The December Pull: Why We Overspend, Overcommit, and Seek Belonging During the Holidays

It’s December 10th.

You’ve already spent more than you planned. You’ve said yes to another holiday gathering even though you’re exhausted. You’re scrolling past images of perfect trees, coordinated outfits, and joyful family moments, and something in you feels behind.

What’s driving this isn’t a lack of discipline or willpower.
It’s a powerful mix of attachment needs, inherited family expectations, and the targeted messages of holiday culture.

December doesn’t just bring celebrations. It activates our desire to belong, to be seen as good or generous, to meet expectations, and to avoid disappointing the people we care about. When those needs come online, our choices are shaped by more than intention alone.

How Attachment and Family Systems Shape the Season

Attachment forms early. It’s not about blame or diagnosis. It’s about how closeness, safety, approval, and belonging were experienced in our families.

For some people, the holidays feel relatively spacious.

When the Holidays Feel Spacious

• relationships feel secure

• traditions feel flexible

• boundaries are respected

• love doesn’t need to be earned

• expectations are clear or minimal

For others, December brings a familiar kind of pressure.

When Old Family Systems Are Activated

• pressure to perform gratitude

• pressure to keep the peace

• pressure to host, give, or overextend

• pressure to meet unspoken expectations

• pressure to hold the family together

Even adults with their own homes, careers, and families often slip back into familiar roles: the responsible one, the giver, the organizer, the one who smooths tension or makes things “nice.”

This isn’t a personal failure.
It’s attachment meeting tradition.

Unmet Needs: When Emotional and Material Realities Collide

The holidays don’t just stir emotions. They also highlight material realities.

Rising costs.
Unequal access to resources.
The desire to give children what we didn’t have.
The fear of falling behind.

For many families (especially immigrant families and communities shaped by colonialism and capitalism) December has long meant stretching, sacrificing, and doing more with less. Survival and dignity often depended on appearing “okay,” even when resources were thin.

Emotional and material needs become tightly linked:

• wanting children to feel special

• wanting parents to feel proud

• wanting the holiday to feel meaningful

• wanting to look like we’re doing okay

These aren’t shallow wants. They’re rooted in care, history, and survival.

The Marketing Mirror: Why Holiday Ads Tap Our Need to Belong

Holiday marketing doesn’t just sell products. It reflects our longings back to us.

It quietly suggests:

• this is what good parents do

• this is how love is shown

• this is how you keep up

• this is how you belong

These messages land not because we’re easily influenced, but because they echo needs we already carry. December is when people are most emotionally open, reflective, and sensitive to comparison. Marketing is designed around that reality.

Often, what we’re buying isn’t the item itself, but the feeling we hope it will create: reassurance, closeness, pride, or relief.

Aspirations and Isolation: Why Influencers Offer Connection

This is also why influencers have such pull during the holidays.

They don’t just offer recommendations. They offer identity, validation, and a sense of community. When family dynamics feel complicated or traditions feel heavy, it makes sense to look elsewhere for connection.

Curated homes, routines, and lifestyles offer a temporary sense of belonging. Wanting that connection isn’t a flaw. It’s attachment doing what attachment does.

The Scarcity Trap: Why “Opportunity” Groups Peak in December

December is also peak season for MLMs and similar “opportunity” spaces.

They tend to show up when people are:

• financially stretched

• emotionally tired

• craving stability

• longing for hope or a fresh start

They rarely lead with numbers. They lead with belonging, encouragement, and identity.

“You’re not just joining a business.”
“You’re joining a family.”

I understand the pull of this personally.

In my early twenties, I was serving as an AmeriCorps VISTA member and had taken what felt like a vow of poverty. At the time, it felt principled. I was trying to escape the chaos of my life and the bar industry and build a life rooted in service and meaning. In hindsight, it was also a path far more accessible to people with financial safety nets than I had.

That holiday season, I went home broke and idealistic, and a childhood friend tried to recruit me into Primerica. I was angry. I recognized it as a pyramid scheme, and I remembered how, years earlier, I had almost joined Cutco when I was desperate for money.

I wasn’t going to do that again.

Instead of confronting him directly, I leaned hard into my service identity. I played a kind of secular Mother Teresa, explaining that I couldn’t possibly join because I was committed to a life of poverty and selfless service.

It was half resistance, half performance.

