"For many people, going home for the holidays brings warmth, nostalgia, and a sense of belonging. For others, it brings a tightening in the chest, a quiet dread, or an old heaviness they thought they'd outgrown. The moment you walk in, you feel it. No one has said a word, nothing "bad" has happened, and yet your stomach drops in the same way it did when you were 15. The house feels familiar in a way you didn't consent to."
"Pop-psychology often offers easy explanations for your dread: that you're "fragile," your " unconscious is undermining you," or that you simply "haven't healed enough." As if the world around you doesn't exist. As if everything that happens to you begins and ends with you. But going home at this time of year isn't a story about personal weakness or inadequate "healing.""
Returning home produces varied responses: warmth and belonging for some, tightening dread and old heaviness for others. Physical presence in a remembered environment can collapse past and present, producing exhaustion, withdrawal, and a sense of not really being there. Popular psychological framings often locate the problem solely inside individuals, labeling reactions as fragility or incomplete healing. Phenomenological perspectives instead locate memory and trauma in places and atmospheres. Houses, rooms, smells, acoustics, streets, and relationships can retain past affects and actively participate in recalling earlier versions of a person, shaping current experience.
Read at Psychology Today
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