TRANSCRIPT
I would like to explore the value in making small talk. What a strange subject for this YouTube channel about going deep and going into the truth of ourselves and the depths of ourselves, healing from historical childhood trauma—the polar opposite of small talk. So why would I like small talk?
I actually was recently talking to someone who I met through this healing childhood trauma work that I do, and he said to me that he has a lot of trouble making small talk, and he hates it. And I kind of get that, but in a way, I find a value in small talk. And so here’s what I think the value is. It’s that small talk can lead to big talk. That for me, small talk is not an end in and of itself.
I think about when I was a child, watching my parents sometimes going to family dinner parties with, you know, my grandparents and their friends coming over. And they would sit around for hours sometimes doing small talk. It was so boring. One of my grandparents’ friends even had a word for it. They called it chitchat. And it was sitting around eating like these cheap pretzels and cheap potato chips and drinking cocktails and talking about nothing. And it really was small talk with no purpose beyond small talk. That’s the kind of small talk I hate now. I hated it then. It’s boring. It goes nowhere. It does nothing. It doesn’t lead to big talk.
But how can small talk lead to big talk? Well, for me, what I find is that when I meet new people—and I’m always meeting new people out in the world, out in my travels, out in my daily walking, right now around New York City even—I just start by asking questions. And small talk is a good way to begin to get to know a complete stranger. I mean, I can’t look at a complete stranger and say, “Please, could you tell me about your childhood trauma? Tell me about your history of trauma when I don’t even know their name or anything about them.” But what I find is that talking to people, especially in some sort of environment that it’s okay to ask questions—sitting around a campfire, sitting at a table somewhere in my travels, perhaps sitting in a living room at a hostel, sitting on an airplane next to someone, sitting on a bus next to someone for three hours—I can just ask polite questions.
And what I find is that if people are open to having small talk, a lot of times they like being asked questions. It’s a normal human thing to like to have someone show interest in them. So small talk at the beginning is a polite way to show interest in someone. What’s your name? Where are you from? What do you like to do? And then anything they answer, I just keep asking questions. Oh, you’re from here? Wow, I’ve been there. Oh, if I haven’t been there. Oh, you’re from there? Where specifically are you from there? What’s it like? How long have you been here and not there? How did you end up coming here from there?
Now, small talk doesn’t always lead to bigger talk. Sometimes people really are just kind of shut down and boring and don’t really have much to say. They’re not very interesting. But sometimes they are. And sometimes, well, for what I found, sometimes small talk is the only way to find out, well, if there’s more to this person. Sometimes they give big clues. And sometimes it’s like my knowledge of the world can help.
For instance, um, oh, I’m trying to think of the specifics, but it was about 20 years ago in New York City. I was talking with a woman. Was it Nicaragua she was from or El Salvador? I think it may have—I can’t remember which one—but I was talking with her, and I at that time knew a fair amount about her country. And she didn’t seem that interesting at all, but then when the more she talked about it, I was like, “Oh, you lived in this country in Central America at this time, and you came to America at this time.” I said, “Were you there in your country during the civil war there?” And she was like—she got an interesting look in her eyes—”Yes, I actually did.” And very quickly, the small talk went into me learning that she was actually a guerrilla warrior against her murderous right-wing government. And then the next thing you know, she’s talking all about it. And it’s like, whoa.
And then I think of another one. Sitting on an airplane somewhere in Europe, I was going between two different film screenings of mine. This is about maybe 12 years ago. I was doing a film. I don’t even remember. I think I was flying maybe from Sweden to Greece—one film screening of one of my documentary films on psychosis to another documentary screening on a different film of mine on psychosis. And I sat next to this young woman, and we just started having small talk. And the next thing you know, I learned that, well, she had a very intense and wild and even crazy experience during the Balkans war—the war that broke up former Yugoslavia. And the next thing you know, small talk went—and initially I could feel she wasn’t really that interested in talking to me. The more I asked questions, small talk questions, boom, suddenly it’s like she’s telling me this amazing, fascinating story about her experience escaping from one part of the former Yugoslavia into another breakaway part of the former Yugoslavia and escaping with her parents and her brother and sister and having to switch cars and losing all their belongings and having to pay off policemen, her dad almost getting killed. And she tells me all this, and it’s like on this airplane, I believe they had movies on the screen on the airplane then. There was no movie that was going to be more interesting than this. This was amazing education.
I remember she just told it and told it and told it, and I remember thinking, “Wow, if I hadn’t asked these questions, she wouldn’t have told me.” And I remember at the end of maybe a one, one and a half hour conversation, she just said, “Thank you so much. That was—I never get a chance to share that.” And it’s kind of also nice to share it with someone, well, who I don’t have to see again. So that was one positive one that I remember that was just fascinating of small talk leading to really big talk.
