A sense of belonging

Your sense of belonging within a community is affected by the interplay between identity, perception, and reciprocity.

Belonging, at least as an emotional experience, is never static. You move through networks of communities on a daily basis, with each community supporting a range of belonging that fluctuates based on the three factors I’ve listed and likely more. Here I’ll explore how these factors influence one’s sense of belonging in a single community and the consequences thereof.

Belonging is Influenced by Identity

Think of your total identity as a garden. You might envision an English walled garden, enclosed and orderly, or perhaps a wild and unkept wilderness seems more suitable. In your garden grow plants of many varieties: orchids, lily pads, chokecherries, elms. You might divide your garden into sections and supply them labels: Musician, Friend, Parent, or Spouse. Like a real garden, you may refer to a section as the “friendship garden” while acknowledging that there’s a wider Garden.

Over the years, your identity garden has evolved. New sections may have been planted. An area for parenting your children perhaps, or a professional nook. Your friendship garden may have once been lush and vibrant in your high school years, but as your responsibilities to spouse, children and work have been tended in latter years, the plants of friendship have wilted.

Belonging is Influenced by Perception

Your sense of belonging is proportional to the sense of being known and appreciated the other. Your friendship garden was planted first for the enjoyment of your friends even if it’s not dependent upon them for its existence.

Let’s explore with an analogy.

You’ve gotten to know an individual at a weekly parenting meeting you’ve attended the past month. You’ve enjoyed conversation with them and discovered some shared interests, especially the struggles of raising small children. You’d like to become deeper friends outside the gathering, so you invite them to coffee.

Over coffee you share how difficult it’s been to have patience with your three-year-old child while getting ready get in the car. You describe their particularies around putting on shoes - “this one first” “that’s not comfortable, take it off” “actually, I want to wear boots now”.

In the identity garden metaphor, you are strolling with them on a tour of the parenting garden.

Now, here are three ways your acquaintance might respond: empathy, disdain, or indifference. Each response will have a private interpretation and an influence on one’s sense of being known and appreciated.

Empathy

• Response: “Ugh, I know, right? My son Jimmy does the same thing. Sometimes I just wanna strangle the little tike.”
• Implied: I sympathize and I’m glad you shared.
• Metaphor: I have that rose bush in my garden too.
• Known: ⬆️
• Appreciated: ⬆️

Disdain

• Response: “Oh, I don’t get upset when my daughter takes her time with shoes in the morning. It’s not reasonable to expect a young person to be efficient.”
• Implied: You’re being unreasonable.
• Metaphor: Yuck, you’ve got weeds to pull.
• Known: ⬆️
• Appreciated: ⬇️

Indifference

• Response: “Hey, are you going to that parenting get-together next week that was mentioned at our last gathering?”
• Implied: I’m changing the subject.
• Metaphor: I’m looking at my phone, not your garden.
• Known: ⁇
• Appreciated: ⁇

In the empathetic response, your sense of being known is bolstered by your new friend. You feel seen and appreciated, and your sense of belonging grows. However, in the disdaining response your sense of being known also grows, but it’s experienced as a liability because that knowledge is not appreciated. In the indifferent response, your sense of belonging is in question. You don’t know if the other has misunderstood you or if they don’t care about this part of your identity.

Perception and Identity Over Time

Before we proceed to reciprocity, consider how identity and perception interact in the course of your life. As your identity garden grows in size and complexity, there are more sections to explore and more ground to cover. In early life, you might offer your new friend a tour of the majority of your garden real estate in a summer’s worth of afternoons. Later in life, besides the lack of free afternoons, you have a much bigger task to offer a comprehensive tour of your identity. Therefore, it’s common for there to be more people with some insight but a smaller percentage of the total. Many have walked the well-trodden paths of your outer gardens, but few have ventured across the breadth of your Garden or peered into the undergrowth.

Belonging is Influenced by Reciprocity

Belonging isn’t purely an interpersonal experience. We’re more likely to use a word like “connection” to express our feeling of belonging towards another individual, while the word “belonging” is reserved for our experience in community. While the language may differ, I’m not convinced there’s a significant distinction. In either case, reciprocity is an important factor.

