Send us a text

In this episode of Structure & Scars, we’re talking about the quiet, crushing guilt so many adult survivors carry during the holidays — the belief that you owe care, time, or emotional labor to a parent who never showed up for you.

We dive into what happens when the holidays weren’t magical growing up, but chaotic, unstable, or unsafe. We look at the false cultural “contract” that tells adult children they must care for aging parents, even when those parents caused harm. And we unpack why your body still feels obligated to reenact old survival roles — especially this time of year.

We also take a trauma-informed look at Christmas Vacation and the way Clark Griswold reenacts his own childhood wounds through holiday performance, perfectionism, and emotional overfunctioning. If you’ve ever felt the pressure to “hold the season together” or rewrite the disaster into a success, you’re not imagining it — that pressure has roots.

Together, we explore structural dissociation, holiday trauma, and what it means to choose peace, boundaries, and safety over obligation. You get permission to step out of survival mode and into a holiday that actually feels like yours.

And if you listen closely at the very end… you’ll hear Hawkins the German Shorthaired Pointer adding her own commentary — because even the dogs have thoughts about holiday chaos.

Structure & Scars
Unfiltered dialogue about the structures that shape us.

✉️ Continue the conversation: [email protected]