Glitter Ghosts and Gravy Boats: A Nervous System Survival Guide for the Holidays
The only gym where the equipment is your childhood and the membership started before you were born
The holidays are a neurological hostage situation with better food. Your skeleton has been running cloud storage for three generations of family trauma, and this is the week everyone decides to sync at once. Your bandwidth is insufficient. Your system is overheating. And grandma just uploaded another file called “why_arent_you_married_yet.exe” that’s crashing your entire operating system.
Your blood remembers every holiday before your brain catches up. Your tissue holds time differently than your calendar. That clench in your stomach when you hear a car door? That’s not anxiety. That’s archaeology.
Welcome to the annual Nervous System Olympics. Events include: competitive people-pleasing, synchronized eye-rolling, and the freestyle “I’m fine” while your cortisol does a floor routine that would get a standing ovation at the Anxiety Olympics.
Your throat already knows which words it will swallow today. Your jaw has been rehearsing its clench since you saw the calendar flip to December.
You’re standing in the kitchen “helping,” which actually means hovering near the wine while your mother does everything herself and somehow you’re still doing it wrong. Your sister just made a comment that sounded like a compliment but your nervous system filed it under “attack” and now you’re smiling while internally composing a TED talk about boundaries you’ll never actually give.
WHY FAMILY HITS DIFFERENT (The Science Without the Fluff)
Your family doesn’t trigger you because they’re “toxic.” They trigger you because you were built inside them. You don’t meet your mother as an adult. You meet her as a nervous system that was literally formed inside her body. Her stress hormones shaped your stress response before you took your first breath. Mom wasn’t just mom. She was your first climate, your first chemistry, your first country. That’s why her tone of voice can erase 30 years of therapy in 0.3 seconds. That’s not weakness. That’s neurological loyalty written before you had language.
The first seven years? Software installation without a firewall. If your parents were dysregulated, overwhelmed, or emotionally unavailable, your nervous system learned hypervigilance, people-pleasing, freezing, or disappearing to keep the peace. Your brother can say the exact same words as your coworker, but only your brother activates the ancient survival protocol. Because your coworker wasn’t there when you were learning what it means to be loved.
And here’s the part that will make you cry over soup for no reason: You’re not just you. You’re the whole family tree with roots still whispering in your cells.
That unexplained wave of grief at the dinner table? Your cells remember when that same meal was cooked in silence, in war, in poverty. Epigenetics says trauma doesn’t just change lives, it changes how genes are read. What your grandfather never spoke, you exhale as panic without knowing why.
The holidays? Maximum compression. Every nervous system in one pot, resonating. One dysregulated member and the whole network vibrates. It’s an epigenetic karaoke competition and everyone’s singing songs they didn’t know they knew. Maybe it’s not hard because you’re failing. Maybe it’s hard because you’re carrying 300 years of emotional storage.
WELCOME TO TRIGGER GYM™
(Where Every Family Gathering Is Leg Day for Your Nervous System)
Those triggers you’re dreading? They’re not the enemy. They’re the workout.
Your mother’s “when are you finally going to...” is a bicep curl for your boundaries. Your father’s career advice is a deadlift for your self-worth. Your aunt’s comment about your weight is cardio for your “not my problem” muscle.
Your body has been lifting everyone else’s expectations for decades. No wonder your shoulders live next to your ears.
STATION 1: The Screen Séance
Everyone’s in the same room. Nobody’s in the same room. Dad’s “just checking one email” for the 37th time. Mom’s scrolling Instagram, comparing your chaos to someone’s curated aesthetic. The teenagers have ascended to a TikTok dimension. The kids are watching something loud on a tablet and honestly? That’s the most regulated anyone’s been in hours. Bodies sharing space while souls scroll in separate dimensions.
THE MOVE: Look up. Name three things you can see in the actual room. Feel your feet on the floor. You just re-entered your life.