Let’s continue the analogy of your new friendship.

Your sense of belonging with your new friend has deepened over coffee as you’ve shared yourself with them and they’ve responded in positive ways. You feel more belonging in the gathering after your coffee date too, knowing that your new friend understands and accepts more of you. You schedule another coffee and share another element of your identity: your enjoyment of inspirational true sports film. You reminisce about watching Miracle with your spouse for the first time. Your friend responds positively. You leave energized, but over the next week you sense something is missing in your friendship. Upon further reflection you realize that, while you’ve felt known and appreciated by your friend, they haven’t shared much about themselves. You also note that you initiated the last two coffee dates and you wonder if they’ll initiate the next.

What you’re sensing is the absence of reciprocity. You’ve offered a tour of your garden, even two different sections, but your friend’s garden is padlocked. Your friend appreciates your rose bushes, and maybe they’re growing some of their own, but you haven’t been invited to see theirs. You’re experiencing a belonging ceiling.

Contribution

The missing invitation demonstrates a second important element of reciprocity, contribution. Although subtle in the coffee date analogy, invitation is the offer to add your own touch to the other’s identity. To be affected or constrained by the other. To plant a tulip in your friend’s garden.

To see this more clearly, let’s back up the analogy to the meeting setting.

It’s been two months of weekly attendance at the parenting meeting. You’ve shared several parenting stories with your group that were positively received and enjoyed hearing other’s stories. Once per month your group elects a member to offer a short meditation on a parenting-adjacent subject. One of the members suggests you give the next one, citing your interest in children’s autonomy from a story you shared last week. You’re nervous, but after sharing your meditation you feel more of a sense of belonging than ever.

In this analogy the invitation is more obvious. The group offers a plot of land to plant your own garden.

Reciprocal Community

I’ve found reciprocal community is to be prized, for it is rare. Much more common are communities where some provide unilateral contribution to others; either a small collective, even a single individual, supplying unilateral contribution to a powerless majority or the many offering the bulk of contribution on behalf of the few. The first case explains why church attendance supplies weak belonging, while the second your labors for your manager.

This element of reciprocity is why it is impossible for anyone to belong in an organization. Or an institution. Your company can’t reciprocate, and neither can your church. Only living beings reciprocate. This is a central tenent in Mandy Brown’s provocative piece, A Unified Theory of Fucks.

The Belonging Ceiling

A consequence of your belonging being influenced by your identity, perception, and reciprocity is the experience of the “Belonging Ceiling.” In any community there is an undefined ceiling, perhaps a band, which defines the maximum possible sense of belonging by any member. Our private brokenness and limits ensure that no ideal state of belonging exists. We will never achieve 100% belonging nor experience a high degree of belonging always, even in a healthy community. What then shall we do?

The hub of my thinking about belonging and community is encapsulated in that ambiguous phrase, Kingdom of God. In my kingdom manifesto I offer a community definition which tangentially addresses the topic of belonging in four Kingdom community expressions.

Further Exploration

• Is belonging interdependent on other’s response, or is this dependence on another’s response evidence of brokenness, such as a desire for other’s approval? Might an ideal human experience a high degree of belonging independent of other’s response?
• How does a high state of belonging affect one’s mental health? A low state of belonging?
• How does vulnerability affect one’s sense of belonging?
• Should the garden metaphor allow for enmeshed gardens? Is it possible for two identities to be intertwined in a way that they share garden sections? Could their be a shared garden section across an entire community? Is this metaphor bent beyond all recognition trying to carry more meaning than it can?
• There’s a corrolation between the shared identity surface area in one community and the degree of context shift that happens between communities. Belonging is desirable, but not in a fragmented way where each community sees a different garden section.

TODO

• Read “Braving the Wilderness” by Brené Brown
• Read “The Art of Gathering” by Priya Parker
• Read “Give and Take” by Adam Grant