Managing CPTSD During Holiday Family Gatherings: 5 Essential Skills

For those of us with complex trauma (CPTSD) from childhood, the holidays are often a heady cocktail of hope and dread.

No matter how much time has passed, our emotional scars can't help but twinge in remembrance when we're around our families — especially if old patterns are still active. When our bodies brace for the same dynamics to happen again, it's easy to question our progress and even doubt that healing has happened at all. 

Some families work together to heal the impact of complex trauma and learn how to create mechanisms of relational repair. Other families stay stuck in the quicksand of generational trauma, unwilling or unable to free themselves.

All it takes is for one of us to stand up, heal our trauma, and bring that momentum back to our family system to begin to change the pattern.

There is a difference between doing our own healing and getting stuck trying to fix our family dynamics. We might intend to make family gatherings easier and less painful, but we can't heal what's still happening. Instead, it’s essential to focus ruthlessly on what is within our control — our responsibility to ourselves.

CPTSD and Family Triggers: Understanding the Nervous System Response

For people with complex trauma, it’s easy for stress and trauma responses to feel overwhelming because of the unprocessed trauma we carry in our bodies. We might find ourselves swimming in old emotions from childhood, feeling hopeless, helpless, or full of rage, when there's nothing specifically happening in the moment to create that response. The tinder of family dynamics can quickly activate full-scale flashbacks that transport us back to the same anguish, loneliness, and frustration we felt in childhood.

When we're back in our family systems, even small triggers can have outsized impacts on our wellbeing.

That’s why, those of us with complex trauma can easily slip into hypervigilance. We hope that by staying aware of potentially harmful dynamics, we can avoid retraumatizing ourselves. But no matter how hard we try, complex trauma flashbacks flare before we even realize they’re happening.

It's easy to second-guess and blame ourselves, but our power lies in noticing what’s happening and then taking different action than the usual pattern. We need to gather our courage and make a change.

How to Regulate Your Nervous System with Complex PTSD

As adults, it's our responsibility to calm ourselves, when our nervous systems are activated. When we change how we respond, we have a better chance of connecting to the people we love from a place of curiosity and care.  

Rather than trying to change the family system, we can change our position within it. Rather than shaming, blaming, or making anyone wrong, we take wholehearted responsibility for our nervous system activation and tend to ourselves. We shift from caring for the emotions of others to caring for ourselves.

By holding clear boundaries — containing our own feelings while protecting ourselves from others' emotional impact — we can set limits and make requests that others can actually hear and respond to. When we come from a settled and centered nervous system, our words land differently for other people.

Because of interpersonal neurobiology, which is the science of how our nervous systems are socially and relationally connected, the strongest nervous system sets the emotional tone in a group of people. Centering the nervous system in a calm state can help family members move into the same centered calm.

When we’re in a state of heart-centered coherence, our nervous systems become the new baseline for our family systems. This might not happen instantly, but with time the gravity in family dynamics starts to shift.

This kind of centered calm in the face of generational trauma takes skill, but skills are learnable.

People change when they have good reason to do so — at any age. The powerful thing about changing positions in a family system is that the rest of the system automatically adjusts to the new equilibrium by shifting position too. Our own centered, grounded state is naturally more coherent and can bring others into a new alignment.

This is how we create more peace and joy in our families over the holidays. We bring our skills and our settled, grounded presence to the people we love and invite them to meet us in new and different ways.

5 Essential Skills for Shifting Family Trauma During the Holiday 

Here's how to work with your nervous system activation to create opportunities for connection and care in your family system over the holidays. These are complex skills, so be patient with yourself as you put them into practice. The patterns you’re shifting may have been here for generations and this is going to take some time.

1. Recognize Your Body's Signals

Notice when you feel angry, shutdown, or frustrated. Scan your body regularly to sense how you’re doing. For example, when a family member criticizes your appearance or asks intrusive questions about your relationship, your shoulders might tense and your breathing become shallow. 

These activated feelings are indicators that something isn't right. Your body's sensations are embodied intelligence sending you information and prompting you to do something. Rather than ignoring or trying to change how you feel, listen and respond.

2. Prioritize Self-Care

Those of us with complex trauma are used to putting other people first. It can feel selfish or even wrong to prioritize ourselves and our self-care. Prepare yourself to feel selfish and uncomfortable when practicing these new skills.

Before family gatherings, assemble your toolkit of brief self-care strategies you can call on in the moment. Instead of forcing yourself to stay in a conversation where you feel trapped and overwhelmed, excuse yourself without explaining.

Stepping outside for a few moments of fresh air is a reliable way to give yourself space. You might even coordinate a signal, with your partner, that you need them to step away to connect with you.

3. Protect from Emotional Impact

We can choose what energy we absorb. When family members are activated into familiar trauma responses, it’s essential to remember that their emotions are not your responsibility. For example, if a family member starts attacking your career choices, pause to take care of yourself before responding.

Do what you can to shift your nervous system back into calm and self-connection. Perhaps visualize a shield or armor around your body, creating a force field that protects you from harshness and intrusion. See it, hear it activate, and imagine unwelcome comments collapsing against the outside of your protective boundary like bugs on a car windshield. 

4. Communicate Limits

Setting limits defines what we will and won't accept in our relationships. This isn’t about right or wrong, but what we want to experience in our close relationships. Communicating limits from a centered, calm nervous system has a coherence that others can sense, when it’s done by stating clearly and simply where our limits lie.

Limits can be hard to hear, especially in families with generational trauma where boundaries might be overly rigid or overly porous. It can help to say, “I need to take a break now,” or “I’m not comfortable discussing that topic.” Set limits early, before situations escalate, and do your best to communicate them without judgement or blame.

5. Make Requests

Once we know our preferences, we can make requests for what we need. Making requests strengthens your relational integrity, whether you get what you're asking for or not. When you do this from a place of care and connection, you invite others to join you in the negotiation and practice of relationships.

You might say, “I’d appreciate it if we could avoid discussing politics during dinner,” or “I would be happy to talk about this more in-depth at another time.”

Using “I” statements takes responsibility for your preferences and helps people hear your requests. Do your best to speak up, without expecting others to meet you there, and it will get easier with time. 

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It's courageous to explore shifting patterns of generational trauma. Instead of getting stuck in old patterns, we can focus on our own nervous system state, setting limits and making requests as needed. How others respond isn't up to us, but we get to lead by example.

Learning these skills is a gift not just for yourself, but for your entire family system. As we practice them, we step into a new culture of cherishing and of care.

Our families — the ones we're born into and the ones we create — deserve nothing less.

Elie Losleben supports individuals and couples internationally through trauma resolution and embodied healing. She brings extensive training in somatic approaches and a deep understanding of how the nervous system shapes our capacity for connection. To learn more about working together, you're welcome to reach out.