STATION 2: The 24/7 Parent Trap
Schools closed. Daycare closed. The children are HERE. All day. For what feels like seventeen years compressed into two weeks.
You love them. Obviously. They’re also the reason you’ve hidden in the bathroom four times and it’s not even noon. Your partner and you have exchanged three adult sentences in four days, two were “your turn” and one was just a look that translated to “I am one Paw Patrol episode away from psychological collapse.”
Your nervous system is trying to regulate tiny humans who are dysregulated because YOUR nervous system is dysregulated. It’s a beautiful disaster loop.
THE MOVE: Tag team. Ten minutes alone. Just to let your body remember it exists as something other than a snack-dispensing jungle gym.
STATION 3: The Friendship Comparison Spiral
You’re out with your best friend. Should be connection. Instead your nervous systems are running silent calculations neither of you asked for. She has a partner, you don’t. Or she just got promoted while you’re “figuring things out.” Her holiday photos look like a Hallmark movie, yours look like a documentary about survival. Jealousy isn’t a character flaw. It’s your nervous system grieving something it wants but doesn’t have.
THE MOVE: Hand on heart. “I’m happy for her AND I’m sad for me.” Both things. Same breath.
STATION 4: The Parental Time Machine
Mom says that thing and suddenly you’re not 43 with a mortgage. You’re 12. Your amygdala has entered the chat. Your prefrontal cortex has left the building. Your inner child is now running the meeting and she is NOT prepared. Your nervous system doesn’t know it’s 2025. It thinks it’s every holiday you ever white-knuckled through, stacked on top of each other like a traumatic lasagna.
THE MOVE: Hand on chest, press until you feel bone. Slow exhale. You’re reminding your body you have a present tense where you pay taxes and can leave whenever you want.
STATION 5: The Ghost at the Empty Chair
For those whose holidays have a vacancy. Maybe someone died. Maybe the estrangement was necessary. Maybe you’re watching everyone post their family chaos and thinking: I would give anything for that chaos. Maybe every “so, anyone special?” lands like a small grenade in your chest. Maybe you have people but still feel like you’re watching through glass. Longing isn’t weakness. It’s your nervous system reaching for connection because that’s what it was built for. You’re not broken for wanting what you don’t have. You’re human in the most ancient, aching way.
THE MOVE: Both hands on belly. “I’m allowed to feel this AND I’m allowed to be okay.” Your loneliness doesn’t need to be spiritually bypassed. It just needs five seconds of being allowed to exist.
STATION 6: Capitalism in a Santa Hat
You’re in a fluorescent hellscape that smells like cinnamon and existential dread. Everyone’s shopping like the apocalypse is scheduled for December 27th. Inflation said “absolutely not” to your gift list and now you’re doing mental math while pretending you’re not. The woman behind you just sighed aggressively over cranberry sauce. Your cortisol is preparing for combat over condiments. Your body can’t distinguish between a crowded store and actual danger. It just knows: too much, too close, too loud.
THE MOVE: Shake your hands like you’re flicking off water. Soften your jaw. One long exhale. You’re not shopping. You’re surviving capitalism in a Santa hat.
THE BATHROOM RESET
Excuse yourself. Lock door. Cold water on wrists for 30 seconds. This drops your heart rate faster than any meditation app. Return slightly damp but mysteriously calmer. Your family will assume digestive issues. Let them.
THE ONLY ASSIGNMENT
The holidays don’t have to be magical. They just have to be done with your nervous system intact.
And you? You’re reading this in the bathroom, aren’t you. Cold water still dripping from your wrists. Someone’s yelling about the gravy. A child is crying for unclear reasons. Your phone battery is at 12%.
And yet here you are. Regulating. Like a goddamn professional.
Somewhere, your ancestors are watching and thinking: “Wait, you can just... BREATHE? And it WORKS? We carried this for 300 years and all we needed was a bathroom and a cold tap?!”
Yes. That’s exactly it.
Welcome to the first generation that knows what the hell to do. 🔥