Navigating Holiday Triggers
For many people, Christmas isn’t peaceful or joyful—it’s exhausting, overwhelming, or quietly painful.
Instead of rest, the season can bring tension, emotional overload, guilt, loneliness, or a strong urge to escape. If that’s been your experience, this course is here to help you understand why.
Navigating Holiday Triggers explores how Complex Trauma shapes your nervous system’s response to the holiday season. You’ll learn why family gatherings, expectations, and traditions can activate survival mode, why logic alone can’t turn those reactions off, and why shame often follows. Through a trauma-informed lens, this course helps you make sense of your reactions so you can move through the season with more compassion, clarity, and protection.
This course isn’t about making a perfect Christmas (because let’s face it — no holiday season can ever be perfect). It’s about understanding yourself and creating a season that feels safer and more honest.
Get Access with the EVERGREEN Membership
Get unlimited access to Tim Fletcher Co’s Evergreen library for just $30 per month, or $300 per year. With six new self-development courses added every month, you’ll always have fresh, practical tools to support your growth in areas like trauma recovery, boundaries, relationships, and personal transformation. Learn at your own pace, revisit lessons anytime, and build lasting change with guidance that’s both compassionate and deeply practical. See more details here.
*All prices are in Canadian Dollars.
Course Curriculum
-
Welcome Video
Introduction
-
If Christmas fills you with dread, exhaustion, or irritability, this lesson helps explain why. You’ll explore how holiday environments can activate survival responses shaped by early experiences, even decades later. This module shifts the story from self-blame to understanding, helping you see your reactions as protective rather than defective.
Lesson • Video • Journal -
Many people try to reason their way through the holidays, only to feel frustrated when it doesn’t work. This lesson explains why survival mode overrides logic, especially in familiar family environments. You’ll begin to understand how your nervous system responds to perceived threat and why compassion and safety matter more than willpower.
Lesson • Video • Journal -
Unspoken rules, old family roles, and pressure to keep the peace can make Christmas emotionally exhausting. This lesson explores how childhood expectations resurface during the holidays and why people-pleasing or emotional shutdown often follows. You’ll learn why you’ve felt overloaded in the past and how to move beyond it for future seasons.
Lesson • Video • Journal -
While the world celebrates togetherness, Christmas can magnify loneliness, guilt, and shame for many people. This lesson explores why the season highlights what feels missing and how comparison and performance-based worth deepen old wounds. You’ll be invited to separate your value from holiday outcomes and respond to these emotions with greater kindness.
Lesson • Video • Journal -
Boundaries often feel especially threatening during the holidays, even when they’re desperately needed. This lesson reframes boundaries as a form of protection rather than rejection and explores why guilt shows up so strongly when you consider saying no. You’ll learn how honoring your limits can lead to a safer, more meaningful Christmas, even if it looks different than expected.
Lesson • Video • Journal -
This bonus section offers carefully chosen resources to support regulation, grief, and boundaries during the holiday season. You’ll find trauma-informed talks, reflective films, music for emotional processing, and simple somatic practices designed to help your nervous system feel safer without forcing cheer or engagement. These are not prescriptions or expectations, but optional companions you can turn to when the season feels heavy, overwhelming, or lonely.
This course is included in the Christmas + Complex Trauma Bundle!
Save over 62% when you get all Christmas + Complex Trauma courses together! Includes:
