Depression and the Holidays:
Thoughts on Unique Challenges Posed by Positive Expectations and Joyful Occasions
When we think of seasonal depression, many may point out the change in available sunlight during the colder months of the year and its subsequent physiological implications on our mood. But for some individuals, depression arising around November and December may indicate a deeply personal psychological experience, that when left unprocessed, can resurface in the form of depressive symptoms, such as low motivation, trouble completing tasks, little to no interest in activities that typically bring joy, sleep disruptions or excessive sleeping, or negative self-talk, to name a few.
November through the end of December bring with them the holiday season. The holidays, unsurprisingly, come with innumerable cultural associations. For clients who have experienced adverse childhood experiences, especially trauma, the holidays may pose a particular challenge. Holidays, for instance, can cause those painful memories resurface. For example, for those raised by caregivers who failed to meet the needs or expectations of the client when the client was a child, holidays may have been an especially confusing time.
Western culture tends to paint the holidays as a time associated with a heightened sense of filial connection, innocence, joy, celebration, etc. The ubiquity of holiday-themed media around this time reinforces these associations, especially for children. So when an child’s personal, lived experience differs drastically from these cultural expectations, the child’s psyche will be impacted. In other words, holidays, ironically, can dramatically highlight the ways in which that client’s lived reality fell short. For clients with complex trauma (trauma which occurred repeatedly over an extended period of time, rather than acute trauma in which a singular traumatic event may have occurred), the holidays were often reinforced established transgressions or challenges faced by the child in the family system.
In these ways, the timing of this particular depression can indicate an otherwise unconscious grieving for the childhood that was denied the client. The therapist, in turn, seeks to guide the client through the grieving process consciously. With time, this therapeutic processing can lead to an improvement of depressive symptoms, precisely because the underlying cause of the depression (grief) has been addressed.
Similarly, expectations we may have about our life (“I thought I’d be in a different place in my 30s…” or “I’m successful in my career—why am I not happy?”, etc.) may run aground when faced with the symptoms we’re experiencing. If we can thoroughly unpack and thoughtfully examine what underlying expectations and beliefs we may have about a certain part of ourselves, our living situation, lifestyle, etc., then we may be able to access the underlying root cause of the depression.
By no means is grief the singular cause of depression, even during the holiday season. Effectively treating an individual experiencing symptoms of depression requires an approach tailored to the unique psyche of each client. And depression can have manifold causes for an individual. But no doubt the holidays provide a heightened sense of personal and interpersonal meaning to each of us, even those with relatively stable or even fundamentally positive childhoods. And in this way, a season rife with implicit positive interpersonal expectation can offer us a powerful lens through which to contemplate how intrapersonal discrepancy impacts mental health more broadly.
Chris Hershey-Van Horn is a California licensed therapist available for in-person therapy in the San Francisco and online for all California based patients.