Then there was another one I had in Central America about a year ago. Uh, it was in El Salvador when I was there. I ended up having a conversation with a young couple who I met from Europe, and we started talking and just doing small talk. And I was doing my thing, just asking them, “Where are you from? What part of Europe? Oh, I’ve been there. Wow, interesting.” And getting, you know, me getting more of a picture of who they were, just being curious about who they were and asking about their travels.
Hey, and a question that I like to ask also. I like to ask positive-negative questions. So on your travels, they were traveling by bicycle through Central America. What’s the most interesting thing that’s happened? What’s the most difficult thing that’s happened? What’s the best thing that’s happened? What’s the worst? And it turned out they’d been robbed in a different Central American country. It had been a horrible experience. And I was like, “Whoa, trauma.” And they started talking about it. And when they found out that I had been a trauma therapist, they were very curious about it. And they asked me some questions. And suddenly small talk, woo, went really, really deep.
And then a fascinating thing happened. The more they were talking about it, the young woman looked at me and she just gave me this funny look and she says, “Do you have a YouTube channel on trauma?” And I said, “Yeah, actually I do.” She goes, “We’ve been watching it.” Since they had had that horrible experience of being robbed, they were searching for trauma and robbery, and they found one of my videos on being…
Mugged in New York City several years earlier, and I don’t even think they watched the first one, but they said, “Yeah, we ended up binge watching a bunch of your videos. They were really helpful.” It’s like it went really, really deep, but then they wanted to argue with me a little bit, too. Yeah, we don’t agree about some of what you say about having children ’cause we might have children someday, and we don’t think it’s so bad, but a lot of your ideas were really, really helpful. Thanks a lot.
And I was like, wow, random small talk with people that I probably would have only known for an hour led to a really fascinating conversation. Another thing I’ve had happen a few times with just random small talk with some random person I meet in a random part of America or another random part of the world leads to the realization, as the small talk starts to put pieces together for both of us, both parties in this small talk conversation, that we actually know people in common, that we actually have friends in common. Common ground, that’s fascinating.
But then I think a lot of people don’t always reciprocate so well with asking small talk questions. Sometimes they’re just satisfied enough to have someone ask them a lot of questions, and they can talk about their lives. I think a lot of times people are very, well, very deprived at having any sort of human interaction. And so to have someone with genuine curiosity ask them any kind of questions, small talk questions, deep talk questions, any kind of questions is so well, exhilaratingly exciting that it doesn’t necessarily even cross their mind that they could or should or even might reciprocate.
So I found, well, a fair amount of time with people who aren’t so practiced at interaction that they don’t ask me anything a lot of times, and I can end up asking them a lot of questions in hopes of developing a bond, a relationship, some sort of back and forth intimacy where they can see into me, into me see, and I can see back into them. And sometimes, well, maybe if our whole interaction, which can sometimes go really deep and be really fascinating and be very bonding in a way, and then we part ways never to meet again. I can think about it afterwards and realize they don’t actually know anything about me because they didn’t even reciprocate with the small talk, let alone the deep talk.
So I think about an analogy here for small talk. When I was a child, I used to like, when I grew up in the countryside in upstate New York, I used to love hiking up these gorges, these riverbed streams, and turning over stones to see what’s under there. You just never know what you’re going to find. And maybe three out of four big stones, big flat stones, I’d turn over and there’s just water and muck and algae and dirt and little sticks. But then sometimes there’s a crayfish, sometimes there’s a polywog, sometimes there’s a salamander, sometimes there’s really like odd, like sort of creepy crawly things that I don’t know what they are. Sometimes there’s a snake hiding under there. Sometimes there are fossils hiding under there, and you just never know. And that’s what I think about small talk. Small talk is like turning over stones, just the very beginning of the interaction to open it up and to begin the getting to know process.
And I think with a lot of people, well, maybe for starters, they just haven’t met very many interesting people in their lives. And so they just come with the assumption that most people are boring and there’s nothing there. And so they don’t even turn over the stones at all. They don’t even realize, or, or this is another thing, because of their childhoods, traumatic childhoods often, where they were so punished for being curious. I mean, I was to a degree, but to a degree I wasn’t. But they’re so punished for being curious, raised in the background like of my grandmother’s generation and something years ago. Children are there to be seen, but not heard. Children should only speak when spoken to. Well, many people are still in that mindset of children out in the world, even though they are adults. And it’s just frozen into them, pressed and stamped into them that it’s wrong to ask questions. It’s wrong to ask personal questions. It’s wrong to be curious about other people.
