Relationships
Are You Hoarding Hurt?
This holiday season, declutter your emotional house to make room for joy.
Updated December 19, 2025 Reviewed by Margaret Foley
Key points
- For joyous holidays get rid of old hurt and make room for gratitude.
- When we keep old injuries alive, we cause ourselves more suffering.
- When cleaning your emotional house, ask yourself, "Does this memory bring joy?"
- Time alone does not heal; we can actively participate in letting go of pain.
There’s a holiday song that says, "It's the most wonderful time of the year!" And so it is. And also a most evocative, challenging, and complicated time. It's a time of December darkness and the light and warmth we fill it with as we gather with people we love.
These are often the people with whom we experience a confusing complexity of joys and emotional misadventures. Sharing holidays with them offers abundant opportunities for both gratitude and letting go of old injuries.
Gratitude
Of these two, gratitude is easier, yet sometimes forgotten. The people in our lives bring us gifts of comfort, joy, companionship, and laughter. Time with them is precious, and we are enriched by their presence. Yet, too often we fall into taking them for granted—the background of our busy lives. Sometimes when I suggest to couples that they appreciate the small things their partner does—making dinner, picking up the dry cleaning—they react with surprise. "What! These are just table stakes!" Sharing our life with others is both difficult and a privilege. There's no such thing as table stakes. No kindness is ever too small to notice.
Research has shown the physical, mental, and emotional benefits of practicing gratitude. Neurochemically, gratitude increases dopamine and serotonin, and decreases cortisol. We feel better and are less depressed and anxious. These benefits are even stronger when we express our gratitude. Gathering for the holidays is a good time to experience and express gratitude for family and friends and the joy they bring to our lives.
Discarding Old Injuries
Now comes the harder part: letting go of old injuries. As we prepare for the holidays—planning trips, decorating, anticipating seeing friends and family—it's a good time to clean house, especially your emotional house. How many closets do you have stuffed with old hurts? As you go to put coats away, do you get bonked in the head by an unpleasant memory? Or do you arrive at someone else's house with way too many packages of old injuries? What if holiday preparations could include getting rid of those?
Marie Kondo, the organizing guru, taught us to declutter by considering whether the things around us "spark joy." Just as we keep things around us that not only don't spark joy, but also get in our way, we may also hoard old hurts. As with the pile of useless things in the garage (really, do you still need the toaster that stopped working a decade ago?), we may be reluctant to discard pain that may once have served a purpose, but no longer does.
Awareness of our emotional experience, including pain, in the moment is useful, helping us guide our relationships to maximize connection and minimize hurt. Then, when the experience has passed, it's important to let the pain go, let it lose its power over us, so that we can have the next experience, with this person or with others, freshly and accurately. Cultivating this ability—an aspect of what we call mindfulness—is powerful. Let's look at what gets in the way.
Why We Hang Onto Our Suffering
We keep old hurts around for several reasons. First, we imagine that we need them as reminders to keep our guard up. This will protect us from future injuries, right? Sometimes we even generalize and guard ourselves from all kinds of injuries with multiple people in order to be supersafe. This strategy leaves us unable to receive and give love. Furthermore, it doesn't actually keep us safe. True safety comes from being able to sense accurately, in each moment, what is really happening. This ability is impeded by too much awareness of, and emphasis on, the past. Like the broken toaster, pain from the past is no longer serving you and is getting in your way.
We also keep old hurts alive out of a need for fairness. When we're injured, we want accountability, even retribution. Apologies can help soften this, but often an apology fails to satisfy. If we just forgive and let it go, then they "get off scot free." Right?
We fail to notice that keeping these old injuries alive actually causes us extra suffering. This can create a vicious cycle. The more we suffer, the more we feel a need for retribution, an evening of the score, which is not forthcoming and will not, in fact, free us from this self-inflicted misery.
Letting go of past injuries doesn’t mean you're a doormat for ongoing bad behavior. It means instead that you become free and alert to experience what is actually happening now instead of what happened before. Self-protection depends not on keeping your distress active, but upon this clarity.
Time Heals If You Get Active
Finally, we fail to understand that time passing is not enough to heal all wounds. We are active participants, saving or discarding old injuries. Instead of keeping these experiences alive, we can, and need to, actively encourage them to fade.
When your mind serves up a painful memory, instead of feeding it with attention, playing the whole movie again in your mind, complete with popcorn and a new round of tears, leave the theater; go outside and take a walk. Shift your attention to something neutral or pleasant.
Make a choice about what you will enlarge with your attention. This is an aspect of resilience. We often don't get to control the experiences life serves up, especially with other people, but we can actively engage with pain in ways that lessen it, helping it to go instead of stay. If this approach is new to you, know that it will take some practice before you see results. Like most habit changes, it will be hard at first, but easier with repetition.
Add a Dash of Humility
Remember that we're all constantly making mistakes with each other. In the wonderful dance of relationship, we're frequently stepping on each other's toes. Furthermore, we are prone to the fundamental attribution error: when others make a mistake, we attribute it to a character flaw, whereas when we make a mistake, we allow ourselves situational excuses. When they screw up, they're bad; when we screw up, we're a good person dealing with a tough situation. To enjoy the pleasures of relationship, we need to handle skillfully the inevitable uncomfortable mistakes. Humility helps a lot.
Life serves up some hurt and lots of joy. For happier holidays, let go of old injuries and make room for gratitude and joy. May your days be merry and bright.
