attachment Fireworks: Why holiday Gatherings can Turn Into Anger You Didn't See Coming

Holidays carry memories of both togetherness and loss. Today's holiday, the Fourth of July, can bring up either side of that. Family visits, cookouts, long weekends with the same handful of people from morning to night. Or the absence of those gatherings: kids grown and gone, family members who've passed, living somewhere else now, a fallout that never got resolved. Either one can stir up old attachment wounds. Old roles come back. Old sore spots get touched. Someone brings up something from years ago, or nobody brings it up and the silence says just as much. And often what shows up first isn't sadness or fear. Alongside the fireworks outside, there's a different kind of combustion happening inside. It's anger.

It's easy to misread aggression. By design, it triggers fight, flight, or freeze in whoever is on the receiving end. Those are self-preserving modes, and in them it's nearly impossible to stay mindful or to do what Peter Fonagy calls mentalizing: accurately tracking what you think and feel, and what the other person thinks and feels, at the same time. Whether the anger is coming from someone else or from us, it's hard to tell in the moment whether the anger is really about anger, or whether it's covering something more vulnerable underneath.

This is especially true when anger is standing in for panic, and underneath that, grief.

The system underneath the anger

Attachment distress and attachment security are rooted in a brain system Jaak Panksepp called PANIC/GRIEF, working alongside two other systems called CARE and SEEKING. When disconnection happens and you need connection back, the automatic reaction is panic. That panic exists to alert you, and the people around you, that you need connection for survival. It teams up with SEEKING to point you toward the person you need. When that person notices your panic, it's their own CARE and SEEKING systems that pull them back toward you. These are old, fast circuits, and they run well beneath conscious thought.

When panic doesn't succeed in getting reconnection (through neglect or through attack) it risks tipping into the pain of isolation and grief. That's a state where you feel helpless, alone, and often like you don't matter. It can feel close enough to a threat to survival that the FEAR system recruits its counterpart, RAGE, to pull the system out of that collapse. RAGE brings a stronger, more mobilized feeling than panic or grief, and for a nervous system that's starting to feel it might not survive disconnection, that mobilization can feel like relief.

Why anger works, until it doesn't

Anger is empowering. Its original job, as Paul Ekman and Silvan Tomkins both described, is to clear whatever stands between you and something you're after. It comes with a sense of rightness and a jolt of confidence. Paired with SEEKING, it can help a person get real things done.

The problem is that in relationships, when anger is being called up in service of PANIC/GRIEF rather than in service of an actual obstacle, it tends to produce the opposite of what's needed. It pushes the other person away and adds to the misunderstanding instead of resolving it. The person on the receiving end usually focuses on the anger itself and misses the panic, grief, and fear driving it. That deepens the isolation, the helplessness, and the hit to self-worth that started the whole cycle.

From response to pattern

This pattern doesn't come from nowhere. It builds out of repeated experiences where attachment cues weren't met well, and over time the response becomes automatic. At the automatic, repeated level, we start calling it personality.

This particular pattern (anger that is really panic and grief in disguise) shows up more often in certain personality profiles: Borderline Personality Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and in Enneagram terms, the one-to-one (sexual) subtypes of Eights, Ones, and Fours in particular. In each case, the anger looks like the presenting problem, but the attachment system underneath it is what actually needs attention.

What changes it

Change comes from three places: awareness, tools, and new experience.

Awareness means being able to mindfully notice when you're about to tip into this state, when you're in it, and what happened as a result once it's passed. That includes recognizing your own patterns: how you think, what you feel, where your eyes go, what happens in your body, how you move, and what you tend to say. A simple way to check yourself, or to notice it in someone else, is to ask what you tend to:

• Think

• Say

• Feel

• Do

Tools, from a Somatic Experiencing lens, give the nervous system a way to move through activation instead of getting stuck at the top of it or freezing under it.

