At a Glance
The holiday season often intensifies stress, loneliness, and old family patterns, particularly for those with histories of criticism or emotional neglect. This article explains why these reactions occur and shows how psychologically grounded compassion, combining emotional soothing with firm boundaries, can regulate the nervous system, reduce reactivity, and support healthier, value-led responses during Christmas.
The Holiday Season Stirs Up Big Feelings
On the surface, holidays promise warmth, celebration, and connection. However, the holidays can be difficult for many people, and you may feel anxious, depressed, exhausted, lonely, and experience emotional flashbacks. Mental well-being over Christmas can be affected by heightened expectations, family pressures, or even a change in routine.
I often hear clients say, “I love the idea of the holidays, but I don’t love how I feel during them.” They are not alone, because, according to a survey, around one in three people in the UK say their mental health during Christmas gets worse. That’s not all, 84% find the festive period stressful or triggering, and nearly three-quarters report feeling lonelier even when surrounded by others.
As a Clinical Psychologist, I’ve noticed that this time of year regularly awakens old emotional patterns, ones shaped long before adulthood. Being around family, navigating expectations, and trying to keep up with the invisible list of “shoulds” can bring us straight back into outdated roles we learned during childhood.
If you are finding Christmas hard, there is one choice that can quietly transform how you experience this season. It involves learning to respond to yourself with compassion that is psychologically informed and supportive of real change. This kind of compassion helps regulate your nervous system, strengthens your ability to set health boundaries, and allows you to stay aligned with your values even when familiar family patterns begin to resurface. This is cultivated in Compassion-Focused Therapy and Schema Therapy, which soothes and stabilises you.
Why the Holidays Feel Emotionally Heavy
Even if you’re not celebrating a specific holiday, December carries a universal emotional intensity. There’s the pressure to be joyful, the expectation to socialise, and the belief that you must meet certain standards or traditions. If you’re finding Christmas hard and searching for ways to protect your mental well-being over Christmas, this pressure is often the first thing to address.
For instance, if you grew up in a family marked by criticism, unpredictability, emotional neglect, or high expectations, this season can unconsciously reactivate old schemas, the emotional themes shaped early in life.
You may notice yourself slipping into familiar roles from either being the perfectionist, the peacekeeper, the helper, or the invisible one. These aren’t flaws. They’re emotional echoes, and they often return most loudly when we re-enter old systems, even temporarily.
The Hidden Cost of “Just Getting Through It”
For many people, mental health during Christmas worsens, and they move through the season on autopilot, prioritising everyone else first, while quietly absorbing discomfort. They buy thoughtful gifts, go to social events, and answer with a polite smile even when comments or family dynamics feel painful. However, overriding your own needs simply to avoid tension can come at a high emotional cost.
The vulnerable part of you withdraws, the angry part might flare, or the detached part shuts down without meaning to. You end up present physically but absent emotionally. This is where compassion becomes essential, not as a luxury, but as a form of emotional protection.
What Compassion Actually Means in Psychology
Compassion is often mistaken for softness, but in psychology and clinical practice, it is understood as an active, evidence-based way of responding to suffering. It involves recognising distress, understanding what is happening internally, and choosing responses that support emotional safety and long-term well-being, instead of coping short-term.
This understanding is grounded in Paul Gilbert’s work, where compassion is defined as a motivation to acknowledge suffering and take steps to alleviate or prevent it. It is not passive or indulgent. It requires courage, steadiness, and, at times, the willingness to make protective choices rather than reactive ones. Similarly, Kirstine Neff’s research on self-compassion adds further clarity through three core elements, which include mindfulness, self-compassion, and recognising our shared humanity.
Within this framework, compassion shows up in two essential forms. Tender compassion is the soothing, validating response that says, “It makes sense this is hard for you.” Fierce compassion is the protective, boundary-setting response that says, “This is not safe for me.” Together, these forms of compassion support nervous system regulations and help people who are finding Christmas hard. It also offers clearer, more intentional responses during emotionally charged family situations.
Compassionate Strategies to Support Yourself This Holiday Season
1. Acknowledge Your Emotional State
When you notice yourself shutting down or reacting strongly, quietly acknowledge it. Saying to yourself, “My vulnerable child feels triggered,” or My protector is stepping in,” instantly creates a gap between reaction and response. Acknowledging that gap is important for your mental health during Christmas, as it lets you, as a “Healthy Adult,” observe and choose better. In my work, I use simple labels so clients can move from automatic survival responses to deliberate, composed choices that reduce reactivity and make room for self-care.
