilised needs somewhere to go. A walk around the block. Tensing and releasing your muscles under the table. Even excusing yourself to the bathroom and shaking your hands can help discharge activation.

Lower your own bar. Surviving December counts. You don't have to enjoy it. You don't have to be gracious about it. Getting through it with your nervous system somewhat intact is enough.

You're Not Broken

If December is hard for you, it's not because you're ungrateful or damaged or "not healed enough." It's because your nervous system learned that closeness can be dangerous, that family can hurt, that the holidays are a time to brace for impact.

That learning happened for a reason. It protected you. And now it might be working a little too hard, flagging threats that aren't there anymore, or staying activated around people who haven't earned your relaxation.

That's not pathology. That's survival.

Healing is hard and takes longer than anyone wants. But understanding what's happening in your body—why you feel the way you do in December—is part of that healing.

Want More Support?

I've created a free guide specifically for this: Surviving the Holidays When You Have Trauma: A Somatic Guide. It includes nervous system education, practical somatic tools you can use in the moment, and strategies for getting through December without betraying yourself.

Because you deserve more than "just get through it." You deserve to understand what your body is doing and why, and to have actual tools that work with your nervous system instead of against it.

[Download the free guide here] https://drmel1.podia.com/surviving-the-holidays-with-trauma