It might be that not-belonging is a modern epidemic, a product of industrialization and globalization. It is something we need to sort through pretty urgently in my sense of things.
I am particularly interested in belonging as a practice, as something that you practice claiming, rather than as an entitlement or a right.
And I like to think of belonging as a skill you can learn. A skill that takes practice, with tools that can help you. This post shares one of my favorite tools, Grieve your Grievance.
Scroll down to find an innerwork exercise to help you practice it, and read on for the ideas and story behind it. It can take you deep so take it at your own pace and make sure you’ve got the space, time and support you need.
Belonging as a Practice
Belonging is a basic human need and helping people connect to it is an act of love. It is an act of building the world we want. Belonging is a powerful trigger to activate in your marketing and can supercharge your efforts to make your difference.
But many of us have some kind of issue with belonging.
Have you ever felt that you didn’t belong?
I definitely have. Actually, I’d have to say it was a big T, Theme, in my life. Belonging has not come easy to me.
It has taken work to build a stable pathway inside myself to a sense of belonging. To find my own source of sustainable power, to find the power of persistence. To feel I have the right to stand for something, and the resilience to hang in there through the ups and downs.
Not-belonging is part of my personal story, part of my history, emerging from a particular social and cultural context. And that story is what drives me to learn and teach ways to access belonging as a practice, because each and every one of us needs it.
I know I’m not alone with the belonging struggle. It is pretty common … perhaps universal. After all, loneliness and imposter syndrome are two silent epidemics of our time.
I believe we need the kind of belonging that supports us to make our own unique difference for the whole.
Over a couple of blog posts, I want to share 4 of my favorite tools for working with belonging.
Here is the first one!
BELONGING TOOL #1 Grieve your grievance
Not belonging often feels personal, as it if were your fault.
Clearly, goes the thinking, if you don’t belong, it must be something to do with you. There must be something wrong with you.
On the plus side of this thought: if it is your fault, then you can potentially do something about it. You could try to fit in, for example. Fitting in isn’t always a bad thing. But when you do it because you feel unsafe, because you feel you don’t belong, then it is an injury. It does you harm. It is part of the harm of not belonging.
Our ability to fit in, to adapt, to comply, to assimilate can be a useful social skill that can contribute to group life and to our own happiness. But when it is forced upon us as a threat, fit in because you don’t belong, then it hurts us. It is a loss of feeling accepted and needs to be grieved.
Not belonging is an injury and a loss that needs to be seen, recognized, claimed, and grieved. Shame arises if our injury is not seen as an injury. If our not-belonging is not seen as an injury then we internalize the judgement and responsibility. Since no-one else thinks this is a problem, then it must be my fault. I must deserve it. Add shame to not-belonging and you have a nasty cocktail that can drive people to self-harm or to harming others.
Gratitude note: Francis Weller first helped me see that not-belonging was not personal and that it is not deserved. He named the great grief of not being received by your community. It is a grief, and it needs to be grieved. It is an injury that happened to us. David Bedrick taught me about the importance of unshaming.
So this belonging tool invites you to see your not-belonging as an injury so you can heal it. Once you can see it as an injury rather than a personal failing, you can release yourself from shame and the internalized self-hatred which makes not-belonging so much harder and more dangerous. The tool invites you to claim the injury and complain, to name your grievance and grieve it.
Grieve your Grievance means see the injury, understand that it is a loss and allow your natural grieving process to free you.
If you are ready to give it a try, there is a guided innerwork exercise below that helps you practice using the tool in a structured way. Scroll down to find it. Or if you’d like to hear my story of discovering this tool, keep reading.
Learning from Mr. Cat
I discovered the tool of Grieve your Grievance through the help of a cat companion, during a painful break up experience.
Break ups can create an excruciating not-belonging experience. Rejection in an intimate relationship is a huge loss, and can also layer in other forms of not-belonging. For example, if the relationship was embedded in a friendship group, within family ties, or to a community, you might experience losses like rupture, exclusion and isolation on many levels.
I was experiencing the end of my first marriage and hurting greatly. It was one quiet Saturday afternoon. The house felt painfully empty. It was a few weeks after my husband had walked out of our house. The shock had worn off and I just felt tired and low.
I drifted around the house, trying to distract myself. Suddenly my cat, Mr. Cat, strode into the room and demanded my attention. Proud and assertive, he walked right up to me with a glare and then complained as only cats can do. The loud meow and his steady, insistent gaze let me know that he should be attended to.
I found myself overwhelmed with intense feelings of irritation. Noticing this irritation, I wondered if there might be something more to it. Was Mr. Cat expressing a part of my experience that I didn’t have enough contact with?
In Processwork terms, Mr. Cat was a less familiar part of my own process, communicating through what Arnold Mindell called the ‘world channel’. Related to Jung’s concept of a synchronicity (a meaningful coincidence), Mindell observed that world happenings can have meaning for our own experience. He noticed that our experience is represented to us through different perceptual channels, usually through our own senses, like auditory, visual, body feeling, and movement but also through things that happen externally, in relationships and in the world around us.
In that moment, I was identifying with my experience of feeling low energy, listless and lost, while Mr. Cat was high energy, demanding and assertive. The known and familiar part of my experience (my primary process in Processwork language) was low energy, but the experience happening to me through the world channel of the cat, was high energy, demanding and loud (my secondary process in Processwork terms).
