The Quiet Rage Behind Gratitude Season
Sometimes this isn’t the “most wonderful time of the year.”
Sometimes you hear one more jingle, one more saccharine commercial, one more reminder that you’re “supposed” to feel grateful — and something in you wants to scream.
Maybe you want to mouth off a few choice expletives every time Mariah Carey starts her annual resurrection.
Maybe what you want for Christmas isn’t festivity at all — you want the dread, the anger, the heaviness, the self-pity to stop.
Maybe you want to burn down every memory, room, or ritual that once made you feel alone, unprotected, or exposed.
Let’s call it what it is: grief.
Not the sentimental, poetic kind.
The kind that simmers beneath the surface because you’ve spent years being the “strong one,” the “capable one,” the leader who could always hold it together so unhealthy dynamics didn’t have to.
This isn’t a post about “holiday mindset.”
It’s a post about telling the truth when the world wants you polished.
If gratitude feels fake and rage feels honest — this post is for you.
The Honest Truth About Why the Holidays Hurt
What Grief Really Is (and Why It Turns Into Rage)
Before we talk about rage, we have to talk about grief.
Because rage is never the first emotion — it’s the overflow of everything you were never allowed to feel.
Grief isn’t just about losing a person or a place.
It’s about losing an identity you built to survive.
Maybe that identity was the caretaker.
The reliable one.
The one who absorbed everyone else’s dysfunction to keep the peace.
Or the overachiever who believed competence would eventually earn safety.
Sometimes that identity was real.
Sometimes it was pure fantasy.
And sometimes it was a survival mask you had to wear because the truth was too dangerous to name.
Either way — when that identity cracks, grief surfaces.
And the grief isn’t linear.
It loops.
It doubles back.
It hits in layers.
You know the stages:
Shock: “I can’t believe this is happening.”
Denial: “Maybe it’s not as bad as it feels.”
Anger: the heat of injustice, abandonment, or unmet needs.
Bargaining: trying to rewrite the story so the pain feels reversible.
Resignation: the quiet slump of “I guess this is just how it is.”
Depression: when everything goes still inside.
Acceptance: not peace — just a new truth you can live with.
But here’s the part no one says out loud:
Anger isn’t a stage. It’s the protest.
It’s what happens when your system finally stops pretending.
When the mask slips.
When you realize how much you carried, how young you were, or how alone you felt while everyone praised your strength.
Anger shows up when grief has nowhere safe to land.
So you blame yourself for not knowing better.
Or you replay old scenes, assigning responsibility to every person who had power over you.
Or you beat yourself up for the business moves you didn’t make, the opportunities you avoided, the risks you were too scared to take.
You’re not wrong for feeling this.
You’re not dramatic.
You’re not overreacting.
You were never given the emotional toolkit to hold grief in real time — so it shapeshifted into rage.
And as long as nobody else is modeling what honest grief looks like, you’ll think you’re the only one drowning in it.
You’re not.
Let’s talk about that next.
You Aren’t Alone in Your Grief
If you’ve ever felt like the holidays magnify everything you don’t have, you’re not alone.
For years, this season was the hardest time of year for me — not because I was single, and not because I didn’t have invitations, but because I had nowhere I felt emotionally safe enough to go.
I was drowning in addictions then — sugar, alcohol, sex — anything that kept me from feeling the ache underneath.
Every Thanksgiving, every Christmas, every New Year’s…
my couch was the only thing that welcomed me with open arms.
I wasn’t avoiding holiday cheer.
I was avoiding myself.
I tried to dodge anything that felt sentimental — holiday episodes, family commercials, anything tied to warmth or belonging. I told myself I preferred “serious” conversations about politics and world events.
Truth was, I didn’t have the capacity for joy.
Joy felt foreign.
Joy felt accusing.
Joy felt like a spotlight on everything I didn’t have.
And the only family member I talked to regularly back then was drinking more than I was.
Every conversation turned into a spiral about our parents.
No support.
No softness.
Just two people numbing in parallel.
And I used to think I was the only one who felt this way during the holidays — until I learned that I wasn’t.
Research shows that nearly nine in ten adults feel stressed during the holiday season, and over two in five say that stress steals their ability to enjoy it at all.
