No matter how composed and mature you are in your daily adult life, the journey home for Christmas has a peculiar way of turning you back into a grouchy teenager. If you find yourself locking horns with parents or squabbling with siblings, new research confirms you are in very large company.
The Psychology Behind Holiday Regression
According to clinical psychologists, this shift is driven by a completely normal and widespread process known as 'regression'. Dr Chester Sunde, a licensed clinical psychologist based in California with two decades of experience, states that our fundamental psychological structures were formed within the pressures and conflicts of our early family life.
"While we learn to control those deeply ingrained habits in our adult lives, it's remarkably hard not to slip back into old patterns as soon as we return to a family context," explains Dr Sunde. "When you return to that context, those patterns can reactivate automatically."
He emphasises that it is not that your relatives deliberately "make you" regress. Instead, the environmental cues—the familiar family home, the dinner table, even a parent's familiar sigh—trigger automatic responses built decades ago.
How Regression Manifests in Adults
Dr Sunde reports seeing "countless" patients over his 20-year career who encounter this difficulty during festive gatherings. "Capable professionals describe finding themselves feeling and acting like teenagers shortly after walking into their parents' house," he says. "They feel defensive, reactive, or caught in old sibling dynamics despite their external success."
This phenomenon intensifies at Christmas, which compresses extended family into close quarters, often in the childhood home itself. Added pressures around gift-giving, meals, and unspoken expectations further strain composure.
The regression process has three core components:
- Physical: You may experience familiar stress symptoms like a tight chest or shallow breathing.
- Emotional: Disproportionate emotional responses emerge, such as excessive anger, anxiety, or perceived criticism.
- Behavioural: You fall into childhood roles, acting as the peacemaker, the rebel, or the golden child, leading to uncharacteristic snapping or arguing.
Managing the Festive Emotional Rollercoaster
Dr Sunde frames this experience through a lens echoing ancient Greek philosophy. "Plato described three aspects of the psyche: reason, spirit or emotion, and appetite or basic needs," he notes. In adulthood, these are typically balanced. However, the family setting can disrupt this integration, pulling us back to an earlier developmental stage where we craved approval or security.
"What collapses is constitutional self-governance—that stable sense of who you are that transcends context," Dr Sunde states. "Many people have this at work or with friends, but it can dissolve at the family dinner table."
The key to managing regression is not necessarily preventing it, but recognising it as it happens. "You probably can't prevent regression entirely if the patterns run deep," he advises. "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."
By noticing the teenage mindset in the moment, you gain the crucial opportunity to choose a more measured, adult response, making for a more peaceful holiday for everyone.
