When Holiday Small Talk Hits Too Close to Home
This is an article about therapy and Thanksgiving, but it is also not about dealing with family members’ different politics. I’m interested in focusing on how all the questions that people ask instead of politics can, and often are, deeply triggering.
Why Holiday Small Talk Can Feel So Draining
Seemingly banal questions, like:
How’s your job going?
How’s your partner?
How’s your new place?
How are your parents?
What are your holiday plans?
And on and on and on.
These questions are in a checklist because that’s what it can feel like. It’s the mandatory to-do list for maintaining family connections. This checklist feels simultaneously like a bad intake form for therapy and a weird capitalist game, where everything should be good (or fine!), or there’s something wrong with you and you should fix it.
The Checklist of Connection Questions
Intellectually, you know that the people asking their questions are making an earnest, often clumsy, attempt to connect with you (or at least check off the box of talking to you). Most of the time, these questions are not designed to hurt you.
So what should you make of the really shitty feeling that comes after answering….
“Good” to everything, to everyone, all night?
The Hidden Emotional Weight Behind Casual Questions
What is so terrifying about these questions? Aren’t they just annoying, frustrating, and boring? If you’re numbed out to the questions, or you happen to really like your new city or job, it’s likely that dread is just under the surface. Why?
These are the questions that are on your own mind 24/7. They might feel like blaring alarms telling you to get your shit together, or critical voices shaming you for making a bad choice, or anxiety about whether all the informational interviews you’ve done will add up to anything. While it would be rude for your relatives not to ask about your life, these questions can feel like a trap.
You’re trying your best to present as a competent adult, but you feel surrounded by other people’s projection of you. Or maybe you’re projecting your fears about yourself onto your family? And all of this is right in your face, the past year and present moment are colliding, and it is definitionally overwhelming.
How Therapy Helps You Navigate Family Interactions
Having a therapist can be an effective tool to navigate these tough dynamics. Therapy is not a place to quickly answer these questions. It’s a place to explore the feelings and thoughts that come up around these questions.
Turning Small Talk into Self-Reflection
Psychodynamic therapy in particular focuses on how thoughts and feelings outside your awareness are contributing to the reasons you feel stuck in these questions.
Bad therapy intake questions zoom in on the problem, with the hopes of finding a solution. Good therapy zooms out. Rumination is often the tip of the iceberg. Psychodynamic therapy in particular is interested in what’s happening underneath all that rumination. At its core, in psychodynamic therapy, we build a therapeutic relationship and journey together to explore what’s outside of your awareness.
Why Psychodynamic Therapy Works for Holiday Stress
Working with a psychodynamic therapist is like wearing a comfy coat with pockets to Thanksgiving. Every time one of these questions is asked, you can tuck it in your pocket. You’re not ignoring the questions, but you’re also not tending to them right now. Then, when you get to therapy, you can take the coat off and hold the questions gently. Slowly, you and your therapist can hold these questions and, with trust and curiosity, zoom out and deeper to come to a greater understanding of the roots of these conflicts.
Bringing Awareness and Compassion to the Holidays
When you have a therapy session booked, you can go into the holidays knowing that the thoughts and feelings that get brought up have a place where they can be explored with nuance and self-compassion. You don’t have to figure out these questions by yourself. Often, the most essential information is hiding just out of your awareness and can be discovered in a clearly defined therapeutic relationship.
Author
MEET Eviva
Hi, I’m Eviva, a therapist at Space Between Counseling Services. My work is rooted in psychodynamic theory, supported by tools from CBT and DBT. I’m passionate about helping people slow down, notice their patterns, and reconnect with the parts of themselves that have been overlooked or silenced. I work with teens and adults who feel stuck, disconnected, or uncertain about what comes next, and I believe that healing starts with curiosity and compassion.