An Explanation of the Structure of Belonging Illustration
Each individual brings their identity, their output potential, their interdependent position in the system, and their needs to the group. When they connect with the other members of the group and their identities, outputs, input needs, and system embeddedness is accounted for, a new group identity will emerge from that complex interaction. The group can the work towards discovering its interdependent connection with the larger system it is in and identify its shared generative purpose. Engaging together with this purpose will reveal, test, and refine the individual identities and their interactions with each other. The group is similar to the individual in that it has output capacity for the system and input needs from the system. |
Content from the book: Building belonging with stories
The following is an excerpt from my book about belonging and stories. It is the summary essay focused on belonging.
Main Ideas
Belonging is a Theory of Everything
Belonging is much more important than we realize. It’s not just a nice idea and it’s not a feeling. Belonging is the structure of the universe. It is how everything fits together and why each part matters. It is the most fundamental motive for humans. We should care more and understand more about belonging and how it can guide us to thriving individual lives, relationships, organizations, and communities. This book will help us get there.
From the first formative days of my work in youth suicide prevention, I discovered that belonging, often described as connectedness or a sense of community, is recognized as valuable. The most well-researched prevention organizations identify belonging as a significant or even primary ingredient in their prevention strategies. However, I found almost none that presented a clear or complete definition of belonging, why it matters, or how to achieve it. There seems to be a pervasive assumption by scientists, academia, and the mental health community that we already know these things. In the vast majority of conversations I have about this subject, the average person makes the same assumption. Unfortunately, the anecdotal and statistical evidence continues to suggest more and more urgently that we don’t understand belonging or how to get it.
In our current spot on the timeline of cultural evolution we do not, as a norm, recognize the importance of investing in belonging as a daily intention. At least compared to other things we normalize as important. I want us to elevate belonging to the position of humanity’s most important focus. Our need to belong powerfully influences everything we feel, think, say, and do. Because we do not currently prioritize it, belonging is broken in our culture. We have broken it and so now we misunderstand it, misuse it, and miss out on its benefits. This brokenness is the reason for the disorganization of our human system and the reason we cause disorder in so many of the systems we interact with. It is the underlying cause of many of our most significant health problems. It is at the root of prejudice, inequity, and our political dividedness. It is in our trauma and our relational disconnection. It underlies the conflict with our children, our parents, our siblings, our partners, our neighbors, bosses, colleagues, and friends.
If we increase our individual and communal experience of belonging, we will see improvement in the equilibrium and harmony of all the conditions and connections listed above. Very fortunately, the investments we make can multiply quickly because belonging is contagious. Social network science has shown that an improvement in belonging can spread far beyond the person or group who initially experiences it. This means us regular folks can organize our dysfunctional human system from the inside out. It also means we can make positive change rapidly.
Belonging Definition… Sort of
Defining belonging is a bit like defining a taco. It’s possible but what we are really looking for is the parts and what you get when you put them all together. The way I make a taco starts with a crunchy shell. Then I add the meat, onions, hot sauce, cheese, lettuce, sour cream, tomatoes, and tabasco. In that order. I will spare you my overly strong opinions about brands (check the footnotes though). Belonging is much the same. As a structure it requires six parts to realize its full potential. It starts with a group of at least two individual identities. Each has outputs for the group and needs inputs from the group. The group is embedded in a larger system that it contributes to and receives from just like the individual identities do within it. Once the identities and the mutual exchange with each other and the system are in place, a new identity is created - this is the identity of the group. In order for it to grow and be refined, it must be generative. Otherwise it’s like a taco that’s only for decoration. Which will get soggy and eventually mold and be covered with flies. Generativity matters.
The Six Parts
It follows then, that humans, especially as the most reciprocally dependent social species on the planet, would demonstrate belonging like all the other systems. Not only would we choose to follow these same natural laws, but we would make use of the opportunity to apply our evolved brains to creativity and innovation instead of destructive individual gain. Sometimes we do. But too much of the time, we haven’t. The problem and the blessing is choice. We are conscious. We can decide to resist the structure of belonging - not follow the rules - and it makes a mess. We can choose to follow them and find a sort of homeostasis. Or, we can choose to participate in creative evolution. This brings more than homeostasis. It brings a revolution of art, growth, discovery, regeneration, and all the other good things. There are pockets of this revolutionary belonging all over the place. Unfortunately, it’s not the norm in Western culture. Not yet.
