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When Family Becomes a Trigger: Navigating Holiday Gatherings After Trauma

The holiday season is filled with a multitude of feelings for most women; often, it is a very complex mixture of happy and unhappy feelings, stress, and the heaviness of difficult emotional issues. 


Traditionally, the holiday season is about celebrating family with great joy and pride. However, current statistics from Canada demonstrate that home is the most frequent location of domestic and sexual violence toward women. 


In fact, women experience family and intimate partner violence at a rate significantly greater than men (Statistics Canada, 2025). Many women who come to me share that the holidays tend to resurface emotional wounds they’ve been working hard to heal.


When holiday gatherings create feelings of discomfort, anxiety, or heaviness, you are not imagining it, and you are not alone. 


While your thoughts and feelings do not mean you are failing, they do indicate the trauma you have experienced, which is deserving of compassion and support.

✨ Why Family Can Be Triggering Even if You Love Them


Canadian research regarding trauma and mental health has identified that people may experience activation of a trauma response in a situation that represents a place of emotional invalidation or unresolved conflict, due to their connection with that environment as connected to trauma or caregivers and previous experiences of trauma (PHAC, 2025; CAMH, 2024). 

This includes many women's family gatherings,  even with love present.


Some triggers may arise when:

  • 🌫️ being placed back into roles you’ve outgrown

  • 🫥 interacting with relatives who minimized your experiences

  • 🧶 cultural or generational expectations to remain polite, agreeable, or “strong.”

  • 🗣️ comments about your body, choices, or relationships

  • 🧘🏾‍♀️‍➡️ feeling responsible for managing other people’s emotions


These types of reactions do not necessarily mean that you are overreacting or dramatic. They are trauma responses and demonstrate how the body remembers what it has gone through to survive.

✨ Family Traditions Can Hold Both Love and Pain


Many women, and particularly Black, Caribbean, immigrant and racialized women, are faced with additional burdens regarding cultural expectations. 


Expectations of respect, loyalty, silence and the need to take care of others’ emotions have historically been a part of family traditions.


These traditions have both cultural significance and inherent beauty; however, they may create:


  • 🎎 Pressure to fulfill your gender role

  • 🤐 Silence regarding past abuse

  • 🕊️ Expectations to maintain “peace in the family.”

  • 🪞 conflicted feelings of obligation and resentment


It is possible to deeply love your family while at the same time feeling emotionally unsafe in certain family dynamics. 


Both of these truths can exist together, and by addressing both of these truths can begin the healing process. At NJCCS, I  provide a safe space to explore both the cultural bonds that hold significance to you and the emotional trauma that requires healing.

✨You Don't Have to Go Through This Alone


People celebrate the holidays for every reason imaginable, but for many women, this time of year is full of sadness, fear, suffering and emotional wounds that they can heal from. Even though everyone is busy celebrating and partying, it's easy to forget about the struggle and to feel out of sorts.


At NJCCS, I work with women to:

🧩 Understand why certain people, places, or traditions activate emotional pain

🫀 Learn how trauma is stored and expressed in the body

🌺 See how cultural expectations shape their trauma and emotional needs

🌿 Explore how generational patterns influence their reactions

🔍💗 Understand what their reactions, feelings, and behaviours are trying to communicate


It's important to remember that healing does not necessarily mean that you have to "suck it up" and continue to endure what hurts. Healing means you have a place to feel safe and understand and process how you feel without fear of being judged.


If the holidays are bringing you more pain than joy, know you are not alone and that NJCCS will be there for you and support you through this process.


You deserve to feel safe, grounded and truly understood.

With warmth,


Nada Johnson, MSW, RSW

Registered Social Worker, Psychotherapist / trained Family Mediator / EMDR Trained Therapist / Certified Racial Trauma Clinician / Mental Health & Sexual Violence Consultant / Professional Speaker


Nada Johnson Consulting & Counselling Services – Online phone and video sessions available

Village Healing Centre: 240 Roncesvalles Avenue




Please share this post to support another woman who may be quietly carrying too much. 🤝

References

Canadian Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. (2024). Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). CAMH. https://www.camh.ca/en/health-info/mental-illness-and-addiction-index/posttraumatic-stress-disorder

Health Infobase. (2024). Family violence and lower positive mental health in adults. Government of Canada. https://health-infobase.canada.ca/mental-health/family-violence/

Hoffman, S. J., Richardson, H., Lee, J. Y., Khan, S., & Waisman, S. (2025). Health status among women and men in Canada who have experienced non-physical intimate partner violence (IPV). PLOS ONE. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11891695/

Public Health Agency of Canada. (2025). Trauma- and violence-informed approaches to policy and practice. Government of Canada. https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/publications/health-risks-safety/trauma-violence-informed-approaches-policy-practice.html

Statistics Canada. (2025, October 28). Trends in police-reported family violence and intimate partner violence in Canada, 2024. The Daily. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/251028/dq251028a-eng.htm

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