For many people, Christmas is meant to be a break from the stresses of everyday life. You head home, eat too much, watch telly you’d never normally choose, and fall back into routines you haven’t thought about since you were younger.
It’s familiar, comforting, and usually harmless, at least at first.
However, somewhere between the second cup of tea and the first awkward family discussion, things can start to feel a bit off. You might notice yourself getting irritated more easily than usual, reacting defensively, or feeling strangely tense for no obvious reason. Conversations that would barely register in normal life suddenly feel loaded, and old dynamics seem to reappear out of nowhere.
Psychologists say this experience is far more common than people realise, especially during the festive Christmas period. The combination of being back in your childhood home, spending extended time with family, and navigating unspoken expectations can have a powerful effect on how we think and behave.
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According to Dr Chester Sunde, a licensed clinical psychologist in California — home of recently hospitalised former Nickelodeon star Tyler Chase — what many people experience over Christmas is linked to a process known as regression: something he says is ‘completely normal and very common’.
The reason for this, as he explains, is that the conflicts and pressures arising from families and our relations in childhood are what form our psyche’s fundamental structures. While adults are usually able to manage these deeply ingrained habits in everyday life, returning home can make them resurface.
As he explained to the Daily Mail, Dr Sunde said: “When you return to that context, those patterns can reactivate automatically…It’s not that your siblings ‘make you’ regress; the environmental cues trigger responses you built decades ago.”
He added that Christmas is a perfect storm for this effect, having you feud almost as badly as the Beckham family’s new drama, saying: “The family home is where your psychological architecture was originally constructed. The familiar rooms, the dinner table, even the way your mother sighs – these cues can bypass adult functioning and activate the defensive structures of childhood.”
Dr Sunde describes regression as having three main parts: physical, emotional, and behavioural.
It can begin with stress-related sensations such as tightness in the chest or shallow breathing. From there, emotions may start to feel disproportionate, with people becoming angrier or more anxious than the situation calls for. Finally, behaviour can slip back into childhood patterns, such as snapping at parents or falling into old sibling roles.
Describing what many of his patients report after arriving home for the holidays, he said: “Capable professionals who suddenly feel defensive, reactive, or caught in old sibling dynamics even though you’re successful and have nothing to prove.”
While he says it’s difficult to prevent regression entirely, awareness can help. Sunde explained: “You probably can’t prevent regression entirely if the patterns run deep and the context is powerful. But you can recognise it when it’s happening…There’s space between feeling the old pattern and acting from it. That space is where your freedom lives.”
Topics: Christmas, Mental Health
Ben Williams