How to Survive the Holidays With an Emotionally Immature Parent
By The Healing Collective
The holiday season can bring a mix of warmth, grief, joy, pressure, and emotional overwhelm, especially if you grew up with an emotionally immature parent. While cultural messages encourage us to reconnect and gather, many people quietly brace themselves for the emotional labor that comes with returning home. As a trauma-informed therapy clinic offering therapy on the Danforth and across Ontario, we see this struggle every year.
Recently, Mel Robbins’ “Let Them” theory has gained momentum online. The concept is simple: Let people behave as they choose, and don’t take it personally. While this can be helpful for everyday stressors, like a friend arriving late or a coworker being short, it becomes much more complicated when applied to childhood trauma and emotionally immature parenting.
Telling someone to “let them” when the “them” is a parent who chronically dismisses, minimizes, or invalidates their emotional needs oversimplifies a complex psychological wound. It risks minimizing the very real mental health impact of being raised by someone without the capacity to provide emotional attunement.
Understanding Emotional Immaturity in Parents
Emotionally immature parents often struggle with:
- Difficulty regulating their emotions
- Limited empathy
- Self-centered behaviours
- A need for control
- Fear of conflict
- Discomfort with intimacy
For a child, this can lead to deep confusion:
Why do I feel responsible for their feelings? Why do I always end up soothing them? Why don’t they see me?
The body carries these unanswered questions into adulthood. What we often call “the holiday spiral” is really our nervous system revisiting old patterns, what trauma therapists sometimes refer to as “emotional time travel.” This is not immaturity. This is not overreacting. This is a survival response.
Why “Let Them” Isn’t Enough
The “Let Them” approach assumes two things:
- You are emotionally resourced enough to let someone behave as they wish.
- You are not in a relational dynamic shaped by childhood trauma.
If you grew up with an emotionally immature parent, your nervous system may be conditioned to:
- anticipate rejection
- avoid conflict
- overfunction
- people-please
- shut down to keep the peace
Simply “letting them” behave in harmful ways can reinforce the original wound.
We don’t heal childhood trauma by ignoring it. We heal by understanding it, naming it, and learning how to protect ourselves with boundaries, self-compassion, and support. Therapy, whether with a therapist in Ontario, online or in-person therapy on the Danforth, can help untangle these long-standing patterns.
The Psychological Impact of Growing Up With an Emotionally Immature Parent
Children raised in these environments often become adults who:
- struggle with guilt when setting boundaries
- feel responsible for others’ emotions
- disconnect from their own needs
- experience anxiety during family gatherings
- feel “not enough,” no matter what they do
- enter the holidays with both hope and dread
These experiences have long-term mental health implications. Some individuals avoid celebrations altogether, while others push themselves into overwhelming situations out of loyalty, fear, or habit.
If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Many clients seeking therapy for childhood wounding express the same tension: I want connection, but I also want peace.
How to Survive the Holidays
Here are gentle strategies to support your well-being:
1. Name the Pattern
Awareness is the first boundary.
“I did not have choice as a child. I have choices now.”
2. Create a Nervous System Plan
Before you walk through the door, ask yourself:
- Where does my body feel emotionally safe?
- Who can I connect with if I feel overwhelmed?
- What is my exit strategy?
Polyvagal-informed strategies, breathing, grounding, movement, can help remind your body you are safe right now.
3. Honour Mixed Feelings
It’s okay to love a parent and acknowledge their limitations.
Two truths can coexist: They did their best and their best hurt me.
4. Redefine “Letting Them”
Rather than “letting them” do whatever they want, consider:
I can let them be who they are, and I can choose the level of access they have to me.
This is emotional maturity.
5. Seek Support
Talking with a therapist, especially one experienced in trauma, emotional development, or family systems, can help you build new patterns of safety and boundaries. Therapy can help interrupt generational cycles that often resurface during the holidays.
You Deserve Peace This Season
Surviving the holidays with an emotionally immature parent requires compassion, preparation, and a deep understanding of how childhood wounding shapes adult relationships. You are allowed to create distance, set limits, ask for help, and protect your peace.
If you’re looking for support, our therapists at The Healing Collective, based in Toronto and offering mental health services across Ontario, are here to help you navigate family dynamics, trauma, and the emotional complexities of the holiday season.
You don’t need to do this alone.