The Hidden Anxiety of Thanksgiving: Why Togetherness Doesn’t Always Feel Like Connection

Transcript

There’s something about Thanksgiving that looks like connection from the outside.

The table is full, the house smells like memory—that specific, almost-burnt smell of sage from the stuffing, or the sweetness of the pies baking. For a few hours, we’re surrounded by the people who knew us before the world got complicated. It’s the one day of the year that’s supposed to feel certain: family, food, gratitude.

But every year, a quiet unease slips in. For years, I just called it "Thanksgiving fatigue." You know the feeling, right? It’s that long, heavy exhale when the door finally closes, when the last guest finally leaves and the sound of their car fades down the street. It’s in the way someone—maybe it’s you, maybe it’s your mom—stares a little too long at the sink full of dishes, as if rinsing away the emotional residue of the day.

We call it exhaustion, but often it’s something else. I’ve learned to recognize it in myself. It’s not the physical fatigue of cooking, or the social fatigue of talking. It’s the deep, bone-weary fatigue of performing. It’s the hidden anxiety that comes from pretending that being together is the same thing as feeling connected.

We’re sold a very specific image of this holiday. It’s a Norman Rockwell painting. It’s a Hallmark movie. It’s the idea that if we just get all the bodies in the same room, if we just cook the same food and follow the same script, connection will magically appear.

Thanksgiving was built on this lovely, simple idea: proximity equals belonging. That if we gather, we’ll feel close. Yet psychology shows us—and our own lives confirm—that emotional connection isn’t spatial. It’s not measured in feet or inches. It’s measured in attunement. You can sit two feet from someone and feel miles apart. And you can feel deeply, profoundly seen by someone who’s halfway across the world, someone you’re just texting with.

So why does Thanksgiving, the holiday meant to unite us, the one day we set aside for connection, so often surface our quietest anxieties? Why does it so often leave us feeling fuller, but also emptier?

The Script and Its Cost

The problem starts with the script. There’s a choreography to Thanksgiving most of us could perform in our sleep. I call it our "Thanksgiving costume." The moment we walk through the door, we slip it on.

Someone cooks too much, someone else arrives late, someone worries that the turkey’s too dry. Everyone takes their seat at the same table they’ve sat at since childhood—maybe you're even at the kids' table, which is now just the 'overflow' table—and the same conversations unfold in the same order.

It’s not just ritual — it’s repetition, the comfort of knowing what happens next. But under that comfort lives an invisible script. A script we didn't write, but we all memorized. And in that script, each person slips into a role they didn’t audition for but know by heart.

There's the Peacekeeper, who smooths tension before it starts. This is the person who jumps in with a bright, "Hey, how about those Cowboys!" the second an uncle mentions the election. They are the family's human shield, absorbing anxiety so no one else has to.

There's the Jokester, who keeps things light. This is the person who still tells that one story from 1997, the one about the cat, because they've learned that humor is the best defense against any real, vulnerable conversation. Silence is terrifying to the Jokester, so they fill it.

There's the One Who Brings Up Politics, even though everyone begged them not to. We see this person as a disruptor, but often, they are just desperate for someone to talk about something real, something other than the weather or the football game.

And let's not forget the Martyr in the Kitchen, the one who refuses all offers of help, insists on doing everything themselves, and then sighs with exhaustion. This isn't just about cooking; it's a way to be central to the event while also being safely removed from the conversations at the table. It's a performance of service that's also a form of control.

Psychologically, these roles are adaptive; they help families maintain equilibrium. Murray Bowen, a pioneer in this field, called it family systems theory. He had this idea that every person in a family functions like a cell in a living organism. Or, think of it like a mobile hanging over a crib. If you touch one part—if one person suddenly gets quiet, or angry, or sad—the whole thing doesn't just move; it wobbles and spins and clatters, trying to restore its original balance.

Thanksgiving activates that system in full force. It’s the one day a year the entire mobile is forced to hang together.

We regress slightly, not in a childish way, but in a familiar one. Old hierarchies reappear. A forty-year-old CEO suddenly feels like a teenager again, shrinking under a parent's critical gaze. The parent who still asks intrusive questions—"Are you still single?" "When are you going to get a real job?"—isn’t necessarily being cruel; they’re reenacting their part in a long-running play.

Everyone’s doing what the family system expects, and the emotional predictability feels safe on the surface. But it can also be suffocating. Because real connection—the kind that requires honesty and vulnerability—can’t live inside a script that’s designed to prevent disruption.

This is the central trap: the more we perform harmony, the less we actually feel it.