Another 38% say the holidays intensify grief, loneliness, or missing loved ones, and many end up coping through isolation or numbing — just like I did.
In other words: struggling during the holidays isn’t unusual. It’s common. It’s human. You’re not the outlier — you’re part of a reality most people never admit out loud.
So if the holidays make you feel disconnected, angry, or suffocated by memories — you’re not broken.
You’re human.
The truth most people won’t admit is this:
Holiday grief isn’t about the season.
It’s about what the season exposes.
And when everyone else is performing gratitude, the gap between what you “should” feel and what you actually feel gets brutally wide.
That’s why it hits so hard.
And that’s why you feel alone — even though you aren’t.
Let’s get into why the holidays pull these feelings to the surface.
Why the Holidays Trigger Grief (and Grievance)
For many people, the holidays don’t just bring up memories — they expose emotional fault lines.
Here’s why this season hits so hard:
1. Society tells you the holidays “belong” to families.
Every commercial, movie, and storyline reinforces one message:
Family = belonging. Family = love. Family = home.
Even when they portray dysfunction, the underlying narrative still says,
“Blood is thicker than water. Family always comes first.”
So if your reality doesn’t match the script?
You feel out of place — even if you’ve built a life you’re proud of.
2. Commercialism turns the season into a performance.
Matching pajamas. Perfect gifts. Perfect photos. Perfect feelings.
Retailers don’t care if you’re grieving or exhausted — the goal is to sell the fantasy.
And when you can’t connect to it, you start wondering:
“Is something wrong with me?”
Spoiler: Nothing’s wrong with you.
You’re responding to a culture that doesn’t leave room for real emotion.
3. Slower schedules force you to feel what you’ve been outrunning.
This is the one no one prepares you for.
When work slows down, inboxes quiet, and people retreat into their family bubbles, the distractions disappear.
Suddenly the overworking, overhelping, overthinking —
everything you use to stay stable —
loses its purpose.
And the emotions underneath start screaming for your attention.
I remember someone reaching out to me years ago, wanting to book a business call on New Year’s Day of all days.
It was obvious she wasn’t trying to plan her business.
She was trying to avoid her pain.
4. The season magnifies unprocessed grief.
The lights, the traditions, the “togetherness” imagery — it all acts like a mirror.
Not reflecting joy.
But reflecting everything you didn’t have, didn’t get, or didn’t know how to access.
And if you grew up without emotional safety, or you’re carrying adult wounds no one witnessed, the holidays don’t feel festive.
They feel exposing.
What Not to Do With Your Grief
When you’re a results-oriented, high-functioning person, your instinct is to make a list, fix the problem, and get to the finish line.
But grief isn’t a project.
And if you try to treat it like one, you’ll only stay stuck longer.
Here’s what not to do:
1. Don’t place demands on yourself to “get over it.”
Anger, despair, numbness — these aren’t glitches.
They’re part of metabolizing pain.
You can’t fast-track grief with breathwork, journaling, or positive thinking.
And you definitely can’t shame yourself into healing.
This process winds.
It circles.
It reveals the next layer only when you’re ready.
If you wouldn’t rush someone else through their healing, don’t rush yourself.
2. Don’t expect apologies, restitution, or emotional justice.
This is one of the biggest traps.
You think:
“If they would just admit what they did, it would release me.”
But apologies don’t rewrite history.
They don’t give you the childhood you needed.
They don’t repair a marriage that was never emotionally safe.
They don’t turn a neglectful parent into a nurturing one.
I once met a woman — I’ll call her Ursula — a childless widow in her 60s who had worked her entire life believing her career would protect her from regret. Now she spends her days hosting open houses, walking into family after family, and going home to an empty house.
She was grieving a life she assumed she’d eventually grow into.
But no apology — not from culture, ideology, or family — could give her what she lost.
We make choices with the understanding we had at the time.
Naming the pain matters.
Expecting someone else to undo it will only deepen the wound.
3. Don’t burn everything down to avoid the discomfort.
When grief feels unbearable, the temptation is to torch anything connected to the pain:
deleting photos
cutting off everyone
moving cities
chopping or dyeing your hair
quitting jobs
destroying mementos
ending relationships abruptly
It feels cathartic in the moment.
