Belonging is a survival tool. As humans, we crave belonging to a group because at the most fundamental level, our chances of survival increase if we are part of a group. And how do you belong? You make people like you, and you can do that by toning down the parts of yourself that are more unique to you. As a group based in survival, it benefits all members to be like-minded. Decisions are easier to make, a strong leader can easily take over directing the group, and the members feel safer. It’s easy to belong if you’re willing to shut off certain parts of yourself.
We didn’t watch a lot of sports in my house growing up. We played a lot of sports, but in terms of professional athletics, my parents didn’t have a lot of interest outside of soccer and the Olympics. I wasn’t aware how prevalent sports were to the general culture until college. Eager to fit in and belong, I analyzed each sport in turn to find what I actually enjoyed watching and what the best strategy was to hide my ignorance in teams and rules and rivalries while I got myself up to speed.
I was well-versed in football by the time I met my husband Dan. He threw a wrench in the situation by also liking baseball and basketball, both which I found incredibly boring. But, as the people-pleasing accommodator I once was, and someone with clearly strong survival instincts, I immediately found a way to belong to the baseball-loving community.
I have to take a second here to stress how absolutely automatic this process had become for me in my early 20s. I didn’t not overthink this or strategize, I instinctively knew what to do.
We’re at a bar, watching the Detroit Tigers 2016 season, which was a good one. I’ve watched more than a few games with Dan at his house, or with friends, or at a bar like this one. I’ve picked up on the basic rules and some of the more nuanced ones. He explains scenarios and terms (like sac fly) to me without annoyance, so I know I can ask questions freely to show my interest. But there seems to be some sort of language that Dan and his friends speak when they’re watching a baseball game. Reacting to certain plays, key points in the game, nuances I haven’t yet put my finger on. It order to belong, I need to figure out these reactions, that will really cement that I know what’s going on.
I remember the delighted look Dan shot me when I first yelled at the screen, “Come on! Gotta get the bats going!” It was the look of pure belonging. And where did I get that phrase? Copied it, of course. I cracked the baseball code of belonging – parrot what everyone else was saying.
We want to belong because we have all felt the sting of rejection when we step out of belonging into individuality. Middle and high school are great reminders for all of us why we crave belonging. My own experiences feel like a seesaw of the childlike desire to want to be special (thanks Disney movies and the massive amount of books I consumed), and the desperate need to blend in and appear completely unremarkable.
If you do any sort of growth work you’ll eventually be faced with a hard truth: all this oscillating and chameleon-like adaptation you’ve inadvertently mastered to achieve belonging is actually hurting you. Instead, you’re directed into cultivating authenticity which has been ignored and shoved out of sight for decades.
For me, I probably made the most dramatic step into authenticity when I published my book. It was very scary and more public than I probably wanted, but it was a defining moment for me. And for a while, a long while, it’s brought such amazing experiences and people to me.
It’s not until recently that my authenticity has brought me negative experiences and that old familiar survival instinct of belonging resurfaced.
I have a law school paper from ten years ago and the comments from the professor grading the paper read: I am afraid that I have somehow failed you in this course: I have not been able to shock you out of your idealized perceptions. Perhaps a more gentle tack might have worked; perhaps I should have been more forceful. I honestly don’t know. There was a second paper of mine he refused to grade because he didn’t agree with my viewpoints on the prison system, writing in the margins: What would Jesus do? to mock my faith. That was perhaps the first time in my life that I experienced a person who would try aggressively to influence me and change my perspective, with consequences.
Looking back at that experiences now, I can say “Wow, I was really not that guy’s cup of tea.” Putting aside the blatant abuse of power in play there, I could not understand why it mattered to him so much that I agree with his ideology. But it comes back to the survival instinct of belonging.
Now that I feel firmly grounded in my autonomy and authenticity, I’m expressing opinions again, with that same “idealized perceptions” I had a decade ago. And once again, it’s not sitting well with others. As I work to regulate other aspects of my life, like my nervous system, to understand that we’re not in survival mode and to not fly into a fight or flight mode over receiving an unpleasant email, I’m doing the same with the instinct to belong.
We’re not in a time where we need to belong to the nearest, loudest group of people to survive. The desire to belong is still there, but the urgency and intelligence in foregoing our values no longer has to exist. Instead you can find belonging with people from anywhere at any time.
When people begin to react negatively to who you are and what you stand for, that’s not a call the shrink back down to the old scripts of yours. The script that says “be quiet, they don’t like that.” The script that tells you to assimilate because your survival depends on it. Instead, it’s a call to understand that you’re not everyone’s cup of tea, and that’s okay. There’s no trophy for being the most liked person. In a world of saber-toothed tigers and wooly mammoths, the ability to be so neutral and un-opiniated that everyone likes you might have held value, but in today’s world it feels…inauthentic.
It’s also important to reiterate that our goal in crafting our lives is no longer survival-based. If we’re not trying to survive, what are we trying to do? Thrive? Grow? Succeed? Adapt? Once you can honestly answer that question for yourself, then you can start finding your people where belonging does not come with a compromise of yourself. Belonging is still a powerful instinct and impacts the goals you’re moving towards. But when you belong to yourself first and foremost, you’ll attract all the people you’ll need to accomplish your goals.
