It is a challenge when you feel like you have never truly belong anywhere in your life. The corners of the world that you have frequented have never truly felt comfortable to you because other people treat you poorly. This has been most of my life. I haven’t felt a sense of belonging a lot in my life. Not in my friendships, not in work life. Almost no where.
I think it is hard to feel like you belong when the first places that you would have learned to belong were so very convoluted and abusive. Trauma changes how you feel about things and it definitely makes it harder to connect with other individuals. Trust is a huge issue for me. It takes a LOT for me to trust other people because I have been hurt by others. Belonging with others is an internal feeling. We have to internally feel okay if we are going to connect with other people. We will feel like we are saying the wrong things or doing the wrong things if we feel like we are not internally okay. I have numerous times in life tried to be around others and recognized that I personally feel off. I feel like I am the anomaly in the room. No one else is making me feel these ways, but it is the trauma trying to keep me feeling different from others. It can make you feel different. How do you feel connected if you are always focused on the aspect of your life that makes you different? You can’t truly connect if you focus there. That is a struggle for me to let go of. I struggle daily to let go of my own stuff that has hurt me so that I can be able to connect. If you want to feel close to others, you can’t use the things that have hurt you to try to make those connections. Yes, you can go to trauma group therapy or things like that, but when we are at say a library event, we should be using what that event is, not feeling different because we are the one with trauma in the group. This is especially true if it is say a knitting club. The common denominator you should focus on is, “DO YOU LOVE KNITTING?” If so guess what? You belong. That is a hard mentality to get into when your brain tells you horrible things. “WHAT IF THEY KNEW?” If they knew and they treated you differently, so what? They are there to knit, so knit your little heart out. You have to learn to separate out aspects of your life when you trying to connect.
Belonging is a hard emotion to get. It is hard to feel that connection to others. I have felt it recently in my job environment that I am in. That space showed me that people can support each other. When you are in bad environments, that impacts you. When you are in a space that others talk bad about each other, this can also impact your sense of belonging. When this occurs, my thoughts are you get away from that environment or have a crucial conversation with others that are doing the talking behind others back. It means being confrontational and that is not a dirty word. Confrontation means taking the time to actually make the changes that are needed in an environment. It means stepping back and focusing on the solution that needs to happen in order to make the environment what you need for the belonging you are needing. If the crucial conversations do not help then you can always leave the environment and find the next place that you will belong. There is a vast world out there and you can always find people. That is the beauty of this existence. We have forgotten the art of connection, but we can meet others in all types of environments, if we put ourselves out there. We can feel like we belong somewhere, but it means going out and doing something. Go do it, it is worth it!
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