2. Prepare For Emotional Triggers
Take time now to identify specific people, topics, or situations that tend to unsettle you. I encourage clients to make a brief plan for how they will manage typical triggers so the nervous system is less surprised when something happens. Anticipation permits you to practice responses, rehearse short boundary phrases, and decide where you will take restorative breaks. This reduces overwhelm and increases the chance you’ll act from values and not from old habits.
3. Set Compassionate Boundaries
Boundaries are an act of fierce compassion, and they don’t need to be confrontational. Calm, short lines such as “I’d prefer not to discuss that” or “I’m stepping outside for a moment” both protect you and communicate your limits. From a therapy perspective, boundaries help retrain relational expectations and reduce shame about saying no. Practising these phrases in advance makes them easier to use when pressure rises and helps keep you emotionally present.
4. Lean Into Tender Self-Compassion
When you feel overwhelmed, speak to yourself as a wise caring adult. Phrases like, “It makes sense I’m feeling this way” or I’m allowed to take a break” are small but corrective experiences that soothe shame and self criticism. Cultivating tender compassion helps lower the internal threat system and creates more emotional space for thinking clearly. Over time this kind, mindful stance becomes a reliable source you can access in family moments.
5. Build Micro Retreats
Short, internal pauses throughout the day are impactful forms of self-regulation and mental well-being over Christmas. Step outside for a breath, sit quietly in the car for five minutes, or do a grounding exercise before re-entering a social situation. These micro-retreats reset physiological arousal and let you return to the room with more presence and choice. I teach simple, evidence-based techniques you can practice in session, so they become automatic support on challenging days.
The Most Supportive Gift You Can Give Yourself
The best gift you can give yourself this season is compassionate care that combines tenderness and protection. If you are finding Christmas hard and these patterns repeat every year, therapy can be an effective way to develop self-compassion, clearer boundaries, and lasting nervous system regulation. I offer Compassion-Focused Therapy and Schema Therapy, alongside CBT and DBT-informed techniques, to help you practice these strategies in a safe, structured way. If you’d like to explore options, I offer both online and in-person sessions from my Petersfield clinic.
A Different Kind of Holiday Gift
The most valuable gift you can give this season isn’t a beautifully wrapped present, a perfect home, or a flawless performance of cheer.
It’s compassion towards yourself.
Compassion that acknowledges when you’re overwhelmed.
Compassion that honours your limits.
Compassion that brings both gentleness and strength.
Compassion that says, “I matter too.”
When you lead with compassion, you shift from surviving the holiday season to experiencing it in a way that reflects who you’ve become, not the roles you once learned to play.
And perhaps this year, the holiday season can offer a moment of reconnection with yourself, a quiet, grounding reminder that you deserve the same tenderness and protection you offer others.
If this season consistently brings up old wounds, therapy can provide a supportive space to understand these patterns and build the inner security to navigate them differently. You don’t have to repeat the same emotional story every December, you can begin a new chapter grounded in compassion, clarity, and emotional safety.
Finding Support During the Holiday Season
Holidays can be difficult and bring up anxiety, loneliness, burnout, or old family patterns. Therapy can improve mental well-being over Christmas and help you understand why these reactions intensify and how to respond differently.
Schema Therapy reframes self-critical thoughts and entrenched patterns as adaptive responses rather than flaws, and strengthens your Healthy Adult to respond with steadiness and care. Compassion-Focused Therapy then fosters inner safety, supporting you to move forward from calm and not from urgency.
I am Dr Sonney Gullu-McPhee, an HCPC & BPS Registered Chartered Clinical Psychologist and an ISST Certified Advanced Schema Therapist. I offer Compassion-Focused and Schema Therapy in Hampshire, both online and in person. I work with adults who struggle with low emotional resilience, self-worth, emotional exhaustion, comparison, or the quiet pain of feeling they should be further along in life.
Whether this time of year brings up emotional overwhelm, unresolved childhood wounds, grief, or a sense of not being enough, therapy can help. With therapy, you understand why these patterns intensify and how to move through them with greater clarity and self-compassion.
The time around holidays can be hard for some as the season amplifies feelings of disconnection, fear of disappointing others, or the pressure to maintain old roles. These emotional echoes can be even more challenging if you’ve experienced trauma, neglect, or complex family histories.
With compassion-focused therapy and schema therapy, you get a grounded, evidence-based support to help you regulate your nervous system, soften harsh self-judgment, and build healthy boundaries. Together, we can explore what arises for you at this time of year and develop personalised strategies to help you feel more steady, protected, and emotionally anchored.
If you’d like to explore whether therapy could support you this holiday season, you’re welcome to get in touch for a free 15-minute consultation to see if we might be a good fit. Call or email to book an appointment.