Titration means taking the activation in small pieces instead of all at once. Rather than diving straight into the memory or the argument that set off the rage, you touch it briefly, notice what happens in the body, and back off before it overwhelms you. Small doses are easier for the nervous system to process and complete.

Pendulation is the rhythm of moving between that activation and a place of relative ease or resource, back and forth. You might notice the heat rising in your chest, then shift attention to your feet on the floor or a steady breath, then check back in with the heat. That back and forth is what teaches the body it can go into activation and come back out, instead of getting flooded.

Shifting attention in and out works alongside both. Attention in means noticing sensation, tension, temperature, and impulses to move. Attention out means noticing the room, another person's face, or something neutral and steady nearby. Moving between the two keeps you from getting swallowed by the internal experience or dissociating away from it entirely.

Tracking waves of activation and deactivation means watching the rise and fall as it happens rather than judging it. Rage has a shape: it builds, it peaks, and if you don't feed it or fight it, it comes back down. Learning to watch that curve, rather than either suppressing it or getting swept into it, is what turns rage from something that happens to you into something you can move through.

None of this is about stopping the anger before it starts. It's about staying present enough in your body to ride the wave instead of being ridden by it.

New experience comes from two places at once: growing confidence in your own capacity for self-regulation, and being met by people whose own nervous systems can stay regulated while yours isn't, people who can understand you and stay close to you through the storm instead of matching it or retreating from it.

Bringing it back to the holiday

If this weekend brings up a flash of irritation at a family member that threatens to turn into a blow up or painful drama, or you watch someone you love go from calm to furious over something small, try not to jump straight to conclusions about "bad behavior." Underneath a lot of holiday tempers is an old, fast circuit doing exactly what it was built to do: trying to get connection back before the isolation underneath becomes unbearable.

That doesn't excuse harm done in the heat of it. But it does point to where the real work is. Not in suppressing the anger and not in venting it, but in learning to recognize the panic and grief driving it, and building the capacity, in yourself and in your relationships, to stay close through the storm instead of being scattered by it.

Trauma Isn’t Intensity — It’s What the Nervous System Learns

When people hear the word trauma, they often picture something overwhelming: extreme fear, intense emotion, or a catastrophic event. And while trauma can involve intense experiences, defining it primarily by emotional intensity actually misses the heart of the matter. Trauma is not best understood as how big something felt — but as what the nervous system learned when survival was at stake.

From a nervous-system perspective, trauma begins with threat. When we perceive danger, the body mobilizes automatically to protect us through fight, flight, or freeze. This mobilization requires a rapid surge of energy — heart rate increases, muscles tense, attention narrows. This temporary dysregulation is not a problem; it is the body doing exactly what it is designed to do.

Under normal circumstances, that survival energy is spent. We run, resist, escape, or orient toward safety. Once the threat passes and the energy is discharged, the nervous system returns to its baseline rhythm of regulation and flexibility.

Trauma occurs when that process is interrupted.

When a threat cannot be escaped, fought, or fully responded to — because of powerlessness, overwhelm, developmental immaturity, or relational constraints — the nervous system is forced to cope rather than complete the survival cycle. The energy meant for action remains trapped in the body. This unresolved dysregulation is profoundly uncomfortable, and the system adapts in whatever way it can to endure.

Over time, this unfinished survival response becomes encoded as learning.

As Mark Solms explains in The Feeling Brain, affect is fundamentally tied to homeostasis — the body’s drive to regulate internal states. Trauma represents a disruption in this regulatory process. The system does not simply remember what happened; it remembers how it survived.

Similarly, Stephen Porges shows through Polyvagal Theory that our nervous systems continuously assess safety and danger beneath conscious awareness. When safety cannot be restored, the system defaults to defensive strategies — hyperarousal, collapse, shutdown — not as pathology, but as protection.

Crucially, the coping strategies used during the original threat often replace instinctive responses in the future. Instead of fluid fight or flight, the body replays learned patterns. This is why trauma can show up in two seemingly opposite ways: explosive emotional reactions that feel disproportionate to the present moment, or a puzzling absence of response when action would be appropriate. In both cases, the nervous system is responding to past threat in the present.

