Brené Brown on belonging
Sometimes the most obtrusive roadblock to dreaming is purpose. Rather, lack of purpose.
A few weeks into dreaming up another blog I’ve launched, I felt the question, “what is this even for?” float down from the ceiling and, like Bananagrams, rearrange itself before my eyes. The question hovered in front of me over the purple orchid at my desk, waiting.
Easy answers popped into my mind: it’s for SEO traffic to the ministry, it’s because it was recommended to us to start a blog, it’s because I’m a writer and this will help me hone my skill. Yes. These reasons were true. But they weren’t good enough for me to spend hours a week laboring over words and sentences that, in all likelihood, wouldn’t be read often or possibly at all for a long while. In fact, I was a marketing assistant, not a pastor, to the ministry. Who was I to preach to the pulpit of our website?
These questions put a damper on my mind for a few weeks. I’ve realized now that to build anything, to dream up anything, at some point, you will come face to face with your why. If you have one, dreams can move forward. If you don’t, it’s like going down a slide with no way of getting back up. When the going gets hard, there’s no reason to get you going again.
As someone who believes in a Creator God, I am confident that we each have a unique, significant purpose—destined for us from the womb. Just as Adam and Eve were given a gardening assignment, Abraham a journey to take, Joseph a nation to build, David a kingdom to rule, and each of the disciples a portion of the early church to spread… we all hold a piece of the puzzle called “Why are we here?”
The trouble is figuring out which piece. Are you an artist, a musician, a mother? A fashion expert, an entrepreneur, an evangelist? Do you have a spiritual gift, an emotional gift, a physical gift? And why do you and the world need you to do it?
I can’t give you your specific why any more than I can create my own. Some things we especially need the Spirit of God to whisper in our ears. But, I can offer you a purpose, universal to all human beings, one big enough and biblical enough that you can live for in the meantime:
Belonging
In The Atlas of the Heart, Brené Brown proposed that “love and belonging are irreducible needs for all people. In the absence of these experiences, there is always suffering.” She goes on to say that “finding a sense of belonging in close social relationships and with our community is essential to our well-being…. We can’t survive without each other.”
It makes sense. In fact, not belonging or loneliness has been considered for a long time by psychologists as a threat to humanity. Think about a baby… without a caretaker, that baby has no chance of survival. In many ways, while we grow up, that remains the same. We can nourish our bodies and take care of our emotions, but without connection to others… what is the purpose of life?
At the end of the day, as I publish these words, if they don’t find you, connect with you somehow, they have done nothing of value. And if you weren’t even here to read them, there would be no power in me writing them.
Similarly, no matter where you land in your vocation, your why, belonging will keep it—therefore you—alive. Belonging to yourself, your closest friends, your community, maybe even to God, is what places your corner of the world in your hands.
The Truths about Belonging
Let’s go over three propositions about belonging from Brené Brown. They might just be the keys to your greater joy in this life.
1. “True belonging is the spiritual practice of believing in and belonging to yourself so deeply that you can share your most authentic self with the world … True belonging doesn’t require you to change who you are; it requires you to be who you are.”
Do you know yourself? Are you actively engaged in the process of getting to know yourself? There are days I wake up and I feel whole, familiar with all the parts of my personality, my beliefs, my thought processes, and my skills, and there are days when I surprise myself.
Belonging to ourselves is one of the most important things we can do because it allows us to know our own mind, heart, and body. We cannot truly relate to others if we do not first know ourselves: what we like and dislike, what we care about, what we wish to share with the world and who we are.
Take a moment today, or even a few moments the next couple of weeks, and sit with yourself. Begin to self-reflect if you’re not in the habit of doing so. What do you think? What do you feel? What do you need? If someone were to ask you, “What are you like?” how would you answer them?
2. “Belonging is a practice that requires us to be vulnerable, get uncomfortable, and learn how to be present with people without sacrificing who we are. When we sacrifice who we are, we not only feel separate from others, but we even feel disconnected from ourselves.”
Belonging can get tricky when we forgo our needs or values for the sake of connection. It’s tricky when we’re asked implicitly or explicitly to do so. Trickier when we feel internally that to belong we must change ourselves.
There is a reason why parents fear their teenagers hanging out with the wrong crowd. It is really important as you grow up to find your place in the world. Sometimes we confuse similarity with belonging and incidentally sacrifice who we really are. We listen to that album, dress this new way, try a new activity, skip out on class if our friends do too.
It’s not wrong to try new things, but the real art of belonging is living the truth of ourselves in vulnerability with others. There’s no deeper feeling of belonging than when another sees you and loves you for who you really are.
3. “Because we can feel belonging only if we have the courage to share our most authentic selves with people, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.”
This third pillar of belonging as shared by Brené Brown is perhaps the secret to all relationships. The capacity you have to love yourself is the capacity you have to love others.
This is true because the more you accept yourself—the good, the bad, the shameful, the unique—the more you will come to love those parts of yourself, and the more whole and present you become. And the more whole and present you are, undistracted by your own insecurities, the more you can love and accept completely other people.
Do you ever catch yourself judging other people? Maybe you have made a judgment or an assumption outright about a part of them that you feel is wrong or unhealthy or maybe it’s a subtler judgment that brings you shame if you acknowledge it. I catch myself in this trap all the time, yet I’ve come to realize these judgments are not really others-focused but revelations of myself… parts of myself that I’m afraid of, ashamed of, not accepting of.
Yet accepting ourselves fully—even the parts of ourselves that we know are still works in progress—is the key to belonging, and in belonging, we find purpose. We are here for a reason. No matter what we do or don’t do, at the end of the day, it can be said that we belonged here.
Resources
Quotes are from Brené Brown’s Atlas of the Heart (Random House, 2021).
