How to Survive Toxic Relationships during the Festive Season

A Life Coaching Guide for Women Who Want to Protect Their Peace

The festive season is meant to feel joyful. Yet for many women, it is the time of year when old wounds reopen, family patterns tighten, and toxic relationships feel impossible to avoid. You may find yourself dreading gatherings, bracing for criticism, or preparing to manage the unpredictable behaviour of people who drain your energy.

If this is your reality, I want you to know that you are not alone. And more importantly, you are not powerless. With the right tools, boundaries and emotional grounding, you can navigate the festive season with strength, clarity and self-respect.

This guide blends the fundamentals of life coaching with gentle, practical daily exercises that help you stay centred, even when others are not.

What Makes the Festive Season So Triggering?

Toxic relationships often intensify during the holidays because familiar environments awaken familiar roles. Old narratives resurface. You may feel obligated to keep the peace, to be the strong one, or to shrink yourself so others feel comfortable.

Life coaching teaches us that true emotional freedom begins when we consciously choose new patterns. Awareness becomes the starting point. You are not destined to repeat the same stories each year. You can create new ones.

How to Guard your Peace During the Festive Season

1. Reclaim Your Emotional Space

Holiday dynamics often blur emotional boundaries. A toxic person may:

• Criticise or belittle you
• Create guilt around how you spend your time
• Pull you into drama
• Expect emotional labour from you
• Punish you with silence or passive aggression

Your first step is to reclaim your inner space with clarity.

Life Coaching Exercise: The Emotional Circle
Draw a circle. Inside it, write what you are responsible for.
Outside it, write what you are not responsible for.

Examples:
Inside: my reactions, my emotional state, my choices

Outside: their behaviour, the mood in the room, their unresolved trauma, their expectations

This exercise reminds you what to release. It stops you from carrying emotional weight that was never yours.

2. Practice Calm Detachment

Calm detachment is not cold or unkind. It is the skill of staying steady while someone else spins. It keeps you anchored in yourself instead of being pulled into their storm.

Daily Practice: The Three Breath Reset
In any moment of overwhelm:

1. Breathe in slowly for four counts.
2. Hold gently for one count.
3. Exhale for six counts.

Do this three times. Your nervous system will drop into regulation and clarity will return. You do not need to fix the person. You only need to ground yourself.

3. Set Boundaries That Feel Safe

You never need permission to protect your energy.
Boundaries are not confrontational. They are an act of self leadership.

Examples of gentle boundaries:

• “I am not available for that conversation.”
• “I will join for two hours and then leave.”
• “I am stepping outside for some air.”
• “I am choosing not to engage with that right now.”

One of the most empowering truths is that a boundary does not need approval. A boundary is a decision, not a negotiation.

Coaching Tip
Decide your boundaries before entering a situation. Pre-decisions support your courage when emotions rise.

4. Anchor Yourself in Nature, Even in Small Ways

Even if you are not physically in the wilderness, you can still borrow her wisdom. Nature regulates, softens, and strengthens us because it reminds the body what calm feels like.

Mini Nature Rituals for the Festive Season

• Stand barefoot on grass for 60 seconds each morning
• Look out of a window and follow the movement of clouds
• Keep a leaf or small stone in your pocket and hold it when anxious
• Take a slow walk alone and match your breath to your steps

These tiny practices reconnect you to your own inner wilderness. They bring you home to yourself.

5. Build a Safe Inner Dialogue

Toxic relationships can distort your self perception, especially if you grew up around manipulation, criticism or emotional withdrawal. Life coaching encourages women to build new, healthy internal narratives.

Daily Affirmation Practice
Choose one sentence each morning and repeat it gently:

• “My peace matters.”
• “I am allowed to choose myself.”
• “I release what is not mine.”
• “I do not owe anyone access to me.”
• “I am safe to trust my instincts.”

Your body believes the words you feed it.

6. Know When to Step Back

You do not need to stay in any environment that harms your well-being. Leaving the room, stepping outside, or choosing a shorter visit is not weakness. It is emotional intelligence.

A key coaching principle is honouring your internal yes and internal no.

If your body feels tight, anxious or drained, your internal no is speaking. Listen.

7. Create a Festive Season Support Plan

A support plan is a simple blueprint that keeps you grounded when emotions rise. It includes:

Your support people
Choose one or two people you can message or call.

Your grounding tools
Breathing, journaling, a walk, a cup of tea alone.

Your exit options
Rides, time limits, ways to step away kindly but firmly.

Preparation gives you confidence and protects your nervous system.

8. A Gentle Journaling Prompt for Each Day

Use these prompts to create clarity and emotional space.

• What is one boundary I intend to keep today?
• What part of me needs kindness right now?
• What will I let go of that is not mine to carry?
• What is one small thing I can do to feel grounded?
• What would my wiser, older self want me to choose?

These questions bring you back into your authority.

9. When the Festive Season Ends

Once the holidays pass, take quiet time to reflect. What patterns repeated? What surprised you? Where did you honour yourself? Where did you abandon yourself?

Life coaching is about awareness before action. You cannot change what you do not see. Journaling your festive season experience becomes the first step toward future healing.

10. You Are Allowed to Choose Peace

Your worth and identity do not come from how well you manage difficult people. You do not need to keep shrinking to make others comfortable. You do not need to tolerate disrespect to keep the family harmony.

You are allowed to redefine your story.
You are allowed to protect your peace.
You are allowed to choose yourself.

At Woman in the Wilderness, we guide women into deep self trust and emotional clarity. We help you reshape your inner landscape so you can walk into any environment, including the festive season, with calm power.

You are stronger than you know.
And you deserve a holiday season that nourishes you, not drains you.

If you feel you need help before, during or after the festive season, reach out and set up a one on one online coaching session.