As Allan Schore emphasizes, trauma is ultimately a disorder of affect regulation. It is not the event itself that defines trauma, but whether the nervous system could return to regulated flow afterward — especially in the presence of attuned support.

Understanding trauma this way reframes healing. The work is not primarily about revisiting intense emotions or retelling the story in greater detail. It is about helping the nervous system complete what was once impossible: restoring regulation, releasing trapped survival energy, and relearning that safety and responsiveness are possible now.

Trauma is not intensity. It is unfinished survival — and the body remembering how it had to cope when there was no other choice.

Is This Trauma or Just Stress? How to Tell the Difference.

Many people in Kansas City come to therapy unsure whether what they’re feeling is stress, burnout, or trauma. With trauma being talked about on podcasts and social media, it can feel like everything counts as trauma now. Commentators like Scott Galloway even argue that therapy tries to “explain everything with trauma” on The Prof G Podcast (Galloway, 2025).

There’s a real point here: when clinical words leave the therapy room, they often get stretched and lose their meaning. Trauma is one of those words.

A Simple Way to Compare Stress and Trauma

Here’s a helpful way to picture the difference. Think of reactions like money:

• A $10 reaction to a $10 problem → normal stress

• A $10 reaction to a $1 problem → a bad day

• A $100 reaction to a $10 problem → old experiences may be involved

• A $100 reaction to a $1 problem → often trauma residue

Not all distress is trauma, and not all trauma looks like the size of the situation you’re in.

So What Actually Counts as Trauma?

Clinically, trauma is not defined by the event.
It’s defined by what happens after the event.

Somatic researcher Peter Levine describes trauma as what happens when the nervous system can’t complete its stress response and return to normal (Levine, 1997; 2010).

In plain language:

Trauma is not what happened. Trauma is what stayed in the body afterward.

Two people can go through the same experience and have different outcomes:

• one returns to baseline → stress

• one stays stuck → trauma

This difference is about physiology and survival, not personal weakness.

Stress Is About Now. Trauma Is About Then.

A simple way to tell the difference:

Stress

• has a clear cause

• matches the size of the problem

• fades when life calms down

Trauma patterns

• show up in different situations

• feel too big for the moment

• don’t automatically go away even when life improves

Stress is your nervous system responding to today.
Trauma is your nervous system responding to back then.

How Trauma Shows Up (Even If You Don’t Call It Trauma)

Unfinished stress responses can look like:

• shutting down during conflict

• panic around feedback

• feeling “on alert” in relationships

• expecting the worst in small situations

• people-pleasing to feel safe

Affective neuroscience shows these reactions begin in deeper emotional circuits (Panksepp, 1998; Solms, 2021), which is why you can’t simply “think your way out” of them.

Trauma Therapy in Kansas City

If you’re asking “Is this trauma or just stress?” a more useful question might be:

Am I spending today’s money — or yesterday’s?

At Analog Counseling in Overland Park, we help clients from across Kansas City complete unfinished stress responses and return to regulation. We use trauma-informed approaches including Somatic Experiencing, psychodynamic therapy, and neurobiological models.

We see clients from:

• Overland Park

• Kansas City, MO

• Leawood

• Olathe

• Prairie Village

• Lenexa

• North Kansas City, MO

• Lawrence

• Gardner

• And more!

A Note on Worthiness

You don’t have to wait for things to “get bad enough.”
Trauma therapy is about helping your nervous system settle and feel safe again — not proving that something happened.

References

American Psychiatric Association. (2022). DSM-5-TR.
Galloway, S. (2025). The Prof G Podcast.
Levine, P. (1997). Waking the Tiger.
Levine, P. (2010). In an Unspoken Voice.
Panksepp, J. (1998). Affective Neuroscience.
Schore, A. (2012). The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy.
Solms, M. (2021). The Hidden Spring.
van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score.