Invisible Wounds Healing from Trauma: Episode 42: Oh, The Not So Joyous Holidays!

Hey there, it’s Kerri. Thank you so much for joining me on this latest episode of Invisible Wounds: Healing from Trauma. This is episode 42, and I’m going to talk about why the holidays can be less than happy and joyous for many of us. I’m so glad that we’re walking the path towards healing together! So just a quick reminder, I’m not a clinician, counselor, or physician. I’m a Certified Trauma and Resiliency Life Coach, a Certified Trauma Support Specialist, Advocate, and someone with lots of lived experience with trauma. Also, the information presented in this podcast is for educational purposes only and not meant to replace treatment by a doctor or any other licensed professional. All right let’s dive in! The holidays mean so many different things to us all. They tend to be a reflection of our personal experiences, religions, memories, habits, and so on. We are bombarded today typically right after Halloween with all things Christmas (Thanksgiving gets touched on, then quickly bypassed) with ads showing smiling families, warm family gatherings, lots of food, pretty decorations. It can be overwhelming, but it’s driven by that all encompassing need for SALES! Consumerism is alive and well my friends! The holiday season can be so hard just to get through if you had less than happy memories or experiences of it as a child. Toxic families often just continue on that destructive spiral, and it seems to get even more toxic around the holidays. It’s a time where many feel obligated to attend family gatherings even though they know that unhealthy, often completely toxic, and destructive behaviors will be a large part of the menu. So we go, gearing up for the battle we know is coming. We rehearse what to say and what NOT to say! We become a captive audience, targets unfortunately, and can be sitting ducks for all of the holiday nastiness. My memories of the holidays are a complicated mixed bag of things. Now we were technically well off, we had nice houses, plenty of food, our physical needs were met. But all of the other needs? Not so much. My mom, even with how sick she always ways pulled out all of the stops for Thanksgiving and Christmas. She wasn’t a baker, but she was a damn good cook and we had lovely meals. Decorating for Christmas was her thing, and our homes and trees were always lovely. And Santa always brought tons of presents for me and my sister, everything we wanted. Except for me the elusive Christmas toy was the game Operation! I asked for it every year, never got it, but I got everything else! If you’ve ever watched “The Santa Clause” where characters Laura Miller and her husband Neil talk about not getting their most wished for gifts “Mystery Date” and an “Oscar Meyer Weenie Whistle” you’ll understand! Up until I was 8 years old, no matter where we were living, we made the trek back to Hutchinson Kansas where my parents were both from, every Christmas to spend it at my maternal grandparents’ house. Christmas at the Fitzgerald house was pretty amazing. My Uncle’s Ed and Jack my mother’s brothers would all come with their families and so I got to hang out with all of my cousins! They had a big old house with what felt like 20 floors (I think it only had 2) and lots of weird little rooms that had connecting doors. I loved exploring! We had Christmas on Christmas Eve there. The tree was in the front living room, so on Christmas Eve my grandmother would close the big double doors to the room, and we all sat outside and waited. We could hear noise on the roof, jingle bells and the sound of things going on behind those doors. When they thought the time was right, they’d throw open those doors and magically, Santa had come! Those were good times. But even there, there were things going on that were too adult for me to understand. One Christmas I think I was 5, we were in the living room opening presents. I was kneeling on the floor in front of an armchair, opening a present on the seat in front of me. A family member went to step over my legs, and he suddenly fell over me landing on the floor shaking violently. His lit cigarette fell on me, burning a hole in my nightgown and on me. I was horrified that his tripping over my legs had somehow caused his fall and violent shaking. I didn’t learn until much later that he had been an alcoholic for years, and he had a seizure at just that moment. There were other things too, they remain fuzzy in the back of my mind, not clear enough to remember well, but impressions of other things going wrong. The holiday trips ended when I was 8, my grandmother passed away suddenly, and that started a cascade of other events, the sale of the grand old house, my grandfather bouncing around living with each of his three kids, another story for another time. Christmas with my parents alone was not a good thing. While my mom worked to make things as wonderful as she could, my parents’ relationship was terrible. With my ...