Turning the Holidays into a Self-Healing Opportunity ✨
Over the holidays, many of us find ourselves returning to family spaces that stir old emotions, familiar roles, and long-standing dynamics. This season can be tender—and it can also be deeply meaningful.
To support you through this time, we’re offering a 6-day holiday blog series designed to help you gently turn family gatherings into a self-healing opportunity—without needing anyone else to change.
Over the next six days, we’ll explore how old patterns form, why they resurface, and how you can meet them with clarity, compassion, and new tools.
In this series, we’ll be drawing from two powerful frameworks that help illuminate why this happens and how healing is possible:
Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents by Lindsay C. Gibson and Changeable by J. Stuart Ablon. Together, they offer clarity, compassion, and practical tools for navigating family relationships with greater emotional freedom.
What This Series Will Offer
By the end of these six days, you’ll be able to:
Recognize emotional immaturity without blame
Understand your own coping patterns and roles
Stop chasing emotional connection where it isn’t available
Respond instead of react
Use family time as information for healing, not proof of failure
This is about planting seeds, not forcing change.
Coming up next: In our first article in this series, we begin by learning how to identify emotional immaturity in parents and family members—without judgment or self-blame.
You’ll explore why some people shut down emotionally and why seeing this clearly can be freeing rather than defeating.
The 6-Day Self-Healing Series for Family Dynamics
Day 1 — Recognizing Emotional Immaturity
Learn how to identify emotional immaturity in parents and family members without blame—and why seeing this clearly can bring relief rather than resignation.
Day 2 — The Coping Strategies You Learned as a Child
Explore internalizers, externalizers, and the “role self”—the ways you learned to adapt, perform, or disappear to stay safe.
Day 3 — The Stuckness of Never Quite Connecting
Name the quiet grief of trying to be understood by emotionally limited people, and why acceptance—not effort—is often the turning point.
Day 4 — Why Trying Harder Doesn’t Heal
A compassionate reframe from Changeable: understanding behavior as a matter of capacity, not character—and why control and willpower backfire.
Day 5 — Plan B for the Holidays
A gentle, practical framework for when collaboration is possible—and how to protect yourself when it isn’t.
Day 6 — Christmas Day: Reflection & Integration
A closing reflection on observation, journaling, self-compassion, and using family time as information—not a measure of your growth.