And this performance, this script-following, has a deep, internal cost. If you’ve ever sat through Thanksgiving trying to “keep things smooth,” you’ve felt this firsthand. It’s a subtle kind of acting. It's the smile that doesn't reach your eyes. It's the "Mmhmm" you give when you're not really listening. It’s smiling, nodding, pretending your jaw isn’t tight.

It’s not dishonest in a malicious sense; it’s socialized. We learn early that politeness protects relationships. Don't rock the boat. Just be nice. It's only for one day. But too much of it, for too long, creates what Leon Festinger called cognitive dissonance.

This is really just a clinical-sounding name for that awful, internal tension between the image we project ("I'm so happy and grateful to be here!") and what we actually feel inside ("I'm lonely, I'm sad, I'm bored, I'm angry"). It's the ache of inauthenticity.

Maybe you spend the day saying how thankful you are, but underneath you’re grieving. Grieving a loss. Grieving a disappointment. Grieving the person who isn't at the table this year. Or maybe you're grieving a version of your life that didn’t unfold as planned. You're surrounded by family, but you're mourning the family you didn't get to have, or the career you thought you'd have by now, or the partner you wish you could bring home.

You can feel the split — the part of you that wants to belong and the part that wants to be honest.

Thanksgiving intensifies that split because it asks us to feel grateful on command. Gratitude, when it’s genuine, emerges spontaneously. It's a feeling that bubbles up. But when it’s prescribed—when someone says, "Let's all go around the table and say one thing we're thankful for"—it can feel like pressure. It's like being told to "Have fun!"—it's the fastest way to make the feeling disappear. It turns gratitude from an experience into a performance.

We mistake compliance for connection — thinking that if everyone just plays along, if everyone just says they're grateful, the warmth will appear. But emotional safety doesn’t come from avoiding conflict; it comes from knowing that conflict won’t destroy love.

There’s also the subtle politics of the table. The things unsaid are often louder than the things that are. The old stories that still sting, the subtle comparisons—like the way your aunt asks if you're 'still' renting, or the way a parent praises one sibling's success, which is a coded critique of the other's.

It's the way silence gets mistaken for peace. Families rarely talk about these things because they fear it’ll ruin the day. Don't spoil Thanksgiving. Yet pretending these tensions don’t exist doesn’t make them disappear — it buries them. And they fester.

We leave dinner full but unsatisfied. The food nourished the body; the script and the performance drained the mind.

Proximity Isn’t Presence

The reason this performance is so exhausting is that it fails to give us what we actually crave. We're putting in all this work for a "nice day," but the work itself prevents the one thing we showed up for: connection.

Psychologically, closeness isn't measured in distance; it’s measured in attunement. Attunement is a beautiful concept. It’s not just listening; it’s a full-body, nervous-system-to-nervous-system experience. It’s the feeling that someone is with you. It means we’re tuned in to another person’s emotional frequency — not just what they’re saying, but what they’re feeling. It's the difference between "I hear you" and "I get you."

Thanksgiving puts this to the test. We are physically present—we passed the potatoes, we're sharing the gravy—but we are rarely emotionally present. We’re sitting across from people we love, but we’re also managing a thousand internal calculations.

• Should I tell my mother I’m struggling, or will that worry her? Will it ruin her day?

• Should I compliment my brother’s new job, even though hearing about his success makes me feel like a failure?

• Should I bring up the thing that’s been bothering me all year, or just let the day stay 'nice'?

• Can I be honest about my new relationship, or will I just get the 'look'?

• Is it safe to be my authentic self, or do I need to put on the version of me they're all comfortable with?

That’s not connection. Let's be honest: that's emotional management. It's triage. It's the kind of work you don't get paid for, the kind that leaves you drained. It's the feeling of being an air-traffic controller for everyone else's emotions, all while trying to land your own plane. And it’s exhausting.

Part of this exhaustion comes from what psychologists call emotional fusion—which is just a fancy way of saying we can't tell where our feelings end and another person's begin. In a fused family system, disagreement feels like betrayal. An opinion different from the family's "right" opinion feels like an attack.

So instead of expressing difference, people mute themselves to preserve peace. We swallow our thoughts. We bite our tongues. We just... go silent. The irony, of course, is that this self-silencing erodes the very closeness everyone claims to value.

The healthy opposite of fusion is "differentiation." That's the ability to be in emotional contact with someone and be your own, separate self. It's the ability to say, "I love you, and I disagree with you," and to know that both can be true. It's the capacity to hold onto you even when you're in a room full of them. But most family systems, especially on a high-stakes day like Thanksgiving, are not built for differentiation. They are built for fusion. They are built for sameness.

We’ve been taught that connection means harmony, but real connection requires friction — the freedom to be authentic in the presence of others. When everyone’s too careful, the conversation becomes a performance, and the table becomes a stage.

