The Holiday Season, Clinical Work, and Personal Meaning

The holiday season has a way of increasing the impact of sensory experiences. The lights are brighter, the schedules fuller, the stories more emotionally laden. In a single December day, you might share space with a client’s raw grief in the morning, head to a staff party at noon, then drive home past houses covered in twinkle lights. It's common for clinicians to report they feel more tired than festive.

Many clinicians experience December with a split-screen perspective: some of them hold space for heightened emotion in the therapy room, while others quietly track their own family history with the holidays, aware of who is missing, what has changed, and what they feel too tired to do again.

Inside that mix, there is a quiet invitation. The holidays bring built-in rituals, a range of sensory experiences, and changes to the usual routine. That combination opens a space where creativity is less about “producing something” and more about finding ways to be present. 

Creativity As Presence

Clinical training teaches us to be attuned, steady, and reflective.  This training is invaluable, as it helps remind us of who we are in the therapeutic relationship. Our creative selves ask for something different of us and come to each moment without knowing exactly how we will show up.

In practice, that might show up as:

Allowing metaphors to carry the work, instead of translating them back into “clean” clinical language.

Implementing grounding rituals before each session, like taking three deep breaths in the doorway, lighting a candle, or drawing a tarot card for inspiration.

The Pressure of Perfection

The holiday season increases internal pressure to “make” everything meaningful: picking out the right gifts, hosting the right gatherings, and making the most of your year-end reflection. Creativity, in this context, can be a gentle refusal of that pressure—more about leaning into what makes you feel alive, and less about performing or striving for perfection.

How Creativity Can Support Us During the Holidays

1. Creativity Makes Room for Mixed Feelings

Holidays are emotionally layered. Joy hangs out with grief, and gratitude couples with fatigue. Creative processes help clients and clinicians hold those layers together, instead of feeling the need to choose one and exile the others. Creativity gives form to “both/and” especially when words are hard to find. 

2. Creativity Offers a Path to Action

Holidays highlight the things we can't control: family dynamics, finances, health, and the wider world. Creative acts, such as a hand-drawn card, a rewritten family story, or a collage of “what this year felt like,” can restore a sense of agency. A reminder that even when circumstances seem fixed, how we respond and the meaning we add are not.​​

3. Creativity Deepens Ritual

Ritual is evident everywhere in December: candles, music, gatherings, meals. Creativity can turn tradition into something that actually fits with your current self. By shaping or renaming seasonal rituals, you can address the emotional weight of your life and clinical work. 

4. Creativity Helps With Recovery and Burnout

There is growing evidence that play and novelty are associated with increased creativity and subjective well-being.  Even if you are not taking a whole vacation, making time for creative practices like drawing for ten minutes or engaging with art that moves you supports the kind of recovery that plain “time off” does not always provide.​

Seasonal Invitations: With Clients and With Yourself

These suggestions do not require artistic skill. They are meant to be adapted, translated, and made your own.

Rewrite a Holiday Scene

Retell a holiday memory as a short story or translate it into a movie script. If you had the chance to experience the situation again, what would you keep the same, and what would change? In the therapy room, clients can describe it, journal it, or sketch it. The goal is not to erase the original memory, but to give it new meaning.

Create a Personal Ritual for This Year Only

Rather than “fixing” a long-term tradition, design a ritual that exists for this season. This may look like lighting one candle for each person you wish were closer, marking the end of each day with a specific song, or placing one object on a table that represents who you are now.

Five-Minute Seasonal Art

Invite whimsy and ask yourself, “If this month were a weather pattern, what would it look like?” Use color, line, or collage to express yourself. The product does not matter. What matters is the experience and an opportunity for expression.​​

Imagining an “After the Gathering” Self

For those anxious about family events,  picture yourself walking out of the gathering feeling good about the experience. In your imagination, with whom did you interact? How were your conversations? What did you put in place ahead of time to support that outcome? Turning this into a written or visual image can help you or your clients set boundaries that feel more accessible in the moment.

Invitations for yourself:

Choose one evening in late December to symbolize “the therapist’s New Year.”  Light a candle, write down what this year of work has cost you, what it has given, and what you want to be different in the following year. 

Spend 15 minutes with a piece of art: a poem, a painting, an album. Notice what parts of you respond to the art, and notice the parts of you that don't get much ‘airtime’ in your clinical week.

Before attending a social event, give yourself one “creative assignment. ” Notice all the colors in the room, track how sound shifts over the evening, or imagine what an outside observer would title this scene. It can turn an overwhelming event into a more curious one.

Creating With Heart

Creativity offers a way to stay connected to yourself, especially in a month that often asks us to be superhuman.

For clinicians, that might look like allowing images, symbols, and small rituals to help you metabolize what you hold for others. For clients, it can mean discovering that there are more ways to experience the holidays than the way they currently do.

The holidays will remain complicated. Creativity does not erase the complexity.  What it does is offer new ways to add personal meaning to a season of established traditions. Over time, those small acts become a record of care, both for yourself and the people in your life. 

by Dr. Amy Vail and Alli Fischenich