Coming Home for the Holidays: Visiting Uncanny spaces

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There is a peculiar choreography to returning home for the holidays. The body moves through familiar rooms; the voice unconsciously adopts its childhood tone; even the air seems thick with a scent that is both known and unreachable. It’s as if one steps not only into a house but into a temporal echo chamber — where past and present selves momentarily collide.

For many, “going home” is a ritual gesture of belonging. But for others — for queer people, for those who have emigrated or remade their lives far from where they began — it can also stir a quiet unease. The reunion promises warmth and continuity, yet beneath it often lies a tremor of estrangement: a sense that the home to which we return is not entirely ours, and perhaps never was.

The Unhomely Home

Freud once described das Unheimliche — the uncanny — as that which is both familiar and alien at once, what should have remained hidden and has come to light. The root of the word, Heim, means home; unheimlich literally, unhomely. In this sense, the very act of coming home can awaken something uncanny. The walls recognize us, but not quite. We sit at the same table, yet the conversation is suspended between old scripts and new silences.

The psychoanalytic insight here is subtle but profound: the familiar can unsettle precisely because it mirrors the parts of ourselves we’ve outgrown or buried. The home we return to is not just an external space, but a psychic one — the site of our earliest attachments, conflicts, and compromises. To re-enter it is to risk encountering the ghosts of our own formation.

Belonging and Its Discontents

For LGBTQ+ individuals, this encounter is often charged with ambivalence. Even in the most loving families, the return can evoke the memory of what had to be hidden — the quiet vigilance of early life, the rehearsal of acceptable versions of the self. As the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas wrote, each of us carries an “unthought known” — experiences too fundamental to articulate but still shaping the texture of our emotional lives. Coming home can awaken that preverbal knowing: the body’s memory of shame or silence, even in rooms now filled with acceptance.

Therapeutically, such experiences remind us that progress does not always erase the past; it transforms our relationship to it. The adult self, integrated and articulate, may still feel the tug of the younger self who learned that authenticity could be dangerous. In the consulting room, this might emerge as a sense of regression around family visits or holidays — an oscillation between confidence and collapse, individuation and compliance. It’s not pathology; it’s the psyche revisiting its own architecture.

The Expat’s Double Vision

Expatriates and immigrants know this feeling in another key. To live elsewhere is to construct a new psychic home — one that reflects different languages, customs, and relational norms. Returning “home” can be disorienting: the streets are recognizable but no longer inhabited by the same meanings. The person who left no longer fully fits the frame of the place that shaped them.

Anthropologists call this liminality — being between worlds — but psychoanalytically it might be seen as the persistence of divided identifications. We carry within us multiple cultural and emotional homes, each with its own internalized expectations. The expat’s nostalgia is not only for what was left behind, but for an imagined coherence — a fantasy of wholeness that perhaps never existed.

Here the concept of anemoia — nostalgia for a time one never truly experienced — becomes apt. Many who return home feel a longing not for their actual past, but for an idealized one: a childhood without tension, a family perfectly attuned, a self that belonged seamlessly. The ache of anemoia is thus not about loss, but about the recognition that such unity was always a mirage.

The Therapeutic Encounter with “Home”

In therapy, the return home often appears in displaced form. A patient might describe dreading the trip, or feeling inexplicably irritable afterward. Beneath these reactions lies something more complex: a confrontation with the earliest layers of relational experience. The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott spoke of “transitional space” — the area between inner and outer reality where play, creativity, and meaning arise. The holiday visit can activate this space, sometimes painfully. We find ourselves trying to play again within an environment that once limited our play.

In such moments, therapy offers a kind of re-home-ing. The therapeutic relationship, at its best, allows for the revisiting of those formative environments under new conditions — with empathy, reflection, and symbolic freedom. The analyst becomes a witness not to the holiday event itself, but to the psychic story it reawakens: the longing to belong, the fear of engulfment, the ambivalence toward those who both nurtured and constrained us.

Winnicott once remarked that “home is where we start from.” Yet, as therapy teaches, we never simply leave it behind; we internalize it, and spend much of our lives negotiating with its residues. To return home as an adult is to discover how those residues continue to shape our capacity for intimacy, independence, and authenticity.

Holding the Echoes

What would it mean to approach the holidays with this awareness — to anticipate not only reunion but reverberation? One might imagine doing so not as a defense, but as an act of gentle preparedness: acknowledging that visiting family is also visiting the earlier versions of oneself. This awareness can soften the expectation that everything should feel easy or whole. It allows for complexity, ambivalence, even sadness — emotions that are, in their own way, signs of growth.

In clinical work, I often see how healing involves the capacity to hold opposites: to love and resent, to belong and feel alien, to be grateful and grieve simultaneously. Coming home for the holidays can invite precisely that kind of integrative work. We return not to resolve the past, but to relate to it differently — to recognize that the home we once knew and the home we now carry within us can coexist, even if imperfectly.

The cultural story of the holidays is one of harmony and joy. Yet psychological health doesn’t require harmony so much as honesty — the ability to bear ambivalence without collapsing into cynicism or sentimentality. For queer people, for expats, for anyone whose life has moved beyond the coordinates of childhood, the holidays may never feel entirely “normal.” But perhaps that’s not a failure. Perhaps it’s a testament to growth — the sign of a self that has expanded beyond its original frame. To come home, then, is not only to revisit where we began, but to measure how far we’ve traveled within ourselves. The table may be the same, the jokes familiar, the rituals unchanged. And yet, the person returning carries a new interior landscape — one shaped by distance, by chosen communities, by the work of therapy, and by the quiet labor of becoming who they are. If the season offers anything, it might be the invitation to hold these contradictions with compassion. The past will never be as simple as we wish, but neither is it lost. It lives on as an echo — haunting, familiar, and, when met with understanding, strangely beautiful. Coming home doesn’t always mean finding peace in the old house. Sometimes it means finding a way to dwell more freely within oneself.