When Gratitude Feels Like Gaslighting: A Bottom-Up Approach to Surviving November
By Jen Bennethum
November arrives cloaked in contradictions. As daylight savings steals our evening light and plunges us into early darkness, society simultaneously demands we perform peak thankfulness. For the families navigating trauma, poverty, and survival, this month becomes a perfect storm where environmental stressors collide with emotional expectations. The mental health impact ripples through bodies and minds in ways both profound and often unrecognized by traditional therapeutic approaches.
“Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary.” — Fred Rogers
The Double-Edged Sword of Seasonal Mental Health
The darkness that descends at 5pm doesn't just affect our vitamin D levels—it activates primal responses in traumatized nervous systems. For some, this environmental shift paradoxically provides relief. The darkness offers cover, permission to withdraw, a socially acceptable reason to stay home when leaving the house feels impossible. Trauma survivors who struggle with hypervigilance might find the shortened days create natural boundaries on their exposure to triggers.
Yet for most, the time change wreaks havoc on already-fragile regulation. Children who've experienced neglect may spiral when darkness arrives before dinner, their bodies remembering hunger and abandonment. Parents managing their own trauma responses while supporting dysregulated children find their window of tolerance shrinking as surely as the daylight hours. The physiological impact—disrupted circadian rhythms, decreased serotonin, increased melatonin—lands differently in bodies already working overtime to maintain basic functioning.
Treatment Modalities: Meeting Bodies Where They Are
Traditional therapeutic approaches often emphasize gratitude practices and cognitive reframing during this season, but trauma-informed clinicians are increasingly recognizing these top-down interventions can actually increase dysregulation. When we tell a terrified nervous system to "think grateful thoughts," we're essentially asking someone in fight-or-flight to perform emotional labor their prefrontal cortex cannot access.
EMDR practitioners might notice increased processing difficulties as darkness triggers implicit memories. The bilateral stimulation that usually helps integrate trauma can feel overwhelming when the nervous system is already on high alert from environmental stressors. Clinicians are adapting by shortening sessions, increasing grounding time, and allowing more space between processing sets.
Somatic experiencing and sensorimotor psychotherapy offer different doorways during this season. These bottom-up modalities work with the body's wisdom rather than against it. When a client's body contracts against the cold and dark, the therapist doesn't rush to relax it but instead explores: What is this tension protecting? What does this bracing remember? The body might be holding a story about November that the mind has forgotten—a loss, an anniversary, a time when cold meant danger.
Internal Family Systems practitioners find that protective parts often intensify their strategies as the holidays approach. The part that dissociates might work overtime, while the hypervigilant protector scans every gratitude-themed interaction for threats. Rather than pathologizing these responses, IFS honors them as adaptive strategies that need updating, not elimination.
How Trauma Rewrites November
Trauma fundamentally alters how we experience time, and November exemplifies this temporal disruption. For those carrying unprocessed trauma, this month might simultaneously be the current November and every difficult November they've survived. The body doesn't distinguish between then and now when triggered—it simply knows that darkness plus family gatherings plus financial stress equals danger.
Anniversary trauma adds another layer. Bodies remember what minds try to forget. Someone might not consciously recall that their abuse intensified during the holidays, but their nervous system begins ramping up protective responses as October ends. They might find themselves increasingly irritable, dissociated, or hypervigilant without understanding why. The traditional mental health response—exploring gratitude—can feel like gaslighting when your body is screaming legitimate warnings based on past experience.
Complex trauma survivors face particular challenges as November demands exactly what trauma stole: the capacity for presence, connection, and receiving care. The gratitude industrial complex asks people to celebrate family when family was the source of harm, to feel abundant when scarcity shaped their nervous systems, to trust in goodness when betrayal taught them survival.
Bottom-Up Approaches: Following the Body's Lead
Bottom-up treatment modalities recognize a fundamental truth: we cannot think our way out of dysregulation. These approaches begin with the brainstem and work upward, establishing safety in the body before attempting any cognitive intervention. During November's unique challenges, this might look like helping clients notice where in their body they feel the approach of darkness—is it a chest tightening, a stomach clenching, a numbing in the limbs?
Polyvagal-informed therapy maps how November shifts nervous system states. A client might notice they're more dorsal vagal (shut down) as darkness increases, or that their sympathetic arousal (fight/flight) peaks during family planning discussions. Rather than judging these states, the work involves building capacity to notice shifts and developing personalized strategies for state regulation.
The beauty of bottom-up work during this season is that it doesn't require clients to feel grateful, positive, or even hopeful. It simply asks: What does your body need right now to feel one degree safer? This might be movement to discharge activation, weight to calm a scattered system, or rhythm to reorganize chaos. These interventions work because they speak the body's language rather than imposing the mind's expectations.
Survival Guides That Honor Reality
True support during November means creating resources that acknowledge both the genuine difficulty of this season and the resilience already present in surviving it. These guides don't promise happiness or even peace—they offer companionship in struggle and practical strategies for getting through.
A trauma-informed survival guide might include body-based check-ins that track sensation rather than emotion—asking "where do you feel November in your body?" rather than "what are you grateful for?" These guides validate the increased medication needs, the canceled plans, the tears in the grocery store when holiday music starts. They normalize sleeping more, eating differently, and needing different things than you needed in July. They include sections like "When Everyone Else's Joy Feels Like Assault" and "Permission Slips for Skipping Things." They offer scripts for boundary-setting that don't require explanation: "That won't work for us this year." They suggest creating "comfort maps" of the safest spaces in your home, the warmest clothes, the most regulating activities. These guides remind survivors that making it through November without crisis is success enough—thriving can wait for spring.
Most importantly, these survival guides include aftercare planning. What will you need in December after November's marathon? How will you repair and restore? They acknowledge that November's survival might mean January's crash, and that's not failure—it's physics. They include local warming centers, food banks without judgment, crisis lines that understand trauma. They remind readers that using these resources is not weakness but wisdom, that accepting help during impossible seasons is how we model resilience for our children who are watching how we survive.
Moving Forward: Rewriting Our November Stories
The work isn't to make November easier—it's to make it more honest. When we stop demanding gratitude from bodies in survival mode, we create space for something more powerful: genuine recognition of what we're actually managing. This isn't positive thinking or reframing. It's the radical act of witnessing our own survival without minimizing what it costs.
For therapists reading this, the invitation is to trust the wisdom of bottom-up approaches even when—especially when—everything in our training says to brighten the darkness with gratitude interventions. Meet your clients' bodies where they are. Let their clenched jaws and shallow breathing lead the session. Honor their protective strategies as the life-saving adaptations they once were. Create space for all the feelings November brings without rushing toward resolution.
For the families surviving this season, know this: your body's reactions make sense. Every protective response, every moment of dissociation, every flash of anger at performative thankfulness—these are not pathology but wisdom. Your nervous system is telling the truth about what November has meant in your life. The goal isn't to override these truths but to companion them, to slowly update the body's files with experiences of surviving differently.
The real invitation this November is to practice honesty about what this season actually costs. To build treatment plans and survival guides that account for the full weight of darkness: meeting poverty, meeting trauma, and meeting mandatory gratitude. To trust that resilience isn't found in forced thankfulness but in the profound courage of admitting how hard this is while continuing to seek regulation, connection, and glimpses of safety wherever we can find them.
Perhaps the deepest gratitude is simply this: honoring the bodies that have carried us through every difficult November before this one, and trusting they know how to carry us through one more. Please feel free to reach out to us at Integrate Therapy and Wellness Collective if you have any concerns or would like us to walk with you on your journey this November to wholeness.