Story
The way we overcome our current deficits in belonging - the way we create, cultivate, build, and battle for belonging - is through story. We understand how we fit and what we do together by looking for the evidence in the content our stories. We build our co-individual generative system out of the building material of those stories. In the end, belonging becomes self-organized within a larger, shared narrative made of our combined stories.
In order to build with stories, we need to share them. We need to intentionally make the time and spend the energy to tell them to each other. As if it was how we put food on the table and a roof over our heads. We need to make story sharing that important. The only thing more important than getting together and sharing our stories with intention is what we do with ourselves once they have been woven into a shared narrative. First, we need to know each other according to our true identities - say the words that accurately describe ourselves as the character we are in our stories. We need to notice and interact with each other as our true selves within a system of multi-faceted relationships, not as independent entities. We need to offer what we have according to who we are and take what is offered so we have the resources to thrive. And we need to do all this in the context of a shared generative purpose. KNOTS
Our lives are not for our entertainment. They are entertaining for sure, but that is not what they are for. When we come together and do belonging well as a system, we will see that system has a purpose. Whether it’s two people or 150, there is a capacity that we create with that combination. Fulfilling that generative purpose is what reveals and refines our identities and gives meaning to our lives - to our life.
Nature Teaches Us What Belonging Is
I have two proposals: First, we need to characterize belonging itself in a scientific, measurable way. Second, we need to intentionally work at increasing it in our lives and the lives of those we live, work, and play with. We can learn how to do both from the examples and patterns we observe in nature.
If we pay attention, we will see that we already exist and always have existed within a structure of belonging. Everywhere we look, we can see complex systems interacting in harmony. At the smallest level, systems of sub-atomic particles, atoms, and molecules all follow distinct patterns that depend on each element adhering to the characteristics of their unique identity. They behave according to what they are and they coordinate according to their innate properties. The human body is a glorious system that includes all the previous smaller stuff arranged into cells that cooperate to produce organs, bones, and interdependent systems that animate us and respond to our environment, our sensations, feelings, and thoughts.
Cluster Flocks
A flock of birds is a wonder inducing example of this. Birds reveal the mechanics of belonging as they gather before nightfall to swarm acrobatically in the setting sun. They follow three simple, unconscious rules as they murmurate magically in the sky. These rules are carried out instinctively, by paying attention to only the seven birds that are closest to them. And then, without any external direction, one or two of them dive into the chimney and the rest follow. Within a minute or two, twenty thousand birds are in the chimney resting for the night.
Their behavior looks conscious to us but it isn’t. At least not to the same degree we are conscious. But the kind of random action demonstrated by the first birds that head for bed can be seen in every system that exists. Every system and all its parts follow certain rules that nature has programmed them with. But there are a few who somehow know the right moment to adapt. When they do, the rest of the system follows them and the whole system adjusts to its environment.
Imagine what we can do as a much more conscious, more intentional system. We can, of course, go along with nature and find our equilibrium. But we can also observe nature and study its rules. We can innovate and find ways of adapting that improve on nature’s intentions. We invent instruments, learn music theory, write symphonies and bring together dozens of people who have spent years learning the piccolo, cello, French horn, and piano to produce music that moves our souls. This is beyond instinct. It is for more than survival. It is our contribution to improving life itself. And this is just one example of many.
Belonging is Fundamental
Belonging is a fundamental part of our lives. I would even suggest that it is the most fundamental. Our intrinsic need for human connection comes from our ancestors. Homo sapiens survived and thrived after all the other versions of hairless apes died off because our brains evolved to give us the capacity to cooperate and work together. We got used to relying on each other for berries, nuts, and protection from saber tooth tigers. Our big brains meant we needed to be born early so we didn’t break our mothers coming through the birth canal. Seventy-five percent of our brain development happens outside the womb in a communal context. This is as true today as it was ten thousand years ago. What Maslow’s hierarchy of needs does not say is that we are literally incapable of separating our physiological and safety needs from our connection to the group.