Sometimes the hardest place to be yourself is the table where everyone insists they know you best.

From Expectation to Real Connection

So if the script is a trap and proximity isn't presence, what do we do? How do we find real connection on a day as loaded as Thanksgiving?

It starts not by changing everyone else, but by changing our own goal. It starts by shifting from expectation to appreciation.

If you strip away the layers of tradition, Thanksgiving is a ritual built on hope — the hope that we can pause long enough to notice what matters. But somewhere along the way, we turned that hope into an expectation. A crushing expectation. Be grateful. Be cheerful. Be close.

And when we can’t meet that expectation—when the day feels tense, or lonely, or just... flat—we assume something’s wrong with us. Or wrong with our family. We forget that discomfort doesn’t mean disconnection; it often means growth. It means we're aware.

So the first step, the real task of Thanksgiving, isn’t to feel a certain way. It's to give yourself permission to notice how you actually feel.

What if we just gave ourselves a break this year? What if we gave ourselves permission? Permission to be quiet. Permission to not be "on." Permission to feel a little sad, even on a day that's supposed to be happy. Permission to go "check on the pies" and stand in the pantry for two minutes, just breathing, just being with yourself. That's not a failure; that's self-regulation.

When you give yourself that permission, you stop chasing an image of connection and you can start paying attention to the reality of it — messy, uneven, sometimes quiet.

This permission is the key that unlocks the next step: practicing presence. Presence is the opposite of performance. It’s staying aware of your own reactions—noticing your own tight jaw, your own fast-beating heart—while allowing others to have theirs.

That’s what emotional regulation really is — not suppressing emotion ("I'm fine, I'm fine") but being stable enough to stay in the moment without being hijacked by it. It's feeling the wave of anger or anxiety rise, and just... breathing. Noticing it. Not having to act on it.

When one person in a room can do this, when one person can just stay calm and present, it helps the entire system settle. That’s the neuroscience of co-regulation — our nervous systems are designed to sync up. Your calm nervous system is, quite literally, a gift you give to the entire room.

So if your family feels tense, start small. I'm not asking you to solve everyone's problems. Just slow your breathing. Listen without rushing to defend or formulate your counter-argument. Make space for imperfection—in them, and in yourself.

This is what attunement looks like in the real world. In psychology, connection isn’t defined by time spent or words exchanged. It’s defined by this ability to perceive another person’s emotional state and respond in a way that says, “I see you.” Not "I agree with you." Not "I'll fix you." Just... "I see you."

Attachment theory gives us another lens here. Secure attachment—that's the holy grail of connection—isn’t the absence of conflict; it’s the presence of consistency. It's the deep-down knowing that the relationship won’t collapse under honesty. It's knowing that you can have a rupture, a disagreement, and that you will repair it.

When you have permission and you practice presence, the outcome is honesty. Not the brutal, weaponized kind of honesty, but the quiet, vulnerable kind. The honesty of just being... you.

And that is when real connection can finally happen. It isn't found in grand gestures. It's not in the big, tearful "I love you" speeches. It’s found in small, quiet moments of steadiness.

• Someone remembers your favorite side dish and makes sure you get some.

• Someone quietly checks in—"How are you really doing?"—after a hard year.

• Someone looks across the table right when that difficult relative starts talking, and you share a silent, knowing eye-roll. That's connection.

• It's the quiet act of just helping with the dishes, wordlessly, side-by-side.

That’s connection. Not the Hallmark version, but the human one. Messy, imperfect, and real.

Even gratitude becomes different through this lens. It’s not a checklist of blessings. It’s the lived awareness that others have touched our lives in meaningful ways. When we express that—out loud, specifically, to another person—gratitude becomes relational, not conceptual.

Instead of "I'm thankful for my family," try, "Mom, I'm so thankful for the way you always listen to me, even when I'm just rambling." Instead of "I'm thankful for my health," try, "I'm so grateful you were the one who checked on me when I was sick." Relational gratitude strengthens bonds far more than polite, performative gratitude ever will.

Gratitude isn’t about perfection. It’s about awareness. It's the awareness that in a world of constant distraction, we still get to sit across from each other, share a meal, and remember that being human—in all its messy, anxious, beautiful glory—is a shared experience.

Togetherness doesn’t require perfection. It only asks that we show up honestly, even when we don’t know what to say.

And maybe that’s the most thankful thing we can do: to be real with the people who have known us longest, to see them not as characters in an old family story but as people still trying, just like us, to connect.

The Psychology of Us will return next week with a new episode exploring another side of what it means to live, feel, and stay awake to our own lives. Until then, be gentle with yourself—and maybe, if you can, with whoever’s sitting next to you at the table.