When the Festive Season Doesn’t Match How You Feel Inside

Exploring the quiet tension between Christmas expectations and inner experience.

Christmas is often described as a time of joy, warmth, family, and celebration.But for many adult adoptees, the reality is more complex - not necessarily heavy or bleak, but layered, tender, and sometimes quietly overwhelming.

If you’re carrying mixed feelings this season, you’re not alone. Christmas can stir many emotions for many reasons, and adoption often adds its own quiet complexity.

Everywhere you turn, there’s a cultural script about how you’re supposed to feel: happy, grateful, connected, festive, together. The UK, in particular, places enormous emotional weight on Christmas as the centre of family life and a time when families gather, traditions are shared, and everything is expected to feel just right..

Why Mixed Feelings Make Sense at Christmas

Adoption brings with it a complex relationship to belonging. At Christmas, that complexity tends to surface in sharper focus.

You might feel:

• grateful to be included, but still a little out of step

• close to your adoptive family, but aware of what’s missing

• connected, yet also different

• happy in moments, and unexpectedly sad in others

• unsure where you “fit” in the family picture

• comforted and overwhelmed at the same time

This isn’t contradiction. It’s emotional truth.

Christmas amplifies ideas of family, roots, and identity. It’s entirely understandable that an adoptee might feel pulled in more than one direction, both internally and/or relationally, as the season unfolds.

For some, this time of year can also bring up questions about who you are within your family or within yourself. If that resonates, you may find this piece about identity confusion helpful.

The Pressure to Pretend

Many adoptees grow up learning how to adapt, but those adaptations can take different shapes. For some, it’s becoming pleasant, agreeable, or easy to be around. For others, it’s becoming independent, quiet, guarded, or resistant when the emotional atmosphere feels pressured or intense.

Neither response is wrong. Both are ways of staying safe.

At Christmas, when the expectations around closeness and happiness intensify, these early strategies can reappear almost without invitation.

You might notice:

• the part that puts on a smile to smooth tension

• the part that convinces itself everything is fine

• the part that keeps quiet so no one feels uncomfortable

• the part that tries to be what others expect

Or you might notice very different protectors:

• the part that pulls away or needs more space

• the part that feels irritated, out of step, or overwhelmed

• the part that withdraws to stay safe

• the part that braces against the pressure to join in

• the part that says “I can’t pretend, not this year”

From an Internal Family Systems (IFS) perspective, all of these are protective parts doing their best to look after you.Some protect by softening.Some protect by stepping back. All of them make sense.Their messages might be different -“Don’t upset anyone” or “Don’t get too close” - but the intention is the same: to keep you safe in a season filled with emotional expectations.

And when pretending becomes the priority - whether pretending to be fine or pretending to feel nothing - you may feel a disconnection from yourself.

Family Expectations Can Stir Old Roles

Christmas, more than any other time in the UK, is organised around family.

The expectation - sometimes explicit, sometimes implied - is that families gather, celebrate, and feel united. But for adoptees, “family” is rarely a simple concept. It may include love and loss. Belonging and difference. Gratitude and grief.

In this environment, early roles can become active again:

• the harmoniser

• the easy one

• the self-sufficient one

• the one who withdraws or goes quiet

• the one who keeps their distance to stay safe

• the strong one who doesn’t show emotion

• the pleasant one who “keeps things light”

• the one who minimises their needs

These roles once protected you. They helped you stay connected. And they can reappear automatically when family dynamics tighten around holiday expectations.

What sits beneath those familiar roles can be layered - tenderness, frustration, longing, gratitude, sadness, or something harder to name. It’s completely normal for these feelings to coexist. Mixed feelings aren’t a sign that you’re confused; they’re a sign that you’re human.

Mixed Feelings Don’t Need Fixing

One of the most compassionate truths IFS offers is that every part of you has a reason for being here.

Your mixed feelings are not faults to be corrected. They are gentle (or not-so-gentle) messages from your inner world trying to tell you something about:

• safety

• history

• identity

• longing

• boundaries

• connection

You are allowed to feel more than one thing at once. You are allowed to feel differently from those around you. You are allowed to have parts that want closeness and parts that need space.

Nothing about this makes you difficult. Nothing about this makes you ungrateful. And nothing about this means you’re getting Christmas “wrong”.

Ways to Support Yourself This Season

You don’t need to have all the answers, often it’s enough to move through the season with a little more gentleness. You might consider:

• Naming your feelings privately

Acknowledging them reduces the pressure to pretend.

• Offering compassion to the parts of you that are trying to cope

Especially the ones keeping you cheerful, agreeable, or contained.

• Choosing one small boundary

It might be taking a walk, leaving early, or having a quiet moment alone.

• Letting yourself step back if you need to

Some parts protect by pulling away rather than blending in. Giving them space can be an act of care, not avoidance.

• Remembering it’s okay if this time of year stirs grief

Grief doesn’t cancel joy; both can coexist.

None of this is about fixing. It’s about softening.

You Don’t Have to Pretend Here

If Christmas brings a mix of emotions, or if you feel pressure to be okay when you’re not, you’re not alone.

These feelings make sense. They come from real, human experiences. And parts of you have been carrying them for a very long time.

Therapy can offer a space where you don’t need to pretend, perform, or hold everything together. A space where the parts that work hard by softening and the parts that protect by stepping back can be witnessed, understood, and met with warmth rather than expectation.

If you’re an adult adoptee looking for adoption counselling for adults, or simply a place where all of your feelings are welcome, you’re very welcome to explore how I work with adoptees or get in touch when you feel ready.