Grieving During the Holidays: When the Season Hurts

The holidays have a way of magnifying everything.

Joy becomes louder. Traditions feel heavier. Absence becomes impossible to ignore.

For many people, this season is wrapped in expectations—togetherness, gratitude, celebration, cheer. When you’re grieving, those expectations can collide painfully with your internal reality. What’s often misunderstood is that this isn’t a personal failing or a lack of resilience. It’s a nervous system responding to loss in a season filled with reminders.

If the holidays feel hard this year, it doesn’t mean you’re doing them wrong.

It means you are grieving.

When Grief Meets the Holiday Season

Grief does not pause because the calendar says it’s time to celebrate. From a psychological perspective, grief is not a problem to solve—it’s an adaptive response to loss. Your mind and body are working to integrate a reality that changed without your consent.

During the holidays, this process can feel more intense. Familiar routines, sensory cues (music, smells, traditions), and social gatherings often activate memory networks connected to who or what you’ve lost. This can heighten emotional pain, fatigue, irritability, or withdrawal—especially when your system is already under strain.

Empty chairs feel louder. Traditions can ache. Even moments that used to bring comfort may now trigger longing or sadness.

None of this means you’re “stuck” in grief. It means your system is responding exactly as it was designed to: by noticing what mattered.

The Emotional Whiplash of Holiday Grief

One of the most confusing parts of grieving during the holidays is the emotional back-and-forth.

You might feel warmth in one moment and deep sorrow in the next. You might crave connection and simultaneously feel overwhelmed by it. You might laugh, then feel guilt for laughing.

This fluctuation is not instability—it’s grief. Emotionally, grief often moves in waves rather than straight lines. Neurologically, your brain is toggling between presence and protection, between connection and self-preservation.

You are allowed to feel joy without betraying your loss.

You are allowed to feel sadness even when life continues around you.

Grief is a both/and experience, not an either/or one.

Gentle Permissions for the Holidays

In a season full of expectations and unspoken rules, grief asks something quieter and more honest of you. It asks you to listen inward rather than perform outwardly.

This holiday season, you have permission to:

• Feel joy and sorrow at the same time

• Change traditions—or step away from them entirely

• Say no without justifying your choice

• Take breaks from gatherings when your body signals overwhelm

• Honour memories, or avoid them, depending on what feels regulating

• Grieve in a way that supports your nervous system, not other people’s comfort

These are not indulgences. They are forms of self-attunement. When you honour your limits, you reduce emotional overload and create more space for steadiness—even in the midst of pain.

There is no correct way to survive the holidays while grieving. There is only the way that helps you get through.

You Don’t Have to Carry This Alone

Grief can be profoundly isolating, particularly during a season that emphasizes togetherness. Many people tell themselves they should be further along, more grateful, more functional by now. These messages often add a layer of shame to an already heavy experience.

Support doesn’t mean being fixed or pushed forward. In grief-informed therapy, support often looks like being witnessed without judgment, having your experience normalized, and learning how to gently care for your body and emotions as they are.

At Grace and Growth Psychotherapy Services, grief is understood as a natural response to loss—not something to rush, resolve, or overcome. If the holidays are feeling especially tender this year, reaching out for support can be a way of offering yourself steadiness and compassion in an unsteady season.

Grief changes us. The holidays may never look the same again.

But you are allowed to move through them in a way that honours your reality.

Slowly. Honestly. In your own time.