Holiday Anxiety 5: Emotions Triggered by Painful Childhood Associations | Reneau Peurifoy

If you grew up in a family where there was physical, sexual, mental or emotional abuse, some if not much of the holiday anxiety you are experiencing may come from associations with painful childhood experiences.

People who come from abusive families often begin experiencing anxiety, irritability or a feeling of not being themselves around Thanksgiving. While this sometimes decreases a little after Thanksgiving, it then tends to increase again as Christmas approaches. They then begin to feel normal the second or third week of January.

The reason for this is that the increased tension of the holiday season often makes parents with limited coping skills more abusive during this time. A critical parent, for example, becomes more critical, while a physically abusive parent becomes more out of control. Increased holiday drinking can also play a role in increased abuse.

In families like this, the holiday decorations, music and activities become associated with danger. These types of associations can develop into conditioned emotional responses commonly called emotional triggers. These are emotional responses that trigger the fight or flight response by something specific you hear, see, feel, smell, taste or think. If you want to learn more about these types of triggers, view the video titled, “Emotional Triggers” in the videos section of this website.

If you come from an abusive family and experience this type of holiday anxiety, a simple tool I call “what’s happening/what’s real” can be very helpful in reducing and eventually quieting this type of holiday anxiety.

When using this approach, the first step is to Identify Situations that Trigger the Conditioned Emotional Response. The more specific and clearly you identify both your reaction and the situation that is triggering it, the more successful you will be.

Next, you identify how today is different from the past. Again, the more specific you are, the more successful you will be. Here is an example of what one person used to summarize what was triggering her anxiety and how today is different from the past.

She wrote her summary on a card and then read it once a day for several days until she could paraphrase it without much thinking whenever she noticed her anxiety or irritability was increasing.

What’s happening: I’m experiencing a conditioned emotional response that was caused by frightening things that occurred in my home during the holidays. Mom and dad became more abusive and I was constantly on the alert to stay out of their way and below the radar.

What’s real: I’m now in my own home and I control what happens here. I am safe and I can make the holidays into whatever I want.

In addition to using this technique, take time to decide what you want for the holidays as was discussed in earlier posts. This might include new traditions that would be healthy for you as well as abandoning old ones that have generated negative emotions. It might also involve avoiding or at least reducing the amount of time spent at anxiety-producing events.

As you quiet the conditioned emotional responses, set limits and develop new traditions that generate positive feelings, you’ll find, over the course of two or three holidays, you can diminish most of the holiday anxiety you experience.