And now, we Americans live in the most individualized, most hyper-independent culture on the planet. Our ideology and our cultural norms create a clashing internal dissonance because they are set against our most fundamental motive. It is no wonder that we are chronically angry, worried, depressed, and sick.
Fortunately, our natural instincts are still in place to provide us with the capacity to correct the error of our ways. We still know how to connect and we are even more conscious than we were when we were hunting and gathering together - or at least we can be. We can decide to increase our experience of belonging. It does require intentionality but it does not require learning new, unknown concepts or skills. Most of what I want to share in this book are ancient truths that are only being revitalized by new science. Putting these truths, resources, and skills into practice will feel familiar - like coming home and putting on a new pair of sweats that are more comfortable than your old ones. No new technology required.
But fair warning - if you proceed, you will be turning against the tide of our cultural norms. Recognizing the harm of hyper-independence and extending the invitation and challenge to join together in a generative system of co-individuality will cause friction. It will be an adjustment for you, for anyone you share the work with, and for the human system you are in. It’s awkward, stressful, and hard and it won’t work unless we stick with it. However, you will be letting go of what doesn’t work and what causes damage to pick up what does work and what brings healing. It’s worth it and it will feel good. If enough of us do it together, we can turn the tide and cause it to flow in a better direction.
One of the greatest capacities of all systems, including the human one, is healing. It is built in. Giving our attention to building belonging brings together and activates all the parts of the healing mechanism that already exists in our system. If we let it do its job, we will come back to full health. We will experience belonging and all the detrimental results of our disconnection will reform like birds gathering at sunset to play and rest.
Let’s do that.
- It is an error to assume that we all know what belonging is, why it matters, and how it works.
- Belonging is a generative group of individuals collaborating within a system.
- Generative - something wanted and valuable is created, cultivated, built, or battled for
- Group - Belonging cannot exist without more than one person. When two or more connect, they form a new identity - the identity of the group
- Individuals - one-of-a-kind identities, characters in their own stories
- System - the larger story, a whole made of many different, interdependent characters or elements
- Collaborating - a mutual exchange of valued outputs and inputs
- We build belonging out of the content of our shared stories.
- Nature shows how belonging is the structure that every element of the universe is already in.
- Belonging is the fundamental need for individual and communal human health
- For humans, the life-giving experience of belonging occurs when we intentionally work at it.
Belonging is a Theory of Everything
Belonging is much more important than we realize. It’s not just a nice idea and it’s not a feeling. Belonging is the structure of the universe. It is how everything fits together and why each part matters. It is the most fundamental motive for humans. We should care more and understand more about belonging and how it can guide us to thriving individual lives, relationships, organizations, and communities. This book will help us get there.
From the first formative days of my work in youth suicide prevention, I discovered that belonging, often described as connectedness or a sense of community, is recognized as valuable. The most well-researched prevention organizations identify belonging as a significant or even primary ingredient in their prevention strategies. However, I found almost none that presented a clear or complete definition of belonging, why it matters, or how to achieve it. There seems to be a pervasive assumption by scientists, academia, and the mental health community that we already know these things. In the vast majority of conversations I have about this subject, the average person makes the same assumption. Unfortunately, the anecdotal and statistical evidence continues to suggest more and more urgently that we don’t understand belonging or how to get it.
In our current spot on the timeline of cultural evolution we do not, as a norm, recognize the importance of investing in belonging as a daily intention. At least compared to other things we normalize as important. I want us to elevate belonging to the position of humanity’s most important focus. Our need to belong powerfully influences everything we feel, think, say, and do. Because we do not currently prioritize it, belonging is broken in our culture. We have broken it and so now we misunderstand it, misuse it, and miss out on its benefits. This brokenness is the reason for the disorganization of our human system and the reason we cause disorder in so many of the systems we interact with. It is the underlying cause of many of our most significant health problems. It is at the root of prejudice, inequity, and our political dividedness. It is in our trauma and our relational disconnection. It underlies the conflict with our children, our parents, our siblings, our partners, our neighbors, bosses, colleagues, and friends.