Curious, I focused my attention on the cat, and tried to notice what was the most disturbing or energetic part. Mr Cat was continuing to meow and glare at me, as I had not provided the right response so far. I heard the sound loudly in my ears and I focused on the sound and began, shyly and quietly, to imitate him. I felt embarrassed to make sounds even though I was home alone. I felt shy and a little nervous about what people would think if they heard me. It seemed like Mr. Cat was free to complain in a way that I was not.
I continued to explore the disturbing loud meowing sound to see where it would lead. Almost immediately, once I opened my mouth and throat to allow sounds to emerge, I burst into tears. I used the palms of my hands to gently touch and manage my jaw, to amplify the opening of my mouth and throat so that sound could emerge, and as I kept meowing and sobbing, the meow turned into a wail and the volume increased until I felt my whole body was involved. I could still hear inner critical voices warning me to stop – how embarrassing, stop complaining, stop whining, what if someone hears you etc. But I keep steady on unfolding and amplifying the embodied experience. I followed the movements in my face and throat, opening up to the sounds and freeing, expanding, releasing the emotional energy through movement and sound.
Eventually the storm of grief passed, and my sobs and cries became a gentle loving song, almost joyful. I lay on the couch, breathing big breaths, a huge relaxation in my body and a sense of peace and contentment. I had reached the deepest part of my experience and I finally felt whole again. Everything felt right in the world. Mr. Cat was relaxing at the end of the couch, keeping me company.
I felt that I belonged again. I felt in good company with all of us when something does not go our way, experiencing the pain of rejection and loss. I was grateful for the freedom to complain that Mr. Cat so majestically embodied and demonstrated for me. I knew that my ex- was doing the best he could and that my pain was just part of the big human story.
Grieve your Grievance Guided Innerwork Exercise
To practice this belonging tool, use the following innerwork exercise to guide you through the process of claiming, complaining and grieving.
I’ve worked with many people to help them open up to the flow of grief. Almost always it helps to relax your jaw, to allow sobs and sounds, and to follow the flow of grief in your body, allowing it take you deeper. Following the flow of grief can often lead to an almost ecstatic experience, sense of peace, relief, and a return to oneness. Most people experience a kind of calm after the storm.
As with all innerwork exercises, read it through first and track your own response to the ideas. If you feel any concern about touching on the underlying feelings, take this seriously and find a supportive context to help you do the exercise, perhaps with a willing and trusted friend, or with a professional counselor or facilitator.
BELONGING EXERCISE #1 Claim your grievance and grieve it
- Find some quiet space and time, at least 20 minutes, and have something to make notes with, and a way to keep time.
- Reflect on your experience and identify some situations in which you have experienced not-belonging, either now, in the past, or even in an imagined future. It could be in a relationship or a family context, or in a larger group, like a workplace, school, social event. It could be while shopping or doing administrative tasks, or in a community, culture, or country. It could be a momentary or a longer term experience. Choose one to focus on for this exercise.
- Invite yourself to complain. Set a timer for three minutes and write everything down that you can think of. Step fully into the victim experience and give yourself permission to notice and identify everything that is wrong, painful and harmful about the experience of not-belonging. How does it impact your feelings, your practical, everyday life, your relationships, your status in social settings, your physical body, your sense of safety and happiness in the world.
- After three minutes of writing, take some breaths and relax.
- Read over your notes, and then read them out aloud. Claim your right to feel a grievance and invite yourself to feel the grief of being injured.
- Set a timer for ten minutes, and invite yourself to grieve your grievance.
- Slow your breathing by counting your breaths down from 5 to 1, and sense the weight of your physical body, invite yourself to drop into the sense of your physical experience.
- Scan your body and find a place where you can locate the injury. If you can’t find a place that feels right, just choose a part of your body to represent the location of the injury.
- Breathe into that part of your body and allow your physical experience to amplify and expand. You might find that feelings arise, and if they do, invite yourself to welcome them and make space. Do not worry if nothing happens, just allow yourself to breathe gently and honor your experience of injury, inviting your body to allow the natural healing process. Invite your jaw to soften and allow yourself to make any sounds that emerge.
- Once you feel complete, or after ten minutes, return your awareness to your breath, counting down from 5 to 1.
- Consider the following idea: I can grieve for my experiences of not-belonging. I can forgive anyone and anything that contributed. I can welcome myself home.
- Look around the space you are in, and welcome yourself to a feeling of home, of safety and belonging. Use your hands to gently touch your arms, legs and torso and invite yourself to feel at home, safe, and belonging to yourself and the world.
- Make some notes about your experience and anything you want to remember or do.
Belonging as a practice of empowerment
Claiming that you do belong, when something says you do not belong, is a practice of empowerment. Whether you are up against an inner critic or outer social oppression, claiming it anyway, in spite of those forces, gives you access to the deepest, most sustainable source of power.
In my learnings about making a difference, this is a real key.
Plus you get a special bonus! When you claim belonging as a practice you don’t need to exclude others to make it stick. ‘Us and them’ dynamics are the result of belonging as an entitlement.
Instead, claim your belonging as a practice, feel the deep security and safety, and then you can share it with others.
You’ve got this.
And the world needs you.
Love
Hellene