And this is something that maybe sometimes is even kind of true. I’ve started asking people questions sometimes, and some people respond very negatively to ask, “Where are you from?” Sometimes, I mean just the basic question I ask when I’m out in the world traveling, especially, “Oh, where are you from?” And why do you want to know? Or they give an answer, “I’m from everywhere. I’m a citizen of the world,” and they give these smarmy answers, or “I am from planet Earth.” It’s like, well, duh, of course you are. I know that. And it’s like sometimes with those people, it’s like that is their indicator that they don’t want to have any conversation. You know, they don’t want me to know anything about them. And it’s like I can respect that too because, you know, I don’t know what their reasons are, but like I don’t have to continue the small talk, but it doesn’t mean I’m wrong for asking.
And that’s something I’m going to give kind of a comparison about having been a therapist. When I was a psychotherapist, I realized my job was to ask questions. Lots of questions. That’s what people are coming for, for me to ask questions, to peel away the layers, to get to know them very, very deeply. One of the things I learned as a therapist from clients, especially clients who had had a lot of past therapists, is they told me that a lot of times their past therapists never asked them deep questions. Didn’t ask them about their traumatic histories, didn’t ask them about any history of sexual abuse, sexual impropriety in their past, didn’t ask them probing questions about their parents’ histories. So a lot of times when I would ask people questions that might come out in the first an hour or two hours of psychotherapy, they said, “You know, I’ve been in therapy for years and nobody ever asked me this.” That was shocking to me that maybe in some ways the psychotherapy just stayed in the small talk of symptoms and symptom relief and basic questions about their here and now present life and never got into the most important stuff about where they came from.
But what I learned is my job was to ask questions and not primarily to satisfy my curiosity for me, Daniel, as a person, but to find out who they were so that I could be more useful to them. That’s questioning someone and asking questions and following my curiosity for that purpose in that psychotherapy context. But when I meet people out in the world, not in a psychotherapy context, I see it very differently. My idea about following my curiosity and asking people’s questions about themselves is that I’m not here to help them. That’s not what the relational contract is. That’s not why. And I find it offensive ’cause sometimes that happens to me. People start asking me questions and the next thing you know, I find they’re asking me questions and starting to use my answers to play therapist with me. Like I say, oh, they’ll find out that I’ve broken up with my parents. Sometimes I tell people this when I’m out in the world, people I’ve just met because they ask me, “Oh, what’s your relationship with your mother and father? Are your parents still alive? How often do you see them? Do you love them?” Blah, blah, blah, whatever they might ask me. And I’ll tell them that I don’t have a relationship with my parents. And next thing you know, they start counseling me. “Well, have you tried talking with them? Maybe you can, maybe it’s very important to you. Oh, have you considered forgiving them?” It’s like, screw you, person. You’re not my therapist. I don’t say that because I want to be polite with complete strangers, but it’s like that’s not appropriate. And I’m very aware that that’s not appropriate when I talk to other people out in the world.
I’m asking questions, small talk questions with the idea of going into deep talk questions because I’m curious. And that’s something that I have found is appropriate, it’s acceptable, and it is allowed in adult human interchange.
Free exchange of information to ask people questions to simply satisfy my own curiosity. That is an end in and of itself. And it’s also perfectly appropriate if people don’t want to share about themselves that they don’t have to.
And what I think is it’s my job to be sensitive to really find out if they want to satisfy my curiosity by talking about themselves. And again, if they don’t, and if they say they don’t or they give me a hint that they don’t, I don’t have to. Or I can say, “Is it okay if I ask you this question?” or “Sorry, did I ask too much?”
And they can give me an indication through their facial expression or directly whether the answer is yes or no. ‘Cause sometimes I can get an indication that maybe I’ve asked a question that’s not really appropriate. Like, “Oh, sorry I asked that. I didn’t mean to.” And sometimes, “No, no, no, no. I really want to talk about it.” And I find that, okay, we can continue.
And the same thing in reverse because I’ll say this now as I wrap this small talk, deep talk video up: I love it when people ask me questions. I love it when people are curious about me. I love it when people want to see into me. And I love to share about myself and my life because what I find is that when people really genuinely want to know about me, not to judge me or assess me or pigeonhole me in some box, when they ask me questions in an open-minded way to learn, to satisfy their curiosity, it’s actually loving on their part.
It’s a sign that they want to develop some sort of connection and bond with me, a friendship. Even if it’s only for 20 minutes or a half an hour or an hour, even if it’s only sitting on a New York City bus, it’s like I really appreciate it. And what I find is that a lot of other people also do.
And that is why I do like to engage in small talk. And that’s why I like to practice my skill and get more comfortable with it so that I can do this in a way, a conversational ritual, to learn about people, to see what more I can learn about them, to see what kind of future our connection might have.