If we increase our individual and communal experience of belonging, we will see improvement in the equilibrium and harmony of all the conditions and connections listed above. Very fortunately, the investments we make can multiply quickly because belonging is contagious. Social network science has shown that an improvement in belonging can spread far beyond the person or group who initially experiences it. This means us regular folks can organize our dysfunctional human system from the inside out. It also means we can make positive change rapidly.
Belonging Definition… Sort of
Defining belonging is a bit like defining a taco. It’s possible but what we are really looking for is the parts and what you get when you put them all together. The way I make a taco starts with a crunchy shell. Then I add the meat, onions, hot sauce, cheese, lettuce, sour cream, tomatoes, and tabasco. In that order. I will spare you my overly strong opinions about brands (check the footnotes though). Belonging is much the same. As a structure it requires six parts to realize its full potential. It starts with a group of at least two individual identities. Each has outputs for the group and needs inputs from the group. The group is embedded in a larger system that it contributes to and receives from just like the individual identities do within it. Once the identities and the mutual exchange with each other and the system are in place, a new identity is created - this is the identity of the group. In order for it to grow and be refined, it must be generative. Otherwise it’s like a taco that’s only for decoration. Which will get soggy and eventually mold and be covered with flies. Generativity matters.
The Six Parts
- Individual identities
- Outputs of each identity
- Inputs from group for each identity
- Embeddedness in system
- Group Identity
- Generativity
It follows then, that humans, especially as the most reciprocally dependent social species on the planet, would demonstrate belonging like all the other systems. Not only would we choose to follow these same natural laws, but we would make use of the opportunity to apply our evolved brains to creativity and innovation instead of destructive individual gain. Sometimes we do. But too much of the time, we haven’t. The problem and the blessing is choice. We are conscious. We can decide to resist the structure of belonging - not follow the rules - and it makes a mess. We can choose to follow them and find a sort of homeostasis. Or, we can choose to participate in creative evolution. This brings more than homeostasis. It brings a revolution of art, growth, discovery, regeneration, and all the other good things. There are pockets of this revolutionary belonging all over the place. Unfortunately, it’s not the norm in Western culture. Not yet.
Story
The way we overcome our current deficits in belonging - the way we create, cultivate, build, and battle for belonging - is through story. We understand how we fit and what we do together by looking for the evidence in the content our stories. We build our co-individual generative system out of the building material of those stories. In the end, belonging becomes self-organized within a larger, shared narrative made of our combined stories.
In order to build with stories, we need to share them. We need to intentionally make the time and spend the energy to tell them to each other. As if it was how we put food on the table and a roof over our heads. We need to make story sharing that important. The only thing more important than getting together and sharing our stories with intention is what we do with ourselves once they have been woven into a shared narrative. First, we need to know each other according to our true identities - say the words that accurately describe ourselves as the character we are in our stories. We need to notice and interact with each other as our true selves within a system of multi-faceted relationships, not as independent entities. We need to offer what we have according to who we are and take what is offered so we have the resources to thrive. And we need to do all this in the context of a shared generative purpose. KNOTS
Our lives are not for our entertainment. They are entertaining for sure, but that is not what they are for. When we come together and do belonging well as a system, we will see that system has a purpose. Whether it’s two people or 150, there is a capacity that we create with that combination. Fulfilling that generative purpose is what reveals and refines our identities and gives meaning to our lives - to our life.
Nature Teaches Us What Belonging Is
I have two proposals: First, we need to characterize belonging itself in a scientific, measurable way. Second, we need to intentionally work at increasing it in our lives and the lives of those we live, work, and play with. We can learn how to do both from the examples and patterns we observe in nature.
