Every year around Diwali, a familiar kind of message starts reaching me through the many relationships I work with in session. Someone has booked the flight home, or set up the video call with the whole family, and alongside the excitement there is a quiet dread. They have spent the year becoming more themselves. Now they are about to walk into a room where everyone remembers who they used to be.
Diwali falls on November 8 this year. For many of the nearly 4.9 million Indian Americans, it is the festival that most reliably brings family together. In the 2020 Indian American Attitudes Survey, 63 percent of respondents said they celebrate Diwali, more than any other holiday the survey asked about. That makes it a joyful season. It also makes it the season when old family patterns get their annual rehearsal.
As a therapist who works with South Asian clients in India, the US, Canada, and across the diaspora, I hear the same paradox every festive season: people feel most at home but least like themselves at the same table.
The pressure to be who you were
Families are systems, and systems prefer stability. The psychiatrist Murray Bowen called the capacity to stay close to family without being absorbed by it differentiation of self. It is hard to hold onto anywhere. It is hardest in the house you grew up in.
You may lead a team at work, manage your own money and make careful decisions about your life. Then an aunt asks, in front of everyone, why you are still not married, and you hear yourself answering like a 16-year-old. Nothing is wrong with you. The setting cues the role. The smell of the kitchen, the seating order, the way your father clears his throat: all of it reminds your body who it was expected to be.
The questions are rarely new. Marriage, salary, when you will buy a house, why you moved so far away, why you do not visit more. What is new is that you now have a different answer, and saying it out loud can feel like betrayal.
The guilt of changing
Diaspora life asks people to live in two frames at once. The same survey found that only 43 percent of Indian Americans say “Indian American” best describes them, and that U.S.-born respondents were far more likely than immigrants to feel more American than Indian (44 percent versus 23 percent). Parents and children often sit on different sides of that line, inside the same home.
Researchers have studied what happens in that gap. A 2002 study of 180 Asian Indian families in the Journal of Family Psychology found that teenagers reported less family conflict, lower anxiety, and higher self-esteem when they and their parents were at similar levels of acculturation. When the gap was wider, conflict rose.
The gap doesn’t close as children grow up. It turns into guilt. Many adult children of immigrants carry a ledger in their heads: everything their parents gave up, and every way they have strayed from the plan. A partner the family did not choose. A career in the arts instead of medicine. A decision not to have children, or to raise them differently. Each choice can feel like an unpaid debt.
Guilt says, “I have done something wrong.” Often what has happened is simpler. You have grown in a direction your family did not expect. Growing away from a plan is not rejecting the people who made it, but in many South Asian households the two sound the same. Much of the pain lives in that confusion.
Making room for different versions of belonging
Holiday stress is not a South Asian invention. In a 2023 American Psychological Association survey, 89 percent of U.S. adults said something causes them stress during the holiday season, and anticipating family conflict was among the reasons. What shapes the diaspora version is how much identity, duty and love gets packed into a single evening.
A few practices help, for adult children and for parents.
Decide in advance which conversations you will have. You do not owe every relative a full account of your life over dinner. Pick one or two people you want a real conversation with this year, and let the rest stay light. One warm line holds more than a long defense: “I’m happy with where things are. How have you been?”
Notice when you start to shrink. If you leave every visit feeling smaller, pay attention to the moment it begins. Naming it to yourself (“I’m fifteen again right now”) is often enough to come back into the room as an adult.
Parents, be curious before you correct. “What do you enjoy about your work?” opens a door that “When will you get a proper job?” closes. Curiosity tells your child you want to know the person they are, not only the one you planned for.
Separate the tradition from the expectation. Lighting diyas, drawing rangoli and cooking together are traditions. Who someone marries and what they earn are expectations that tend to travel with them. A family can protect the first without enforcing the second.
Let the ritual change shape. Some families now celebrate with partners from other cultures, over video across time zones, or with chosen family in a new city. A Diwali that looks different from the one you grew up with is still Diwali.
Being seen as you are now. Diwali celebrates light over darkness. In a family, light means being seen clearly. Most of us want our families to see us as we are today, not as we were, and not as they hoped we would turn out.
That kind of seeing takes practice on both sides. Children can stop auditioning for an old role. Parents can loosen their grip on the script. Neither has to give up the relationship to do it.
This year, if you catch yourself slipping into an old version of yourself, you do not have to fight it in the moment. Notice it, breathe, and remember that you can love your family and still be the person you have become. Belonging was never meant to require staying the same, so here’s hoping this Diwali helps clear us of old cycles.