Looking back now, I can see the irony. The MLM pitch and my own devotion to sacrifice were two sides of the same coin. Both offered meaning. Both offered belonging. Both framed sacrifice as a virtue.

That realization came later. At the time, I was just trying to survive December with my values intact.

How Holiday Pressure Strains Family Dynamics

All of this plays out inside family systems.

Gift-giving becomes symbolic.
Spending becomes emotional.
Boundaries blur.
Old conflicts resurface.

Many people overspend or overgive not because they want to, but because they’re trying to preserve harmony, prove love, or avoid guilt.

December quietly asks many of us the same question:

“Am I doing enough?”

A Gentler Way to Be With This Season: Returning to Yourself

The goal isn’t to eliminate the pull of December, but to soften its grip. Awareness creates space.

The next time you feel the pressure rising, you might gently pause and ask yourself:

• What feeling am I hoping this will give me?

• Whose expectations am I responding to?

• Is this about connection, obligation, or both?

• Would I choose this if there were less pressure?

Answering honestly isn’t a judgment.
It’s an act of self-loyalty.

Looking Ahead

December makes visible what’s often operating quietly all year: the ways our choices are shaped by attachment, family systems, cultural expectations, and material realities.

Next month, this series will continue by looking more closely at family loyalty, emotional roles, and why the holidays activate patterns many of us thought we had outgrown. The very patterns many of us didn’t choose — but learned.

For now, gentleness matters.

Some of the needs showing up this month are old.
Some are deeply understandable.
And none of them make you weak.

They make you human.

What We’re Told, What We Believe, and What We Choose

Introducing My New Blog Series

When I was about twenty-two, a childhood friend once asked me:

“Do you believe in free will?”

“Of course,” I said.

At the time, I was newly out from under strict religious parents and doing whatever I wanted, even when the consequences were messy. I believed every choice was mine.

She shook her head.

“There is no such thing. We are conditioned […] Well, I have a master’s. I know.”” she said, as if the degree had granted her ownership of truth.

Her comment hit a tender spot. It touched my shame about not having a degree yet, and it carried the implication that she understood something I didn’t. Here is what I understand now:

She was right about free will being shaped by conditioning.
She was wrong about me being unaware of it.

Even then, I already sensed that our choices were shaped by the environments we grew up in. I had watched conditioning play out in our community, in our church, and in our families. Sometimes I felt like I was the only one who noticed. What I did not have yet was the language or confidence to describe what I saw.

Now I do have a master’s, and years of experience with people across many systems. All of it confirmed what I knew intuitively:

We do not only inherit trauma. We inherit stories about who we are allowed to be.

Stories about what we owe, when to stay quiet, how we should show gratitude, and what we must sacrifice to keep the peace. Stories about identity, loyalty, limits, and possibility. These private stories often mirror the larger cultural stories we are taught.

These inherited stories don’t just show up on families. They show up nationally, too. Which brings me to Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving is one of the clearest examples of this kind of inherited narrative.

Most of us grew up with the school-friendly version: Pilgrims and Native Americans sharing a peaceful meal, unity, gratitude, and a simple origin story.

The real history is far more painful.
Yet the softened version is the one repeated, celebrated, and taught to children until it becomes unquestioned.

This is how conditioning works.
Quiet.
Familiar.
Comfortable enough that we do not pause to examine it.

The stories we inherit in families, culture, religion, politics, and even therapy function in a very similar way.

Why I am Writing This Series

In every setting I have worked in, including therapy, anti-trafficking work, juvenile justice, immigrant communities, spiritual trauma, child welfare, and national trainings, people name the same feelings again and again:

“I feel trapped.”
“I do not know how to leave.”
“I keep choosing the same thing.”
“I feel guilty taking care of myself.”
“I do not know whose expectations I am living for.”

People often believe they are making fully free choices.
In reality, they are responding to the stories they were handed long before they could understand them.

This series is about those stories.
The ones we grow up with.
The ones we carry.
The ones we question.
The ones we eventually outgrow.

Next Month’s Post

In December, I will be exploring one of the loudest and most universal forms of modern conditioning: holiday consumer culture, advertisements, influencers, and MLMs.

These systems shape our decisions in ways that feel personal but are actually designed.

As we move through this holiday season, I hope you approach your inherited stories with gentleness.

Some of them protected you.
Some of them restricted you.
And some of them are finally ready to be rewritten.

This series is my way of walking through that process with you.