If we pay attention, we will see that we already exist and always have existed within a structure of belonging. Everywhere we look, we can see complex systems interacting in harmony. At the smallest level, systems of sub-atomic particles, atoms, and molecules all follow distinct patterns that depend on each element adhering to the characteristics of their unique identity. They behave according to what they are and they coordinate according to their innate properties. The human body is a glorious system that includes all the previous smaller stuff arranged into cells that cooperate to produce organs, bones, and interdependent systems that animate us and respond to our environment, our sensations, feelings, and thoughts.
Cluster Flocks
A flock of birds is a wonder inducing example of this. Birds reveal the mechanics of belonging as they gather before nightfall to swarm acrobatically in the setting sun. They follow three simple, unconscious rules as they murmurate magically in the sky. These rules are carried out instinctively, by paying attention to only the seven birds that are closest to them. And then, without any external direction, one or two of them dive into the chimney and the rest follow. Within a minute or two, twenty thousand birds are in the chimney resting for the night.
Their behavior looks conscious to us but it isn’t. At least not to the same degree we are conscious. But the kind of random action demonstrated by the first birds that head for bed can be seen in every system that exists. Every system and all its parts follow certain rules that nature has programmed them with. But there are a few who somehow know the right moment to adapt. When they do, the rest of the system follows them and the whole system adjusts to its environment.
Imagine what we can do as a much more conscious, more intentional system. We can, of course, go along with nature and find our equilibrium. But we can also observe nature and study its rules. We can innovate and find ways of adapting that improve on nature’s intentions. We invent instruments, learn music theory, write symphonies and bring together dozens of people who have spent years learning the piccolo, cello, French horn, and piano to produce music that moves our souls. This is beyond instinct. It is for more than survival. It is our contribution to improving life itself. And this is just one example of many.
Belonging is Fundamental
Belonging is a fundamental part of our lives. I would even suggest that it is the most fundamental. Our intrinsic need for human connection comes from our ancestors. Homo sapiens survived and thrived after all the other versions of hairless apes died off because our brains evolved to give us the capacity to cooperate and work together. We got used to relying on each other for berries, nuts, and protection from saber tooth tigers. Our big brains meant we needed to be born early so we didn’t break our mothers coming through the birth canal. Seventy-five percent of our brain development happens outside the womb in a communal context. This is as true today as it was ten thousand years ago. What Maslow’s hierarchy of needs does not say is that we are literally incapable of separating our physiological and safety needs from our connection to the group.
And now, we Americans live in the most individualized, most hyper-independent culture on the planet. Our ideology and our cultural norms create a clashing internal dissonance because they are set against our most fundamental motive. It is no wonder that we are chronically angry, worried, depressed, and sick.
Fortunately, our natural instincts are still in place to provide us with the capacity to correct the error of our ways. We still know how to connect and we are even more conscious than we were when we were hunting and gathering together - or at least we can be. We can decide to increase our experience of belonging. It does require intentionality but it does not require learning new, unknown concepts or skills. Most of what I want to share in this book are ancient truths that are only being revitalized by new science. Putting these truths, resources, and skills into practice will feel familiar - like coming home and putting on a new pair of sweats that are more comfortable than your old ones. No new technology required.
But fair warning - if you proceed, you will be turning against the tide of our cultural norms. Recognizing the harm of hyper-independence and extending the invitation and challenge to join together in a generative system of co-individuality will cause friction. It will be an adjustment for you, for anyone you share the work with, and for the human system you are in. It’s awkward, stressful, and hard and it won’t work unless we stick with it. However, you will be letting go of what doesn’t work and what causes damage to pick up what does work and what brings healing. It’s worth it and it will feel good. If enough of us do it together, we can turn the tide and cause it to flow in a better direction.
One of the greatest capacities of all systems, including the human one, is healing. It is built in. Giving our attention to building belonging brings together and activates all the parts of the healing mechanism that already exists in our system. If we let it do its job, we will come back to full health. We will experience belonging and all the detrimental results of our disconnection will reform like birds gathering at sunset to play and rest.
Let’s do that.