Why Do Family Gatherings Trigger Me So Much?
- Admin
- Feb 12
- 3 min read
Updated: Feb 15
For many people, family gatherings can feel warm and nostalgic. But for others, especially those with histories of trauma, these events can evoke intense emotional, physical, or nervous system responses that feel disproportionate to what is happening in the moment. Understanding why this happens requires looking beyond surface interactions to how trauma lives in the body and nervous system, and how family dynamics can unconsciously reactivate past survival responses.
Trauma in Families: More Than Memories
Trauma changes how individuals perceive and respond to stress. When trauma occurs within a family context, e.g., childhood neglect, emotional volatility, unpredictability, or conflict, these experiences do not stay isolated in memory alone. They influence nervous system patterns, attachment behaviors, and how safety or threat is perceived years later. Research and trauma-informed frameworks acknowledge that trauma affects not just individuals but also family relationships, communication patterns, and the overall emotional climate of a family system. Even when family members share the same event, they can have very different reactions based on their histories, roles, and nervous system responses developed over time.
Why Family Gatherings Feel So Triggering
From the perspective of somatic experiencing and embodied trauma work, triggers are not just “thoughts” or “interpretations” but physiological responses rooted in the nervous system’s memory. Somatic trauma experts describe a kind of “feeling memory”, which are implicit memories stored as bodily sensations and reactive states rather than explicit narrative recollections. These are patterns your body learned during earlier life experiences to protect you, even if those patterns are no longer helpful today.
When you walk into a family gathering, your nervous system doesn’t just register the present moment; it unconsciously accesses decades of stored patterns about what safety and danger “look like” in that context. Familiar voices, tones, body language, certain smells, or even the physical setting may be interpreted by your nervous system as cues similar to past distress even if nothing overtly threatening is happening now.
This physiological activation can feel like anxiety, tightening in the chest, irritability, shutdown, hypervigilance, or emotional flooding. All these are phenomena rooted in how the nervous system learned to survive earlier relational stress.
The Role of Nervous System Regulation
Somatic experiencing-informed perspectives emphasize that trauma responses are stored in and expressed through the body. Your nervous system holds imprints of survival responses (fight, flight, freeze), and these can be reactivated when environmental cues match somatic patterns of past stress. These responses are not “just in your head” but are embodied survival strategies your system learned because they once helped you navigate danger.
How Can Therapy Help?
Therapy helps not by forcing you to “think differently” about your family, but by helping your nervous system experience safety differently.
From a somatic experiencing lens, triggers at family gatherings are incomplete survival responses stored in the body. Therapy works by gently supporting the nervous system to finish what it once couldn’t, so it no longer has to stay on high alert.
Therapy builds awareness of sensations like tightness, heat, numbness, or restlessness, signals that your nervous system is shifting into protection. This awareness alone can reduce shame and self-blame.
Rather than calming yourself through willpower, somatic therapy focuses on:
Tracking states of activation and settling
Gently moving between stress and safety (pendulation)
Expanding your capacity to stay present without becoming overwhelmed
Over time, your nervous system learns that it can come back to regulation, even when familiar family dynamics arise.
As your nervous system becomes more regulated, you may notice:
More choice in how you engage or disengage
Clearer boundaries without overwhelming guilt
Less emotional flooding or shutdown during gatherings
The goal is to no longer feel hijacked by family gatherings, even if you find it hard to love them yet.
Restoring Peace is a private mental health centre that provides in-person and online counselling and psychotherapy for children, youth, and adults with depression, stress, anxiety, trauma, PTSD, personality disorder, and other mental health challenges. For more information, please visit www.restoringpeace.com.sg or WhatsApp at +65 8889 1848. You may also join our Telegram group, https://t.me/restoringpeace, for periodic updates.
Additional Read:
References [APA style]
Doral Health & Wellness. (2025). Trauma-informed care for families: Healing across generations. https://doralhw.org/trauma-informed-care-for-families-healing-across-generations/
National Child Traumatic Stress Network. (n.d.). Introduction to families and trauma. https://www.nctsn.org/trauma-informed-care/families-and-trauma/introduction
The Somatic Project. (2025). Festive survival guide: Family triggers, parts work & self-compassion. https://www.thesomaticproject.com/blog/festive-survival-guide-2
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