Why a Pre-Holiday Therapy Intensive Is the Best Gift You Can Give Yourself
The holidays arrive each year like a beautiful invitation- twinkling lights, festive gatherings, moments of family, reflection, connection. And yet for many of us female entrepreneurs, caregivers battling compassion fatigue, overwhelmed parents, and BIPOC professionals navigating both external expectations and internal demands - this season also carries weight. The joy often comes hand in hand with pressure: performance, perfectionism, pleasing others, honoring traditions, and sometimes revisiting grief or unresolved emotional business.
Before the holiday swirl begins, what if you gifted yourself the opportunity to show up calm, clear, connected? A pre-holiday therapy intensive can be that gift. By choosing a healing moment now, you invest in your resilience, presence, and emotional well-being before things get hectic.
Take a quiet moment before the holidays - a gentle reminder that healing starts with slowing down.
Why the Holidays Can Be Emotionally Challenging
The holiday season may look cheerful from the outside, but underneath it often brings a mix of emotional undercurrents:
Family expectations and cultural obligations. You might feel the pull of traditions, rituals, visiting relatives, doing the “right thing” for your family or community. For those of us balancing multiple roles—parent, partner, professional, caregiver—it can feel like our “to-do” list overtakes our internal world.
Grief, loss, and memory. The season can awaken old wounds: the loved one who isn’t there this year, the holiday you hoped for that turned out differently, the sense of time passing. These feelings can surge when we’re surrounded by holiday cheer.
Perfectionism and people-pleasing. As a high‐achiever or caregiver, you may set the bar high: “I’ll make the tree perfect, plan the gathering, ensure everyone’s happy…” But chasing perfect often leaves you burnt-out before December even ends.
Emotional fatigue and overwhelm. The cumulative effect of the year—professional demands, societal pressures, personal growth, trauma history—can leave your emotional tank low. And the holidays can trigger an uptick in demands just when your reserves are already thin.
In short: the brighter the lights, the shadow can feel deeper. Without a thoughtful pause, we risk entering the season frazzled, reactive, and depleted - rather than grounded, intentional, and present.
How a Therapy Intensive Can Help You Prepare
That’s where a holiday-focused therapy option comes in: a dedicated space to hit “pause,” reset, and enter the rest of the year with clarity, calm, and connection. This is what a holiday therapy intensive (or “emotional reset before the holidays”) can offer:
Condensed, focused work.
Instead of spreading therapy over weeks or months, a therapy intensive allows you to concentrate therapeutic momentum into one session (or several back-to-back sessions) so you can quickly identify patterns, triggers, and desired goals. Research on intensives shows they can lead to faster symptom relief and deeper exploration in a short timeframe. Mental Health Match+2Carol A. Covelli, LCSW, PLLC+2
Targeted identification of holiday-specific triggers.
In the intensive, you can walk through your typical holiday stressors—relationship dynamics, internal demands, cultural/family expectations, self-critique—and uncover how they show up for you.
Skill-building and regulation work.
Once you’ve identified what tends to throw you off, you work actively on coping tools: boundaries, self-compassion, nervous system regulation, trauma-informed techniques like EMDR or IFS if appropriate. As one article puts it, the extended time in therapy intensives “provides deeper exploration, accelerated progress, and focused attention.” Carol A. Covelli, LCSW, PLLC
Entering the season from a place of choice.
Rather than reacting during December, you arrive into it having already done the emotional calibration. You start ahead of the momentum, rather than chasing it. This proactive move can shift your experience from overwhelm to intentional presence.
For busy women and BIPOC professionals - who often juggle multiple identities, expectations, and roles - a therapy intensive in the greater Seattle area (Kirkland, Eastside, Washington State) can be a strategic investment in your self-energy.
Emotional Benefits of a Pre-Holiday Reset
A holiday therapy intensive isn’t just about working through stress - it’s about intentionally creating space for renewal before life speeds up again. Think of it as giving yourself a series of deeply meaningful gifts, ones that can transform how you move through the season and beyond.
The Gift of Clarity.
Before the holidays begin, many of us carry invisible mental lists: who we need to see, what we need to do, how we “should” feel. A therapy intensive helps you slow down and sort through what’s truly yours to carry. You’ll gain insight into your emotional patterns: the expectations, triggers, or fears that tend to resurface each year, and begin replacing them with awareness and choice.
When you enter the season with clarity, you’re less reactive and more intentional. You know what matters most — and what can be released without guilt.
The Gift of Calm.
