Accepting Aversion to Traveling

I used to love going on vacations. New friends are usually impressed with the list of places I’ve visited. Even in the current times, I will visit places across my home state of Texas, since I seemed to miss hidden gems while traveling to other states and countries. However, I have reached my limit on places I will visit and my tolerance for traveling. Let me explain why I haven’t taken a family vacation since pre-pandemic times, and have not left Texas in 4 years.

Vacations as an only child with my parents started to become more stressful during my college years. My father would scare the living daylights out of me and my mom with his aggressive driving. This anger would persist with other drivers even when I would get behind the wheel. I would be so relieved when I did vacations where driving wasn’t involved. But that’s not the only problem.

When I graduated college in 2017, my parents accompanied me to California where I worked an internship. During that trip I experienced mood swings and lack of interest that has now been recognized as treatment-resistant depression. They failed to pick up on these signs, and proceeded to call me “annoying” and blamed me for ruining the vacation. I was already stressed out by toxic situations in college that I was dealing with at the time, and wanted to stay at home to rest all summer rather than go halfway across the country. However, my parents largely contributed to the bad experience I had with my California internship, which ended one month early, and set off a myriad of mental health problems that I deal with to this day.

On a trip to southern Florida a year afterwards, my parents were suffering from increasing demands from their jobs as doctors and poor communication with their contractor during their home renovation. My usually even-tempered mom lashed out at my dad at the very start of that trip. I was in grad school and a professor forced the completion of a group project well after my institution’s final days of class. The first days of that trip were dominated by scrambling to complete this project and find decent Wi-Fi. There was one moment when we almost drained the battery of our rental car because we left the trunk open at a historic site. This was because tempers were flaring so much, my family and I picked on each other like an old married couple and ignored the car.

The last family vacation was in 2019 after I completed grad school. And it was mercifully the last one. This was a trip to Hawaii that was ruined when my dad didn’t want to go to a beach one night, and it showed when he swore like a sailor at other drivers. When we got back to our resort that night, years’ worth of college-induced stress and unresolved stress from
previous trips came flying out. I exploded about my dad’s bad behavior. Again, my parents were recriminatory instead of understanding. My dad blamed me for his behavior, and mom said I had a bad temper even though it was my first time yelling in years.

The last out-of-state trip I took was in 2021 for a wedding in San Diego, where I was supposed to take a friend in Phoenix as a plus one. Not only did she fail to prepare, she let me know the night before the wedding that she couldn’t go to San Diego with me because of the pressures of her traveling nurse job. But she still shared pictures on Instagram of a visit to an attraction 90 miles from Phoenix while I was in San Diego. That’s not all. I ran into a major traffic jam in New Mexico on the returning trip, which resulted in me failing to show up at my uncle’s house in West Texas on the day I was supposed to. Again my parents blamed me for that trip’s mishaps.

Since then, various attempts have been made by my family, friends, and an ex-girlfriend to get me to travel again. All of their attempts have failed, as I refused two trips in the last 7 years that my parents previously planned. Trusting my parents to go on another family vacation is like trusting an alcoholic prone to quick relapses. My therapist recommended group travel, but I have done that twice for study abroad trips, and my travel mates just ended up partying the entire time and conducted risky behavior I wouldn’t do myself. The lesson I have learned is traveling brings out the worst in people, as seen by hidden agendas, insurmountable groupthink and power imbalances that don’t stay behind at home.

My current treatments for depression and Crohn’s on top of buying my first house and holding down a full-time job make large-scale travel impossible. And of course, the negative experiences outweigh the good. My parents think it’s dumb to use my PTO to be a homebody like I want to be. I guess I could travel alone, but I bet my parents would also strike down traveling without them. They also think my aversion to traveling can be fixed by traveling with my friends, but they’re either too busy or uninterested in traveling. Most people besides my parents understand that I can’t and won’t travel anymore. But that doesn’t completely prevent the occasional invites from loved ones.

How can I accept the fact that I hate trips?How can I more gracefully decline offers to travel, especially from my parents?

Travel is supposed to be freedom, but in your story it’s become a cage—too many bad memories, too much blame for things you didn’t cause. It’s no wonder the thought of packing a bag feels heavier than staying home. The truth is, rest doesn’t have to come with a boarding pass. You’ve earned the right to say no without apology. When people invite you, keep it simple: “Thanks, but travel isn’t for me right now.” That’s enough. You don’t owe anyone more than that.

I have a TBI, deal with sensory integration(smell touch taste sound sight) and use a service dog. I hate change, and traveling is none stop change. Where you eat, where you go, sleep. I find that change confusing and I hate confusion. I feel that my disabilities run my life. I would love to travel and have some money to do it.
Never found anyone who wants to deal with my problems.
I hope you can get back to traveling, post pictures here, and I can live vicariously through you?
Wish you the best, you deserve it.