Hijacking Small Talk as an AuDHDer

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]Things I've learned as a high masking autistic therapist that I did not realize were autism. Part one. I didn't believe that small talk actually existed. I always said in my mind that small talk was the foundation for big talk, that sometimes we have to talk about more comfortable common place things so that we can build a relationship, but I didn't realize that's not how everyone uses small talk.

[00:00:18]That for some people, small talk is just about the process of interactions and putting the words and sounds in the right places to broker for comfort.

[00:00:25]That's not how I use small talk at all.

[00:00:27]For me, small talk always has an underlying question. So, like when I ask a client how are they doing this morning? What I realized is for some neurotypical people, small talk isn't even about the answer, but I want to know the answer. I have to know the answer because if you tell me, "Oh, you're feeling tired. Oh, it didn't go well." That starts to set me up for how do I think this session's going to go?

[00:00:45]Where do I think our time and energy is going to be spent? Am I going to spend the first part helping you regulate before we get into the content of what you need to talk about? The other thing I use small talk for is because I have face blindness. I'm often using small talk or topics about small talk as proxies for trying to figure out where someone is in an environment, who they know, who they don't know, and just trying to fix them on a map in my mind.

[00:01:09]I'm part of the Chicago and Columbus gay communities, which means that they're relatively small communities within the larger cities and contexts within which we all live. We tend to know each other or at least know a person who knows that person, and so when I ask someone what their name is, what sound will get you to respond to me, where you're from, I'll often actually pull up a map because in my mind two people can't occupy the same space in in geography.

[00:01:32]It makes that person more concrete in my mind. And the third thing I ask is what do they do because we spend so much of our lives working. For me, those three pieces of information allow me to triangulate someone in relationship to other people. What I did not realize other people didn't do was that by knowing who people are surrounded by and then knowing a little bit about them, I can start to predict how they're going to behave in social situations. And that's really what I'm trying to do in every interaction is build up a better and better model for people interacting in social contexts so they don't have anxiety. And I don't because I have a pretty robust social map in the spaces I commonly go to, which brings me to the other point of small talk. I thought what I was doing was small talk. One of my favorite questions to ask people is what do you like most about yourself? It kind of sounds like small talk. It sounds like a question we should all have an answer to, but because so many people I know and work with have dysregulated concepts of self in which they can't easily name that or they may be a little narcissistic and that also gives me a cue. That question, because it's not a common question, it sounds like it should be like a small talk question. How was your day? What do you like most about yourself? So much in how someone answers that question and what their actual answer is gives me more context for what they're requesting from the environment, what they're putting out into the environment. The other question I like to ask is what's the worst joke you've ever told? Cuz jokes are small talk, right? So by picking something that sounds like that person's a small talk, for me, asking these what seem to be innocuous questions actually are allowing me to have a deeper conversation maybe than the person across from me. And all of this allows me to qualify or disqualify people as to whether or not I want to talk with them more, but it also puts them in the context. It took me a long time not to have social anxiety. I was plagued with chronic social anxiety from the time I was very small because I didn't fit in. And I guess all of this is is to say that when we say that people and social situations can be your special interest as an autistic person, this is what we mean. None of this is intuitive for me. They're intentional cognitive choices I made to build an internal meaning-making system about how people interact in real time and then run the model I have in my head against them. It's actually how I diagnose people, too. When I'm sitting with someone, I try and get a robust picture of their history, their values, what they want for themselves, what's important to them, and then I run that against something they do.

[00:03:44]And if there's a pattern of disruption that happens that fits the pattern of ADHD, autism, OCD, depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, I can see the wave pattern interference from that disorder interacting, interrupting the way that I would have predicted someone who didn't have that would move through that space and time. It's not a perfect system, but it also keeps me from getting bored in social situations. And what I realized I've been doing the entire time is actually bypassing any concept of small talk.

[00:04:13]What's been your experience with small talk? I'd love to hear from you.