Imagine entering December with your nervous system already grounded. Instead of bracing for the next obligation, you’re breathing easier, sleeping better, and responding to stress from a centered place.
During a holiday therapy intensive, you’ll practice evidence-based regulation tools such as EMDR resourcing, grounding exercises, and mindfulness strategies that help your body remember what safety and calm feel like. That internal steadiness allows you to navigate family gatherings, work demands, and last-minute changes with more grace and less reactivity.
The Gift of Renewed Energy.
When the year has been heavy or depleting, it’s easy to enter the holidays on emotional fumes. A pre-holiday therapy intensive acts like a recharge - replenishing your emotional energy before you even begin the season.
This renewal isn’t just about rest; it’s about integrating what the year has taught you, releasing what no longer serves you, and opening space for joy. Think of it as emotional decluttering: you clear out the residue of stress and make room for peace, creativity, and ease.
The Gift of Connection - with yourself and others.
Connection starts within. By spending time reconnecting with yourself (your needs, your emotions, your inner world) you naturally show up more authentically with others. Whether you’re sharing space with family, spending time with friends, or simply enjoying quiet moments at home, this inner alignment makes relationships feel more genuine and fulfilling.
Many clients describe this as feeling “more like myself again.” That sense of grounded connection radiates outward, strengthening your bonds with loved ones while keeping you anchored in self-respect and compassion.
The Gift of Presence Instead of Autopilot.
So often the holidays rush by in a blur - full of moments we don’t fully absorb because our minds are elsewhere. The grounding work you do in a therapy intensive helps you be here: in your body, in your relationships, in the moment.
Presence is the true heart of the season: being able to notice your child’s laughter, the warmth of connection, the quiet of a winter morning. When you’re not battling internal noise, you have more capacity to experience your life instead of simply managing it.
The Gift of Permission
Finally, one of the most healing outcomes of a therapy intensive is giving yourself permission — to rest, to feel, to say no, to take up space. Many high-achieving women and BIPOC professionals have been conditioned to prioritize others’ needs above their own.
Through focused, compassionate work, you begin to unlearn those patterns. You realize that your needs aren’t burdens; they’re invitations to care for yourself more deeply. And that shift changes everything - not just during the holidays, but all year long.
Choosing Yourself Before the Season Begins
It’s easy to talk about giving yourself gifts, but it’s another thing entirely to choose them. As someone who shows up for others, who takes responsibility, who is used to holding much - this is a moment to shift. This is your invitation to view therapy not as a last-resort fix, but as a proactive, visionary act of self-care.
If you wait until December has already taken hold—until the stress kicks in, the obligations mount, the relational tensions rise—you’ll be entering reaction mode. Instead, by booking a therapy intensive now, you’re giving yourself the gift of before. Before the chaos. Before the strain. Before the emotional drift.
In the greater Seattle area (Kirkland, Eastside Washington State) you have access to trauma-informed, culturally responsive care that honors your full self: professional, femme, BIPOC, caregiver, entrepreneur. This is your time to show up for you so that you can show up for others - with presence, calm, and clarity.
Choosing to invest in a holiday therapy intensive is not indulgent, it’s strategic. It’s alignment. It’s coming home to your inner wisdom and strength. It’s setting the tone for the season you want instead of the one that just happens.
A peaceful pause can change how you move through the season - calm is the best gift you can give yourself.
Your Season of Peace Starts Here
If you’re ready to step into this holiday season from a place of choice rather than overwhelm, I invite you to schedule a free consultation to explore a pre-holiday therapy intensive. Let’s co-design a session built for the high-achieving woman, BIPOC professional, caregiver, or entrepreneur in the Eastside Washington State/Kirkland area who is ready to move from “just surviving” to thriving.
Click the “Schedule Now” button and let’s get you grounded, regulated, and connected before the rest of the year holds its weight. Your emotional reset before the holidays is waiting and you deserve to gift yourself this.
Feeling the weight of the holidays before they’ve even begun?
You don’t have to push through the season on empty. Let’s create space for calm, clarity, and connection before the rush begins.
Schedule a pre-holiday therapy intensive - an intentional pause to reset emotionally, strengthen your coping tools, and step into the holidays grounded and at peace.
📍 Available in-person in Kirkland, WA and virtually across Washington State.
About the author
Angelica De Anda is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor and EMDR Certified therapist based in Washington State. Offering virtual therapy and in-person EMDR extended and EMDR intensives for individuals ready to move through trauma, burnout, and stress with deeper, faster results. Her work is grounded in cultural humility, compassion, and a belief in each client’s capacity to heal.
