Holiday dread: When the body tells the truth - Renee Ellory

Your body holds the truth long before your mind is willing to name it.

Image: wal_172619/ Pixabay

If holidays make your body clench before your mind even knows why, you’re not broken — your nervous system is replaying a childhood where holidays were a performance, not a place of safety, warmth, or connection.

Because some of us didn’t grow up with warmth or safety.

We grew up in homes where you could feel the emotional weather shift before anyone spoke. Where the expectation to be perfect consumed every holiday.

Where the table was beautifully set…
…but every person was quietly bracing.

Where “tradition” meant:

• walking on eggshells
• anticipating explosions
• dodging silent treatments
• managing someone else’s mood so the day didn’t collapse

For some of us, holidays weren’t celebrations.
They were tests.
And the test was always:
“Can you keep the peace well enough not to get targeted?”

And here’s the part no one tells you:

If you grew up like this, your body will react to the holidays even decades later.

You’ll tighten.
You’ll dread.
You’ll feel that old pressure that nothing you ever do is “right”.
Even if you’re an adult now.
Even if you moved away.
Even if the dysfunctional person is no longer alive.

And for some people, it isn’t just the past.
It’s the present — the relationship you’re in now, the partner who destabilizes the home, the dynamic that forces you to manage someone else’s reactivity just to get through the season.

If the holidays feel unsafe now, you’re not failing.
You’re still trying to survive someone else’s instability — someone who never took responsibility, so you did.

Here’s the truth no one gave you as a child:

Nothing was wrong with you. Something was wrong around you.

You weren’t “too sensitive.”
You weren’t dramatic.
You weren’t the reason they yelled, sulked, triangulated, or blamed.
You were doing emotional acrobatics no child — or adult — should ever have to do.

Your body remembers what others deny.
Holiday dread isn’t a personality flaw.
It’s a survival response.

But here’s the part they never got to steal:

You get to redefine what holidays mean now.

Even if dysfunction still surrounds you, you have choices — small ones, quiet ones, internal ones.

You can choose peace where you find it.
You can say “no.”
You can opt out entirely.
You can spend the day with people who don’t require psychological gymnastics.
You can call quiet “safety,” not “selfish.”

And if this year still feels heavy —
if November hits and your chest tightens,
if your body revolts,
if someone still makes the holidays confusing, chaotic, or unsafe —

That isn’t failure.
That’s your nervous system doing the one job it always did: protect you.

You’re unlearning survival patterns that ran deep.
You’re living truths you were never allowed to see.
You’re responding to reality — not the story someone tried to force you to believe.

And here’s the shift that matters:

If this was your childhood — or your present — you’re not imagining it.
You’re noticing it.

Your body caught the truth long before anyone named it.
It always did.

You don’t owe anyone a reenactment of the role they assigned you.
Not this year.
Not ever.

Your holidays don’t have to be performances anymore.
They get to be honest — even if honesty looks nothing like tradition.

May this give you the one thing you weren’t allowed back then:
a clear view of what’s true.