But often, it’s emotional avoidance disguised as empowerment.
When you slash everything that reminds you of the grief, you also slash the truth:
They were never going to be the fantasy you built.
And you were never meant to carry what wasn’t yours.
If you keep burning everything, you’ll eventually end up with nothing but the ashes of an identity that wasn’t finished growing.
And ironically, that leaves you even lonelier.
What to Do With Your Grief
If you can’t rush it, burn it away, or outsource it…
what do you do with grief?
You meet it.
Slowly.
Honestly.
Without trying to turn it into a performance.
Here’s where to begin:
1. Recognize the limits you had then — and the limits you have now.
When I look back at the holidays I spent buried in rage, the truth is simple:
I didn’t have the emotional toolkit to feel anything beyond anger.
Grief requires emotional range.
But when you’ve been hurt, you lose access to that range.
It’s like trying to play an instrument with the C key removed—
you can make noise, but you can’t make music.
Rage is a kind of emotional “C” — blunt, loud, and protective.
But it’s not the whole song of your life.
Recognizing your limitations isn’t weakness.
It’s how you reclaim emotional precision, not just emotional intensity.
2. Write down the expectations you carried — and the ones you never admitted.
Anger almost always points to a violated expectation.
Take a moment to name the expectations that live underneath your grief:
What did you believe they should have given you?
What role did you assume they would play?
What safety, recognition, or loyalty did you expect—and why?
Was it truly within their capacity?
If it was, what was happening for them at the time?
This isn’t about excusing anything.
It’s about putting context around behavior, not placing blame onto your identity.
Because when you write it down, you often see:
They didn’t fail because you were unworthy.
They failed because they were limited.
And that reframes the entire emotional story.
3. Let the truth teach you what fantasy covered up.
Expectations aren’t just about desire—they’re about the fantasies we created to make pain tolerable.
Ask yourself:
If they apologized today, would the grief actually disappear?
Or would you still feel the residue of what was lost?
What did you hope the apology would magically fix?
Most people discover this:
The apology would feel good,
but it wouldn’t give you the life you needed.
Grief becomes gentler when you stop waiting for the past to do something new.
Instead, let the truth teach you:
what you needed,
what you outgrew,
what you will no longer permit,
and what you finally see clearly about yourself.
That’s the beginning of emotional adulthood.
Not bypass, not revenge — sobriety.
You can’t rewrite what happened, but you can decide what you’ll carry forward.
And that’s where leadership begins.
Leading Yourself Through the Holiday Season
It’s okay if you feel angry this time of year.
It’s okay if gratitude feels forced, if joy feels foreign, or if the holidays bring up more tension than tenderness.
What’s not okay is abandoning yourself in the process.
Grief is not a personal failure.
It’s the evidence that something inside you mattered — and still does.
And as a leader, your job isn’t to “stay positive” or pretend you’re above the pain.
Your job is to stay present to what’s happening inside you.
You don’t need to work your way out of this.
You don’t need to spiritualize it or assign it cosmic meaning.
You don’t need to destroy everything that reminds you of what you lost.
You just need to tell the truth — to yourself — about what this season exposes:
the expectations you carried,
the identities you outgrew,
the grief you never had language for,
and the parts of you that were never allowed to need anything in return.
Leadership isn’t about performing stability.
It’s about making honest decisions while your inner world is still rearranging itself.
So if this season feels heavy, let it be heavy.
If the grief rises, let it rise.
If anger feels more honest than gratitude, honor that without letting it burn down what you’re building.
You don’t have to rush through this.
You don’t have to fix it on a timeline.
You don’t have to earn your place at the table by being the “strong one.”
Healing often happens quietly, in ways that look like nothing from the outside.
And the truth is simple:
You’re not broken.
You’re unfolding.
And this season isn’t exposing your weakness —
it’s revealing where you’re finally ready to be free.
Go Deeper
If you’re ready to stop performing strength and start practicing emotional truth, I can help.
Together, we’ll untangle the patterns behind your grief and build the kind of internal clarity that can hold both rage andrestoration.
👉 Explore working with me — The Path Coaching Program
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